Logos Enlists Black Church Leaders to Diversify Bible Study Resources

The collective will bring more African American scholarship to 4.5 million users.

Courtesy of Chauncey Allmond

Chauncey Allmond dreams of a day when white evangelical preachers will reference the work of African American Bible scholars without even thinking about it. He and his colleagues at Logos Bible Software hope they can make that happen by adding more African American voices to the digital study tools currently used by more than 4.5 million people.

“The African American voice is a powerful voice that needs to be heard,” Allmond said. “There’s a lot of traditions in the African American church that I think Logos is missing out on.”

Logos has been working for about a year to diversify its Bible study products and has gathered a group of African American Christian leaders to help. They call the group the Kerusso Collective. Kerusso is a Greek verb meaning “proclaim” or “herald” and is used in the New Testament to describe the act of preaching the gospel.

In addition to Allmond, the collective includes:

Charlie Dates, pastor of Progressive Baptist Church in Chicago
Cynthia L. Hale, pastor of Ray of Hope Christian Church in Decatur, Georgia
Esau McCaulley, assistant professor of New Testament at Wheaton College
Kenneth C. Ulmer, pastor of Faithful Central Bible Church in Inglewood, California
Joseph W. Walker III, bishop of Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Nashville
Ralph Douglas West, pastor of Church Without Walls in Houston

The group will advise Logos on resources and scholarship to include. Logos may have bundles of specific African American resources available early in 2021. The goal is not to produce separate Bible study products, however, but to improve existing material by adding the perspectives of black Christians.

“We don’t think it’s going to be primarily for the African American audience. We’re looking at it also to serve the white evangelical church because there’s a need there,” Allmond said. “The multiethnic churches are growing leaps and bounds, and for them to have product and resource offerings that will help them serve their community, I think, is a win-win for everyone.”

The announcement comes as part of a broader movement of American evangelicals listening to black voices and valuing the contributions of African American Christians. Last year, for example, Holman Bible Publishing released the Tony Evans Study Bible, the first single-author study Bible by an African American. The volume highlights black people in the Bible and offers the Dallas pastor’s own perspective on the text.

This year, InterVarsity Press published Reading While Black by McCaulley. The book argues for the importance of African American perspectives on Scripture, showing how the black church tradition illuminates aspects of the Bible that white American readers have too-often missed.

Damon Richardson, who is also a presenter with Logos Bible Software, said the Kerusso Collective will take that same approach, using African American perspectives to show aspects of the truth of the Scripture that haven’t been visible from other vantage points. It’s not that different, he said, from hearing how a professional shepherd might read Psalm 23 differently than someone who has never seen sheep.

“The light hits that diamond in a different way,” Richardson said. “You get a different cut and a different glimmer.”

The Logos effort to diversify the Bible software began before the recent national conversation on racism, based on feedback from African American presenters like Richardson and Allmond and the responses when they demonstrated Logos resources to diverse groups of Christians across the country. African Americans in particular—who are more than twice as likely as Americans overall to read the Bible daily, according to surveys from the American Bible Society—noticed a distinct absence of black Christian voices in the available materials.

“What we started to realize internally, as well as the feedback we had been hearing from our customers and potential customers, was that there was a need to have more African American scholars and theologians included in our library,” Allmond said.

Since the company, based in Washington state, is predominantly white, it established the Kerusso Collective so black Christian leaders could direct the inclusion of more voices of people of color. While the COVID-19 pandemic has hindered their ability to meet as early as they would have liked, the project is still moving forward.

Richardson, who was raised in the Nation of Islam before converting to Christianity, said the diverse perspective reflects an important truth of Christianity. Where the Nation of Islam and others have argued that Christianity is “a white man’s religion,” designed to oppress black people, in truth the church includes people from every ethnicity. The gospel does not belong to a race. Black people have made serious contributions to the church and to Christians’ understanding of the Bible. The new effort to diversify the scholarship will reflect that and present a fuller and truer picture of the Christian understanding of Scripture.

“I think it’s good for people to see the African American contribution in these areas,” Richardson said. “It’s good for the church.”

- More from Adam MacInnis

Books

Review

The Triumph of the Sexual Revolution Seems Stunningly Swift. But Its Roots Go Back Centuries.

Timothy Kleiser

Carl Trueman maps out the revolutionary shifts that made it possible, then plausible, then actual.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons / Gabriel Silvério / Brooke Cagle / Unsplash

I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body.” Only a generation ago, few Americans would have regarded this statement as coherent and believable. Yet today, someone who comes out as transgender can earn cultural cachet, while those who question the new orthodoxy are increasingly branded as bigots or worse. This shift in cultural attitudes is only the latest triumph of the sexual revolution that has radically reshaped sexual categories and behaviors over the past several decades in America. Yet the roots of this revolution go back much further.

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

Carl R. Trueman (Author), Rod Dreher (Foreword)

Crossway

432 pages

$29.90

When determining why revolutions happen, social scientists often distinguish between three types of causes: preconditions, precipitants, and triggers. Preconditions are the long-term structural factors that make revolution possible. Precipitants are the short-term events that combine with these structures to make revolution plausible. Finally, triggers are the immediate catalysts—the sparks that ignite and make revolution actual.

The sexual revolution and its triumphs result from a similar mix of immediate, short-term, and long-term causes. Yet cultural commentators tend to focus only on triggers, acting like police officers or insurance adjusters who arrive at the scene of an accident to determine the extent of the damage or who’s at fault. These roles are important, but they only scratch the surface of how the church should respond to the sexual revolution.

A more holistic response requires a more holistic understanding that can only be achieved by sorting out the long-term structural causes of the revolution from its short-term and immediate causes. This sorting is precisely what theologian and historian Carl Trueman aims to do in his latest book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution.

Trueman’s basic contention is this: The sexual revolution is a symptom rather than the cause of efforts to redefine human identity. Centuries before the nation swooned when Bruce Jenner debuted as Caitlyn, for example, intellectual shifts were taking place that would make a cultural event like this possible. What Trueman offers is the story of those shifts.

Reimagined Selves

Trueman begins by diagnosing the state of modern Western culture so that, throughout the rest of the book, he can trace some of its intellectual preconditions. Here, he relies heavily on the work of three key thinkers: philosopher Charles Taylor, psychologist Philip Rieff, and ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre.

Of particular importance to Trueman’s narrative is the idea of the “social imaginary,” the term that Taylor uses to describe a society’s basic intuitions about the world and the place of human beings within it. As each of us goes through life, we tend not to operate on the basis of a self-conscious commitment to a particular set of ideas. Instead, the process is much more intuitive. For example, only a generation ago, the claim “I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body” was widely understood to be nonsensical. This understanding owed less to a deep theoretical knowledge of gender and sex than it did to the widespread intuition that the world has an established order and meaning to which we must conform.

Today, the social imaginary has been radically reimagined. People tend to see the world and themselves more as raw material that they can bend and shape to suit their own purposes. This reimagining wasn’t the result of learning new truths about the physical world but of subjugating the physical to the psychological. The modern idea of self has become thoroughly psychologized: One’s identity is defined not by a relationship with the external world but by an individual, internal sense of happiness. On this basis, the modern person operates according to what Taylor calls “expressive individualism,” desiring both to express an internal sense of self and to have that sense of self recognized and accepted by the external world.

Drawing from MacIntyre’s work, Trueman explains that expressive individualism has become the default mode of modern society. Because we lack a common framework for understanding who we are and why we exist, our moral discourse has degenerated into expressions of personal feelings and tastes. In order to satisfy our moral preferences, we feel we must be liberated from the repressive constraints of objective moral claims. Such liberation requires a full-scale campaign of cultural iconoclasm, of dismantling and disavowing the ideas and artifacts of the past so that we might pursue happiness on our own—thoroughly psychological and distinctly sexual—terms.

Revolutionary Shifts

After diagnosing the state of modern Western culture, Trueman spends the bulk of the book showing that our reimagined sense of self is rooted in intellectual shifts that had been taking place for several centuries.

The first shift was the psychologizing of the self—in other words, making one’s feelings and desires foundational to one’s identity. Trueman highlights the work of the 18th-century Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who laid the groundwork for this shift by arguing that we can only live authentically when our outward behavior can match our inner psychology. In a revolutionary step, Rousseau gives ethical priority to one’s psychology, claiming that society is the enemy of the authentic self because it forces people to suppress their desires and conform to conventional morality.

At the turn of the 19th century, Rousseau’s heirs within the Romantic movement—particularly the poets William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Blake—were instrumental in popularizing this psychological view of the self. Yet for all their calls to cast off the repressive influences of civilized society, these Romantics—like Rousseau—were confident that nature possessed a purposeful order upon which humans could build their lives. By the end of the 19th century, such confidence was greatly undermined by the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Charles Darwin. To Nietzsche and Marx, belief in transcendent reality and purposeful order are symptoms of psychological weakness and social sickness. Then, Darwin’s writings on evolution dealt the death blow by providing a new story of humankind that reduces human nature to something fluid and directionless.

With the belief that personal identity is psychological and self-determined, the stage was set for a second intellectual shift: the sexualizing of psychology. It was Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology, who in the early 20th century championed the insidious idea that’s intoxicated modern society: Self-identity is grounded in sexual desire. We’re essentially psychological, says Rousseau. Yet our psychology is essentially sexual, says Freud. Therefore, we’re essentially sexual. With Freud, sex is transformed from something we do into who we are.

After this transformation, it was only a matter of time before a third intellectual shift occurred: the politicizing of sex. Two Freudian acolytes, psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and philosopher Herbert Marcuse, drove this shift by merging Marxist ideas of political oppression with the Freudian notion of sexual repression. They argued that, because humans are essentially sexual, there can be no political liberation without sexual liberation.

In response, from the mid-20th century to the present day, a bevy of writers and activists from the New Left have aimed for sexual liberation by attacking the most problematic of all bourgeois institutions: the nuclear family. As long as the nuclear family is considered good and necessary to the right ordering of society, allegedly repressive norms such as heterosexuality and monogamy will perpetuate an oppressive social hierarchy that rewards sexual conformity and punishes those who wish to follow their own sexual codes. On this understanding, political liberation depends on sexual liberation—which depends on the dismantling of the nuclear family.

Though not everyone reaches the same conclusions, the underlying association of political liberation with sexual liberation is widely assumed today. Even if they’ve never read the writings of Freud, Reich, Marcuse, and the New Left, many people intuitively believe that open and unqualified expression of sexual desire is essential to human identity and dignity.

It’s this revolutionary belief that has transformed our “social imaginary” and led to a swift and stunning series of triumphs for the sexual revolution. Trueman devotes several chapters to detailing three triumphs in particular: the pervasiveness of eroticism in art and pop culture, the prioritization of psychological well-being in academic settings and legal or ethical arguments, and the widespread embrace of transgender identity.

Yet, as Trueman reiterates throughout his book, the triumphs of the sexual revolution are not as swift and stunning as they appear. Instead, they’re the latest logical outcomes of a society that has accepted expressive individualism as its basic premise. The road to sexual revolution was long and marked by a series of intellectual turns that were hardly inevitable. But once chosen, they led Western culture to where it is today.

Road to Renewal

As a preeminent church historian, Trueman is well-versed at telling the stories of intellectual turns and tracing their cultural consequences. Yet here Trueman’s aim is more modest: Rather than showing precisely how the ideas that undergird the sexual revolution have come to permeate our culture (for this would take many volumes), he intends only to show that these ideas aren’t new but have been preconditioned by several centuries of intellectual shifts. In this aim, he succeeds marvelously.

Yet certain segments of the book would have benefitted from some attention to causation. I’ll give just one example: By moving from Rousseau (chapter 3) to Wordsworth (chapter 4) in his narrative, Trueman implies a causal relationship that’s hardly clear. Though Wordsworth emphasizes the internal life of the poet, in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads he reins in any excess expressivism by describing the true poet as one “who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.” Also, Wordsworth’s reasons for using everyday language echo the literary choices of earlier poets like Dante, who in De Vulgari Eloquentia insists that vernacular is “natural” and “more noble” than the “artificial” language of educated elites. Further, Wordsworth's distinction between poetry and history stands in the tradition of Aristotle and the poet Sir Philip Sidney.

So, it could be that Wordsworth owes more to Rousseau than to these earlier poets, but the lack of a clear causal connection blunts Trueman’s dramatic claim that “Wordsworth stands near the head of a path that leads to Hugh Hefner and Kim Kardashian.” A similar lack of causal explanation blunts the force of other conclusions that Trueman makes throughout the book.

Yet this critique should take nothing away from the fact that The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is a signal achievement of cultural analysis. Readers wishing to understand the cultural convulsions and social upheavals taking place in the West will find this an indispensable book. It’s a masterclass on the fact that, while all ideas have consequences, some ideas are more consequential than others. Trueman shows that the consequences arising from ideas about human nature and identity can be especially revolutionary.

This fact should help guide the church’s response to the sexual revolution. Just as the revolution was made possible by certain preconditioned ideas about human nature and identity, any successful counter-revolution must arise from preconditions of its own. The church must lead the way by articulating and modeling a vision of true human identity and community. And we must do this with the knowledge that we’re unlikely to see any significant change in our own day. The road to sexual revolution was long, and so too will be the road to renewal. But it’s the only faithful road, and so it’s the one we must take.

Timothy Kleiser is a teacher and writer from Louisville, Kentucky. His writing has appeared in National Review, The American Conservative, Modern Age, The Boston Globe, Front Porch Republic, and elsewhere.

- More from Timothy Kleiser

Culture

Christmas Albums 2020: What’s on Our Playlist

Melissa Zaldivar

From Tori Kelly to Maverick City Music, here are our favorite new releases by Christian artists.

In an especially disorienting year, we ache for the familiarity of gathering together as Christmas approaches. Luckily, music has a way of stirring up memories and encouraging us toward a future hope, and this year, there seems to be something for everyone.

These eight albums—from better-known Christian artists and some fresh finds—provide the inhale and exhale of Advent, reminding us to both celebrate and hold our breath in anticipation of the coming Christ. You can check out our Spotify playlist to listen to all of the recommendations.

A Tori Kelly Christmas by Tori Kelly

If you’re wishing that Sister Act had been a Christmas movie, look no further than A Tori Kelly Christmas. Known for her impossibly perfect vocal riffs, she puts a spin on Christmas classics that brings in R&B tempos, throwback beats and, of course, a choir of backup singers. It’s not only hype, though. Her rendition of “O Holy Night” is as vocally powerful as it is timeless. If you need some pep in your step, throw on “Joy to The World/Joyful Joyful” and crank up the volume. This album is ideal for getting tasks done or for a boost of energy as the days become shorter.

A Jolly Irish Christmas (Vol. 2) by Rend Collective

In their second release of the year, Rend Collective’s A Jolly Irish Christmas (Vol. 2) complements their 2014 Christmas offering. The 12-track album encompasses everything from classics like “The First Noel,” to an upbeat cover of the Irish carol “Christmas in Killarney.” The Northern Ireland rock band’s folky “Silent Night (Be Still)” adds a chorus that especially resonates in 2020: “Be still my heart / Be still my mind / May I still see the magic of that silent night / Fill me with wonder / Keep mystery alive / May peace on earth be my song tonight.”

A Drummer Boy Christmas by For King & Country

In A Drummer Boy Christmas, For King & Country proclaims Christ’s arrival bookended by a prologue and epilogue versions of “In the Bleak Midwinter,” even bringing Needtobreathe to join them in “O Come O Come Emmanuel.” Pop harmonies and electrifying bridges make their Christmas covers stand out. The album’s inspiration came from the Christian duo’s performance of “Little Drummer Boy” at the Country Music Association’s “CMA Country Christmas.” Lucky for us, it’s the perfect soundtrack to brighten our dark winter.

Maverick City Christmas by Maverick City Music

Maverick City Music marries gospel style to CCM form to create music that leads the soul to worship. Especially as so many of us miss meeting in person, the voices on this album move the listener to sing along in a way that only church worship can. The group takes classic Christmas hymns and adds new choruses or lets the Spirit move as it extends them into a worship experience, as demonstrated in the “Joyful Joyful We Adore Thee / Angels We Have Heard on High” medley.

Christmas (Deluxe) by Sandra McCracken

It’s no secret that Sandra McCracken is the singer-songwriter who brings undeniably Bible-centered lyrics to her enchanting falsetto. Though the original album released in 2019, McCracken released a deluxe edition of Christmas this year. She tells stories that make the listener feel at home: “We bless the seeds under the snow / We bless the patience, take it slow / We bless the limits, bless the tears / We bless the failures that brought us here”? This album is best accompanied by fresh snow, a crackling fire, or a cup of tea to unwind.

Advent, Pt. One by Sarah Sparks

Sarah Sparks has been writing music for years with soul and thoughtful, original lyrics. Her latest creation, “Advent, Part One,” is an eight-song collection that brings a balm to her listeners’ hearts and new life to old favorites. I especially loved her original “400 Years,” which says: “And in 400 years / not one word was spoken / and the prophets were silent / leaving us in the darkness / But then what should appear? / Do we hear a new sound in this silent night? / For the first time / not a silent night.” It’s a perfect album to spruce up the winter midday mundane.

A Seed, A Sunrise by Caroline Cobb

Caroline Cobb is less known but equally worthwhile. Her album “A Seed, A Sunrise” is an intentional voyage from Advent to Christmas, leading us from anticipation to full celebration. It’s the kind of album that moves you slowly to where you need to be when you feel stuck during this strange time. Songs like “Comfort, Comfort” remind us that Christ brings us much-needed salvation from what burdens us.

Christmas: Acoustic Sessions by Phil Wickham

Always a calming presence in music, Phil Wickham has given us a real gift in his acoustic album Christmas: Acoustic Sessions. We’re busy much of this month, trying to tie up loose ends and send Christmas cards and gifts, and this album beckons us to set things down and rest. If you need a slowdown, Phil is your ally. With his signature buildups and heart-lightening voice, this album gives us an extra dose of hope this season.

Listen to our playlist below to get in the Christmas spirit with CT’s holiday mix.

Melissa Zaldivar is an author, a Bible teacher, and the podcast host of Cheer Her On. She lives near Boston.

- More from Melissa Zaldivar

News

Wire Story

Trump Administration Expands Religious Exemptions for Federal Contractors

Adelle Banks – Religion News Service

A new Labor Department rule offers organizations providing government services more freedom to follow their own employment guidelines on faith and LGBT identity.

US Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia

Leah Millis / Pool - Getty Images

The US Department of Labor has issued a new rule intended to foster “full and equal participation” of religious groups as federal contractors.

“Religious organizations should not have to fear that acceptance of a federal contract or subcontract will require them to abandon their religious character or identity,” said US Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia in a statement Monday.

The final rule will become effective January 8, two weeks before President Donald Trump leaves office. It is the latest development in the long-running battle over how to balance religious rights with other, particularly LGBT, rights.

The department said the new rule builds on Executive Order 11246, which dates to the Johnson administration, that requires contractors to follow affirmative action and nondiscrimination requirements.

“Yet the order also acknowledges that religious organizations may prefer in employment ‘individuals of a particular religion,’ so that they can maintain their religious identity and integrity,” the department’s statement said.

The new rule, outlined in a 159-page document, aims to clarify what kinds of organizations qualify for a religious exemption. Since the George W. Bush administration, Labor Department rules have followed Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which allows religious employers to prefer members of their own faith when it comes to hiring.

Under its definition of “Religious corporation, association, educational institution, or society,” the new final rule notes that they may or may not be connected to a house of worship.

Its final language also makes clear that a religious organization need not be nonprofit but if it is for-profit it must show “strong evidence that it possesses a substantial religious purpose.” For example, it would not be sufficient for an organization to include a scriptural quote in its marketing or a short mention of religious values on an “About Us” webpage.

The department received more than 109,000 comments after the rule was proposed last year. Some of the comments responded to the Labor Department’s referring in its proposed rule to Supreme Court cases—such as Hobby Lobby, Masterpiece Cakeshop and Trinity Lutheran Church in Columbia, Missouri—in which persons with religious claims were granted anti-discrimination protections.

The Trump administration’s focus on religious liberty has been hailed by conservatives and questioned as discriminatory by advocates of church-state separation and LGBT activists, who are concerned that religious exemptions will deprive same-sex couples of access to services.

Stanley Carlson-Thies, founder of the Center for Public Justice’s Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance, called the new rule a “welcome step” because disputes sometimes arose about the extent of the exemption after then-President Barack Obama in 2014 barred government contractors from discriminating against LGBT applicants and employees.

“The new final rule affirms that religious organizations can maintain their religious employment qualifications when they become federal contractors,” Carlson-Thies said, though he noted that it only applies to the small number of religious organizations who provide services to the federal government.

At the same time, Carlson-Thies said, “The new rule requires proof that an organization is religious—an employer cannot dream up a religious excuse simply because it desires to fire a gay person or someone of a minority faith.”

Americans United for Separation of Church and State opposed the rule, saying it could cause other kinds of discrimination.

“It’s unconscionable, though hardly surprising, that the lame-duck Trump administration would expand the ability of federal contractors—who employ one-fifth of the American workforce—to use religious litmus tests to hire or fire employees for jobs paid for with taxpayer dollars,” said AU President Rachel Laser.

“Like so many others issued by the Trump administration, this rule particularly puts at risk workers who are LGBTQ, women, religious minorities and non-religious people.”

Laser urged the Biden-Harris administration to “immediately begin the process of revoking this rule.” But Carlson-Thies said the new regulation “cannot be reversed by the wave of a pen.”

- More from Adelle Banks – Religion News Service

News

Wire Story

It’s Hard to Social Distance When You’re a Giant Singing Christmas Tree

Bob Smietana – Religion News Service

Big church productions cancel, go digital, or try to adjust to COVID-19 precautions.

Joel Bissell / Muskegon Chronicle via AP

There are no sheep or goats or even llamas at the Capital Christian Center, a 3,000-seat Assemblies of God megachurch in Sacramento this Christmas season. Not even a pair of church members dressed up in a camel suit.

And for the first time in 63 years, no giant Singing Christmas Tree.

“Tonight would have been our opening night,” said Capital Center senior pastor Rick Cole on Friday. “It’s a really weird feeling.”

Large-scale Christian shows, including those featuring a Singing Christmas Tree—40- or 50-foot-tall structures holding hundreds of choir members—have been staples at large congregations like Capital Christian for decades. They draw in thousands of visitors who might never otherwise come to church and bring joy and a sense of community to cast and congregation members alike.

But this year, COVID-19 restrictions make such events nearly impossible to pull off.

Last year, 25,000 people came to see 11 Capital Center Singing Christmas Tree performances. Between 300 and 400 people are usually part of the production, which includes choir members, actors and a host of backstage staff and musicians who play in a specially built orchestra pit in front of the stage.

“We are disappointed,” said Cole. “It’s disappointing for every person on the planet right now. It is the nature of the moment we are in.”

First Baptist Church in Orlando is getting around the lack of in-person performances featuring two Singing Christmas Trees—each about 45 feet high from base to star and able to hold about 200 singers and tens of thousands of Christmas lights—by filming a series of short Christmas-themed videos to be shown at services during December, said Jonathan Hickey, the church’s creative arts director.

In Portland, the annual community Singing Christmas Tree, which began in 1962, will stream online from December 15 to New Year’s Day, with a mix of clips from past shows and stories from the Singing Christmas Tree’s history.

At least a few Singing Christmas Trees will go on with the show this year, with some adaptations.

https://www.facebook.com/262697383832472/videos/3297766633679936/

Abilene Baptist Church in Martinez, Georgia, has moved its Singing Christmas Tree from the church’s sanctuary to a nearby park this year, said Thomas Sunderland, associate pastor of music and media.

Prompted in part by COVID-19 and by a major renovation of the church’s building, Sunderland said, the Singing Christmas Tree will be smaller, with no star, one less level and 70 singers, down from the usual 100 or so. They will be six feet apart, and some will stand next to the tree, rather than on it.

Sunderland said that having the tree outside will help limit the risk of spreading the coronavirus. The audience will also be socially distanced.

“In the end, God spoke to my heart to do the tree,” he told Religion News Service in an email, while admitting that things could change between now and December 10, when the first of three performances is scheduled.

“God could shut it all down tomorrow,” Sunderland said. “It belongs to him, not me, not our music ministry nor our church.”

At Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi, where the first Singing Christmas Tree was held in the 1930s, a lack of rehearsal—and personnel—was the problem with holding it this year.

None of the choirs on campus have sung together this year because of the risk of COVID-19, said Belhaven President Roger Parrott. And the school’s students were sent home at Thanksgiving. Bringing them back to do the Singing Christmas Tree, held outdoors each year at the school’s football stadium, made no sense.

He hopes that the Singing Christmas Tree will be back next year, and in the meantime he takes pride in the way church communities around the country have run with Belhaven’s invention.

“I’ve always said, if we franchised the idea, we could have made a lot of money by now,” Parrott added.

- More from Bob Smietana – Religion News Service

News

Died: Walter Hooper, Who Gave His Life to C.S. Lewis’s Legacy

Daniel Silliman

He kept works in print, edited new collections, and spent a lifetime meditating on everything written by the beloved British author.

Courtesy of the Marion E. Wade Center.

Walter Hooper, a North Carolina man who dedicated his life to preserving and promoting the writings of C. S. Lewis, died Monday at the age of 89. He was sick with COVID-19.

Hooper served briefly and informally as Lewis’s literary secretary—helping the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, Mere Christianity, and The Abolition of Man answer his mail—before Lewis’s death in 1963. Hooper, then 33, left a teaching post at the University of Kentucky to take a leading role in managing Lewis’s literary estate. He continued to promote Lewis for the rest of his life.

Hooper edited more than 30 collections of Lewis’s writing and annotated four volumes of letters, in addition to writing the first authorized biography and a number of studies and reference volumes. In the early years, he played a pivotal role in keeping Lewis in print.

“I hero-worshipped him, and still do,” Hooper said after 30 years. “I can’t think of a better way of spending my life than by making his contribution better known.”

Hooper received a lifetime achievement award in 2009 from the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College, which promotes the ongoing relevance of the literature of Lewis and his circle of Christian writers. According to the Wade Center, “there is not a single reader of C.S. Lewis’s writings who is not deeply indebted to Walter Hooper.”

Hooper was born outside of Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1931, and went to study English and education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He first heard of Lewis at a campus ministry, where a football player who had read The Screwtape Letters recounted the narrative about the senior demon writing instructions to his nephew, a junior tempter named Wormwood. Hooper was fascinated by the story, but the university bookstore didn’t carry The Screwtape Letters or any other works by Lewis. The store did sell J. B. Phillips’s colloquial modern translation of the biblical epistles, Letters to Young Churches, which had an introduction by Lewis. The introduction, which made an argument about how God entered into the world through the Incarnation and comes to us still in everyday, prosaic language, changed Hooper’s life.

“I’d never met anybody who believed that way,” he said. “I was determined to have more words by this man.”

Hooper was drafted into the army in 1953, near the end of the Korean War. He took Miracles with him, keeping it inside his shirt during basic training so he could read it during cigarette breaks.

Ten years later, as a young academic working on a book about Lewis, he went to meet the man in Oxford. They had tea at Lewis’s home, then beer with the Inklings at a local pub. When it came time to leave, Hooper didn’t want to go.

“As he and I walked on towards the pub where I would get the bus back, I didn’t know whether I’d ever see him again,” Hooper later recalled. “But I thought, I really love this man.”

He extended his stay to help Lewis answer his mail and then agreed to return officially when he was done with his teaching appointment in Kentucky. Lewis spoke of him to his friends as “my new secretary” and commented, “He’s almost too anxious to please, but no fool. No, no fool.”

That November, Lewis died, and Hooper was asked to return and help with the literary estate. When he saw a British bookshop clearing out its stock of Lewis’s titles, he decided he needed to fight to keep the works in print and promote Lewis’s legacy.

A few of his efforts were controversial. Hooper published an incomplete science fiction manuscript in 1977, titled The Dark Tower. He was accused of writing it himself and attempting to pass it off as authentic Lewis. According to one critic, the unfinished fiction was “a blemish” on Lewis’s reputation and did not match his other work in “style, content, and sexual orientation.” Hooper was also accused of inventing a backstory about saving manuscripts from a bonfire when Lewis’s brother and gardener decided to clean house, in order to perpetrate his alleged literary hoax.

Hooper never responded to the charges, but Lewis’s stepson Douglas Gresham came to Hooper’s defense, and a former student, Alistair Fowler, reported talking with Lewis about aborted fantasy fiction projects, including the story that became The Dark Tower, years before Hooper was involved with the estate.

The Dark Tower, along with other, lesser-known collections of Lewis’s work that were edited by Hooper, including The World’s Last Night, Present Concerns, and Selected Literary Essays, remain in print today.

Hooper may have made his most notable break from Lewis in 1988, when he left his mentor’s Anglican Church and converted to Roman Catholicism. Hooper said he thought Lewis might have done the same, though, if he had lived into the 1980s. The Church of England was “unravelling,” he said. “Anglicanism seemed a mess, in which its members said conflicting things about abortion and many other things.”

In 1997, Hooper finished his largest single contribution to Lewis studies with the 940-page volume, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide. According to CT’s 1997 review, the book was “a whole reference shelf” between two covers.

“Hooper’s knowledge of Lewis’s writings (both published and unpublished) is unsurpassed, and he has chased down a thousand details to fill in the gaps left by the texts,” the review said. “This readable volume seems to reflect a lifetime of meditating on everything written by Lewis and about him, of talking to those who knew Lewis, and of ruminating upon his own conversations with Lewis during their brief acquaintance.”

When Hooper was once asked by a schoolchild what it felt like to dedicate his whole life to another man’s work, he said, “It feels wonderful. I wish I could do it all again.”

- More from Daniel Silliman

Pastors

The Celebrity Pastor Problem Is Every Church’s Struggle

Rich Villodas

How our ministry policies and practices can push back against entitlement.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: Credit: Tetra Images / digitalhallway / Getty Images

When I became a pastor at New Life Fellowship, my predecessor, Pete Scazzero, told me, “Congratulations, you can’t park in the church parking lot anymore!”

This shocked me, since I came from a church where I saw all kinds of perks and special treatment for senior leaders. I wondered, Shouldn’t pastors have prime parking spots?

Our church in Queens has a small lot—massive by New York City standards—but the point was taken. Pastors aren’t entitled to special treatment; they lead by serving. The parking lot lesson from Pete became one of my most important moments of character formation.

Certainly, this culture of “no parking” can be taken to another extreme, where pastors are not sufficiently cared for, encouraged, and supported. But it’s important to push back against the temptations of entitlement that can come with church leadership.

To be honest, walking to the church building after circling and looking for parking is not fun. It gets pretty tiring, especially when it rains or snows. But I recognize how this policy reflects a broader church culture where pastors aren’t celebrities deserving special treatment.

As a pastor, I regularly think about my own entitled tendencies and the issue of entitlement in ministry. The topic came up recently with the news of Carl Lentz’s departure from Hillsong NYC. While his story also involves the painful extramarital relationships and drama therein, Lentz’s “rise and fall” came in a context of hip megachurch celebrity.

A recent New York Times investigation described a church culture at Hillsong NYC that “seemed to go out of its way to cultivate a hierarchy of coolness” and where Lentz “both loomed large and was rarely present.” His case is just one example prompting all of us in the church to look more closely at how entitlement has become normalized in our churches—and what we can do to address it.

Keeping Honor from Becoming Veneration

Scripture describes the special responsibilities pastors take on and says that those who lead the church well are “worthy of double honor” (1 Tim. 5:17). In some churches, though, pastoral entitlement masquerades as honor.

Certainly, an ethos of honor—a desire for churches to bless their pastors and care well for them—has the potential to correct unhealthy cultures that reduce pastors to human-doings. We have seen the ministry burnout and damaging consequences that can result when pastors are expected to be everything for the community without the adequate gifts of rest, support, and recreation. A healthy culture of honor recognizes the emotional and spiritual weight pastors carry in shepherding a flock and seeks to create sustainable rhythms and policies and practical care for long-term flourishing.

This culture of honor is well-intended. I appreciate when a volunteer sets aside a plate of food for me at a church event because I’m too busy connecting with people in the room. My wife and I have been profoundly grateful for kind visits from congregants dropping off a meal every once in a while. In our congregation—which is filled with many immigrants—we have received generous gifts of hospitality that have humbled us.

But the biblical directive to honor our pastors can be carried out in a way that looks more like sanctified entitlement. There’s a line that’s crossed where honor turns into veneration, shepherds are treated as celebrities, and pastoral vocation degenerates into a sideshow.

Much of this emerges from pastors who take themselves too seriously, narcissistically centering themselves in the church family system. But the more insidious issue lies within the larger systemic reality that reinforces this culture.

In their important book, A Church Called Tov, Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer highlight this dynamic. They write:

Of course, celebrities don’t form on their own. Behind every celebrity pastor is an adoring congregation that both loves and supports the celebrity atmosphere. The development of a celebrity culture also doesn’t happen overnight. It begins when a pastor has a driving ambition for fame, but it can’t take root unless the congregation supports that ambition.

Unfortunately, many people want their pastor to be a spiritual hero or a celebrity at some level. They not only want it, but they often expect it and find themselves believing it about their pastor.

Celebrity church culture is not monopolized by megachurches and big names. I’ve seen leaders at small- and medium-sized churches act like they’re part of the royal family.

In light of these troubling realities, how do pastors and church communities resist this spirit of entitlement? I’d like to offer two suggestions to consider. At minimum, resisting entitlement requires churches ensure their pastors are accessible and accountable.

Making Pastors Stay Present

Few things breed cultures of entitlement like special rooms and hallways that intentionally keep a pastor away the people. Visiting churches all over, I’ve witnessed plenty of these secret getaways that normalized a culture of distance. (Don’t get me wrong, there are times when I’m just exhausted and need to leave the church building by the back entrance. But this is the exception.)

A pastor who is not regularly accessible to the people he or she leads is not a pastor. They might be a preacher or communicator—but certainly not a pastor. In our large congregation of over 1,500 people, every pastor must be available after services to be with the congregants—even if just for 15 to 20 minutes. This expectation was established long before I arrived. No matter how large a church becomes, this gesture of presence goes a long way.

Moreover, a pastoral culture that resists entitlement makes space for those who don’t carry congregational influence. I have had to wrestle with this often. Because I’m the lead pastor of our congregation, many people want to meet with me. When my assistant sets up appointments, I’m often tempted to only say yes to those who carry significant influence in our community. I’ve had to on more than one occasion resist the pull toward only meeting with people I know have power and resources.

Being Asked the Hard Questions

I don’t really like the word accountability, especially how it’s typically used in Christian contexts. Accountability often comes across as stale, awkward, forced confessions to a group of people you don’t even know well–at least that has been my experience in the past. But resisting entitlement requires compassion and honesty. Every pastor needs an environment where difficult questions can be asked regularly.

I would be lying if I told you I do this joyfully. I don’t like being told what to do. I want to call the shots. I want to inform people, not ask for permission. Yet this has been one of the most important safeguards for my leadership and pastoral life.

I’m grateful to report to an elder board that asks hard questions monthly. I’m grateful that they are not “impressed” with me. In the past couple of years, I’ve had to grow significantly in my relationship with the board. To this day, submitting to healthy authority is a struggle for me. My false self is exposed. My perfectionism is clearly seen. Yet deep down inside, I know God is protecting me.

To get to a place where pastors and boards can relate to one another in ways that hold together the tension of grace and truth requires a high level of self-awareness, humility, differentiation, and the courage to ask hard questions.

One simple way to measure humility as a leader is to tell yourself: “Honestly identify the tasks and people you think are beneath you.” I’ve had to ask this of myself more than I care to admit.

Pastoral ministry must be marked by humility. Our churches can help by creating cultures that prioritize accessibility and accountability and resist entitlement. Those changes don’t happen overnight. The policies we make today, though, may go on to change the expectations, then instincts, and then hearts of our leaders in the future—and give them more to think and pray about as they walk from their cars in the snow.

Rich Villodas is lead pastor of New Life Fellowship and author of The Deeply Formed Life.

- More from Rich Villodas

News

Will Caucasus Conflict Come Also to France?

Jayson Casper and Jean-Paul Rempp

President of Armenian evangelical churches in Europe tells CT the Turkish and Azerbaijani diasporas are threatening their neighborhoods, as he struggles to maintain Christian love.

French Armenians and their supporters protest in Paris.

Courtesy of Gilbert Léonian

Editor’s note: CT’s complete coverage of Armenian Christians is here.

Throughout the six-week war in Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian diaspora rallied in support of an ancient Caucasus mountain homeland they call Artsakh.

Overall, they donated $150 million in economic and humanitarian aid.

In California, they blocked freeway traffic to protest the lack of news coverage.

In Lebanon, they hung banners against Azerbaijani and Turkish aggression.

And in France, they successfully lobbied the senate for a non-binding resolution recognizing Artsakh’s independence. (International law recognizes Nagorno-Karabakh as Azerbaijani territory.)

The symbolic vote angered Azerbaijan, which called for France’s removal from the Minsk Group, co-chaired with Russia and the United States and tasked with overseeing negotiations with Armenia since 1994. Turkey has petitioned for a leading role.

But the consequences go beyond regional politics. The controversy could threaten the French social peace, already riled amid President Emmanuel Macron’s campaign against Muslim “separatism.”

Azerbaijan, and especially allied Turkey, also have an extensive diaspora throughout Europe. And last month, their supporters led demonstrations in Armenian neighborhoods in Lyon, vandalizing the Armenian genocide memorial.

France then banned one of the more violent groups, the Grey Wolves.

To gauge the situation, CT interviewed Gilbert Léonian, a Paris-based pastor and president of the Federation of Armenian Evangelical Churches in Europe. Of the roughly 500,000 French people of Armenian origin in France, about 3 percent are evangelical, worshiping across nine churches.

(Like many French pastors across all ethnicities, Léonian studied at the well-known evangelical seminary in Vaux sur Seine, near Paris. He recalled reading CT in the 1970s, as he studied under the renowned theologian Henri Blocher.)

Léonian discussed relations between the ethnic communities, his fears for the fate of Nagorno-Karabakh churches, and his personal struggle to love his Azerbaijani and Turkish neighbors:

Gilbert Léonian and his wife in front of their church near Paris.

To what degree are the Armenian, Turkish, and Azerbaijani communities integrated into secular French society? Do they maintain their respective faiths?

The first Armenians arrived in France in the early 1920s, following the genocide of 1915–1918.

Others came to France in different migratory waves due to insecurity in their countries of origin: Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iran, and more recently, Armenia, following the 1988 earthquake.

Today in France, the Armenian population is mainly established along a south-to-north line from the Mediterranean port city of Marseilles, where the majority of original immigrants arrived and settled, through France’s second largest city of Lyons, and up to Paris.

The Armenian people are deeply religious, and were the first people to accept Christianity as their state religion, in 301 A.D., 12 years before Emperor Constantine’s Edict of Tolerance in 313 A.D. In France, 90 percent belong to the Apostolic [Orthodox] community, in 24 churches. Catholics represent 7 percent, in five churches. Very few Armenians call themselves atheists.

However, we are seeing a major secularization of religious practice, reflecting the general trend in Europe. For many Armenians, the church is more the place where the diaspora maintains its identity and culture, rather than a place where Christian piety is nurtured.

There are about 800,000 Turks and 50,000 Azerbaijanis in France, and overall they try to avoid living close to French people of Armenian origin. We find them in large cities and all over France.

All studies and media cite Armenians as an example of successful integration. The most famous Frenchman of Armenian origin was the singer Charles Aznavour.

Turks and Azeris, on the other hand, live in identity-based and communitarian withdrawal and are very attached to their Muslim religion.

There are 2,500 mosques and Muslim places of worship in France, and 800 imams, 300 of whom are non-French citizens. Half of these are Turkish, and paid as civil servants by Turkey. Additionally, the previous general secretary of the representative council of the Muslim faith in France, was an ethnic Turk.

That gives a fairly accurate idea of the Turkish influence in France.

What is the relationship like between the three ethnic communities?

Inasmuch as successive Turkish governments have not recognized the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915, this wound has not yet healed. The majority of Armenians retain a deep bitterness and hatred for this injustice.

My own family members fled the massacres in modern-day Turkey via Syria and arrived in Marseilles in 1922, traumatized and having lost everything.

But my parents, my children, and my grandchildren were born in France. Over five generations, we have followed a long path to integration.

I did not deliberately cultivate hatred or revenge in my heart. But deep down, even though I was a born-again Christian and a pastor, I still felt very distant from the Turks and everything Turkish.

And then, one day, that wall fell.

Thanks to the prayer and compassion that God poured into my heart, I set out on a path of dialogue, with the aim of arriving, one day, at a reconciliation based on truth. And God put on my path a Turkish pastor who acknowledged the horror of the genocide and asked forgiveness from the Armenian people, by kneeling before the entire assembly of my church.

This year, with Turkish friends from my region, we had planned to go and visit the village of our grandparents, in Cilicia, to continue this path of inner healing. COVID-19 prevented us from doing so.

But after the horrors committed in recent days by the leaders of Turkey and Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh, the pain of genocide has once again been awakened. I feel that this path of dialogue has again gone far away from me, and for a very long time.

Several groups of Christians nevertheless have a true vision from God to make the gospel of Jesus Christ known to the Turkish people. I can only encourage them and pray for them.

What happened during the ethnic Turkish march in Lyon?

Around 250 Turks belonging to an extremist party marched in the main street of Décines, a suburb of Lyon, chanting very violent anti-Armenian slogans. It was a real manhunt. A few days later, in the middle of the night, they tagged the walls of the Armenian Heritage Museum, as well as the monument in memory of the victims of 1915. This type of hateful demonstration was then repeated in Vienne, a town 20 miles south of Lyons with a significant Armenian population.

After having chased us from our lands 100 years ago, they are now chasing us in our new homeland, the land that welcomed us, France. Armenian public buildings, including churches, schools, and cultural centers have since been placed under police surveillance in French cities where there is a strong Armenian community.

Gilbert Léonian’s church near Paris.

How did the Armenian community respond?

As usual, Armenians reacted peacefully. Everywhere, meetings and protest marches were organized to denounce the massacre of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh.

In Paris, we were around 20,000.

We also alerted President Emmanuel Macron, our politicians, and the media.

In several cities in France, including my suburb of Alfortville, we organized ecumenical prayer vigils for peace—with Armenian Orthodox and evangelical believers, French Catholics, and Lebanese Maronites.

Azerbaijani officials are saying that once they regain sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh, they will not harm Armenian citizens. What is your view of the situation?

I remain very pessimistic about the security of the few Armenians who will remain in the free part of Karabakh. How can we trust a head of government who has publicly boasted: “We have finally chased away these Armenian dogs!”

My heart bleeds when I see that Armenians fleeing the area occupied by the Azeris are burning the houses they built with their own hands, so that they won’t fall into the hands of the Azeri conquerors.

Let us make no mistake: The recent tragic events in France—in Conflans-Saint Honorine, where a history teacher’s throat was slit in front of his school after a course on freedom of expression, and in Nice, where three Catholic faithful were also slit while praying in the city’s cathedral—are the result of the same fanatical ideology at work in the carnage suffered by Armenians in Artsakh.

Now that the cease-fire agreement has been signed to the detriment of the Armenians, what are your fears?

First of all, this ignominious defeat and the loss of three-quarters of Nagorno-Karabakh are a real crime against humanity, which will remain a gaping wound in the history of civilized peoples. I am afraid that the Armenian people, who over the centuries have given so many martyrs for the cause of the gospel of Christ, will have difficulty recovering from these barbaric acts in the 21st century.

I am very concerned about the preservation of the 500 churches and religious buildings in Nagorno-Karabakh, once they fall into the hands of the occupier. Nagorno-Karabakh is the cradle of Armenian Christianity.

One of the jewels in great danger is the 12th-century monastery of Saint Thaddeus, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Thaddeus is one of the two apostles of Jesus who evangelized the Armenian people, according to tradition.

And finally, I’m very concerned about the West. After this savage tragedy, lived in full view of the whole world, who is going to stop religious fanaticism?

What are you praying for?

Prayer topics are many, because the Armenian people are in agony, and they need the solidarity of the whole world. Instead we deplore the guilty silence of the international authorities, while the churches of all denominations have shone by their lack of courage!

By the grace of God, I have been a pastor in the Armenian Evangelical Churches of France for 47 years. But I have never been so shaken in my humanity, and in my Christian faith, as by this barbaric war and by the unjust capitulation.

My prayer is that God will manifest his justice, in his time and by his means.

Interview by Jean-Paul Rempp and translation by Andrew Wiles, with additional reporting by Jayson Casper.

- More from Jayson Casper

News

US Adds Nigeria to Top of Religious Persecution List, Removes Sudan and Uzbekistan

Jeremy Weber and Jayson Casper

(UPDATED) State Department revises its Countries of Particular Concern on religious freedom.

People attend a funeral for those killed by suspected Boko Haram militants in Zaabarmar, Nigeria, on November 29.

Jossy Ola / Associated Press

Only one country was added this year to the US government’s official list of the world’s worst persecutors of religion: Nigeria.

The West African nation – Africa’s most populous and divided roughly evenly between Christians and Muslims – has been plagued for years by rising sectarian tensions and the Islamist terror group Boko Haram, which most recently was blamed for a massacre of scores of farmers in Borno State.

Nigeria joins Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan on the US Department of State’s Countries of Particular Concern (CPC) list, which names and shames governments which have “engaged in or tolerated ‘systematic, ongoing, [and] egregious violations of religious freedom.’” Those nine nations were also on the 2018 and 2019 CPC lists.

“Today, the United States, a nation founded by those fleeing religious persecution … once again took action to defend those who simply want to exercise this essential freedom,” stated Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

“… And yet our work is far from complete.”

Last year, Nigeria was added to the State Department’s Special Watch List (SWL), a secondary tier below the CPC list for governments that have “engaged in or tolerated ‘severe violations of religious freedom.’”

The 2020 watch list includes Comoros, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Russia, as it did in 2019. Cuba and Nicaragua were added to the list that year, while Russia was added in 2018.

The elevating of Nigeria to the highest level of concern was met with mixed reactions by the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN).

“[We are] not happy that the US has placed Nigeria on a religious freedom blacķlist, because of the implications which include possible sanctions,” stated CAN president Samson Ayokunle.

“But at the same time, we are encouraged that the global world is aware of what is happening.”

Nigeria has religious freedom, CAN reminded, but it is denied in certain regional states—especially in the Muslim-majority north. Churches face discriminatory zoning procedures, and Christian professors are denied senior leadership positions, the group stated.

And while Muslims denounce terrorism by Boko Haram and its breakway faction, Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), such violence is done in the name of Allah, stated CAN. Fulani herdsmen, meanwhile, kill in predominantly Christian farming communities.

“Pastors and their families are under attack,” stated Ayokunle. “Churches are being burnt and destroyed. They are taking over our farms and communities.”

Other Nigerian evangelical leaders, however, praised the CPC designation. Gideon Para-Mallam called it “long overdue.”

“This should be a wake-up call to the Muslim power elite and those who perpetually live in denial about the persecution of Christians in Nigeria,” said the president of the Para-Mallam Peace Foundation. “Systematic persecution of Christians in northern Nigeria is real.”

Agreeing that religious freedom is enshrined in Nigeria’s constitution, he called on the government to show—rather than say—that it is “real.”

As did Sunday Agang, president/provost of ECWA Seminary in Jos.

“A lack of religious freedom anywhere in the world is an outright denial of our God-given human freedom,” he said. “The administration of [President] Muhammadu Buhari needs to be confronted with the truth—Nigeria lacks religious freedom!”

But whereas Agang “enthusiastically” approved the “apt” CPC designation, John Hayab considered it “sad.”

“Our political leaders have allowed religious bigots, fanatics, and extremists to terrorize fellow citizens,” said the Kaduna state chairman of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN).

“No responsible government permits certain citizens to be treated badly, because of their faith.”

The problem is not just for Christians, he said. Shiite Muslims are persecuted also. Meanwhile, banditry and kidnapping affects everyone, though the severity of treatment often depends on one’s faith.

“No more lip service from the government,” said Hayab. “All forms of religious persecution must stop.”

The Nigerian government rejected the designation as a case of “honest disagreement.”

But religious freedom advocates had similar reactions to Nigerian Christians.

“I am sad it came to this but it’s time for Nigeria to change its behavior; it must protect its citizens,” tweeted Johnnie Moore, a member of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) who visited Nigeria last year and wrote a book on his findings. “Nigeria now has the unfortunate distinction of being the first democracy ever added to the … infamous list of the worst religious freedom violators in the world.”

USCIRF has advised the State Department to add Nigeria to the CPC list since 2009.

“We especially welcome the increased level of accountability that will result,” Trent Martin, a Wilberforce21 fellow, told CT.

“Throughout the country, the people of Nigeria face a rising tide of violence that has left places of worship burned to the ground, families torn apart, and girls still held captive by terrorists,” he said. “We will continue to speak up for these people and encourage the American government to use this designation as a means to advocate for needed action in Nigeria.”

The State Department also shared two “positive developments” on international religious freedom.

Sudan and Uzbekistan have been removed from its Special Watch List “based on significant, concrete progress undertaken by their respective governments over the past year,” stated Pompeo. “Their courageous reforms of their laws and practices stand as models for other nations to follow.”

One Sudanese evangelical leader was “grateful.”

“It is true there have been slight steps taken to reform the law,” said Aida Weran, academic officer of Nile Theological College, in Khartoum. “But it has led to positive developments in religious freedom.”

Both Sudan and Uzbekistan had been listed as CPCs as recently as 2019 and 2018, respectively. USCIRF recommended earlier this year that both nations remain on the watch list; however, vice chair Tony Perkins stated today that its commissioners find it “undeniable the historic progress that has been made in these two countries” and “hope that their progress encourages positive change in other places.” [CT has reported on the religious freedom progress in both Sudan and Uzbekistan.]

“[Their] delisting is good news for religious freedom,” Knox Thames, former special advisor for religious minorities at the State Department, told CT.

“Both countries have undertaken real reforms that have improved the situation on the ground for religious minorities, as well as the country as a whole,” said Thames, currently a senior fellow with the Institute for Global Engagement which has long focused on Uzbekistan. “In both, we have seen oppressive laws and policies changed, and people freed from prison. Churches are freer to meet than at any time in recent memory.”

21Wilberforce also praised the removals. "Years of courageous leadership in those countries coupled with international engagement with civil society, religious freedom roundtables, and other governments has fueled promising progress for religious freedom in both nations,” said Martin.

However, Thames also criticized the lack of one addition: India.

“The State Department’s failure to add India to the Special Watch List was disappointing and a glaring omission,” he said. “The trend lines continue to point downward, with anti-conversion laws and attacks on churches of growing concern to India’s large Christian community.

“Other minorities are targeted, as government policies could force millions of Indian Muslims into statelessness, Muslims are lynched for selling beef, and India’s largest state Uttar Pradesh recently established criminal penalties for interfaith marriages,” said Thames. “If the United States had added India to the watch list, it could have encouraged a much-needed course correction back towards India’s founding ideals of tolerance and minority rights.”

USCIRF recommended in its 2020 report that India be added to the higher CPC list, along with Russia, Syria, and Vietnam.

For the secondary watch list, USCIRF recommended the addition of Afghanistan, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Central African Republic, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, and Turkey (in addition to Cuba, Sudan, and Uzbekistan).

Finally, today the State Department designated “al-Shabaab, al-Qa’ida, Boko Haram, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Houthis, ISIS, ISIS-Greater Sahara, ISIS-West Africa, Jamaat Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin, and the Taliban” as Entities of Particular Concern (EPC), a relatively new category for non-state actors.

Two groups, “al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS-Khorasan,” were removed from the EPC list “due to the total loss of territory formerly controlled by these terrorist organizations,” stated Pompeo.

“While these two groups no longer meet the statutory criteria for designation, we will not rest until we have fully eliminated the threat of religious freedom abuses by any violent extremist and terrorist groups,” he stated.

The State Department is required to produce the CPC list every year by the International Religious Freedom Act, which was passed in 1998 and strengthened in 2016.

In the most recent attack to make international headlines, suspected members of Boko Haram killed scores of rice farmers and fishermen last month as they were harvesting crops in Nigeria’s northern state of Borno, officials said. The UN humanitarian coordinator in Nigeria, Edward Kallon, later stated that 110 people had died, according to multiple media outlets.

The November 28 attack in a rice field in Garin Kwashebe came on the same day that residents were casting votes for the first time in 13 years to elect local councils, although many didn’t go to cast their ballots.

The farmers were reportedly rounded up and summarily killed by armed insurgents in retaliation for refusing to pay extortion to one militant.

Malam Zabarmari, a leader of a rice farmers association in Borno state, confirmed the massacre to The Associated Press, saying at least 40 people were killed.

Prior to the US CPC designation, President Buhari was summoned to appear before a joint session of Nigeria’s National Assembly to give account of the security situation.

The Nigerian Senate, for the third time, called for top military officials to be replaced.

CAN stated that 95 percent of security chiefs are Muslim.

“We have cried in vain to the president to correct the lopsided appointments,” Ayokunle stated. “The country belongs to every citizen irrespective of their religious affiliation, but the government is not interested.”

Buhari, meanwhile, expressed grief over the killings.

“I condemn the killing of our hardworking farmers by terrorists in Borno State. The entire country is hurt by these senseless killings. My thoughts are with their families in this time of grief,” he said.

Buhari said the government had given the armed forces everything needed “to take all necessary steps to protect the country’s population and its territory.”

A member of the House of Representatives, Ahmed Satomi, who represents the Jere Federal constituency of Borno, said at least 44 burials were taking place Sunday.

So while the Christian leadership of Nigeria fears the impact of the CPC designation by the United States, the job of securing religious freedom may be too big for Buhari alone.

“CAN has been consistently calling on the government to fix the security challenges before too late,” Ayokunle stated. “We call on the international community to help our government to wipe out these terrorists.”

Additional reporting by Haruna Umar and Bashir Adigun of The Associated Press in Nigeria.

- More from Jayson Casper

Theology

Advent Week 2: God’s Presence and His Promises

Thabiti Anyabwile, John Goldingay, and Carmen Joy Imes

Advent devotional readings from Christianity Today.

Image: Illustration by Jared Boggess

Sunday: What God Sees

Today’s Reading: Exodus 1:1–3:10

Israel’s exodus from Egypt has fueled the imaginations of countless generations. At its heart, it is a story of hope . The Israelites couldn’t see that at first. They were a despised minority enslaved by an ambitious and greedy pharaoh who continually sought to extract more profit at less cost. In spite of his dependence on their labor, Pharaoh saw the Israelites—especially the men—as a potential threat. Not only did he work them to the bone, but he sought to kill their sons.

The writer of Exodus begins by focusing on the women in the story: midwives, a mother, her daughter, a servant, and the daughter of Pharaoh. Each one acts within her sphere of influence to resist Pharaoh’s cruel policies. Working together, they save the infant Moses. They act with hope, refusing to let the regime force them into submission. The writer describes their bold actions with the same words he will later use to describe God’s saving of the Israelite nation.

Consider these examples: Moses’ mother saw he was good, reminding us that God values every human made in his image. She placed him in an ark in the reeds. The ark (or “basket”) reminds us of God’s rescue of Noah’s family from watery death. Moses’ rescue anticipates Israel’s future escape through the Sea of Reeds (or “Red” Sea). Pharaoh’s daughter saw the ark, saw the baby crying, and took pity on him. Suddenly there is hope for this condemned child. Then we learn that God saw his people’s suffering, heard their cries, and was concerned. God’s concern moved him to action when he commissioned Moses to lead the people out of Egypt.

Christian hope is rooted in God’s seeing. Nothing escapes his notice. The heart of Advent is knowing that God sees a world gone wrong and that he will do something to make it right. He may at times seem distant in our suffering, but he consistently acts to uphold the covenant he made with Abraham (Gen. 17). This same covenant is why God sent Jesus into the world.

The exodus story invites us to participate in God’s audacious work of redemption. The women of the story heard no clarion call from the heavens prompting them to act. They simply lived as though God could see and acted accordingly. They knew the right thing to do, and they did it.

—Carmen Joy Imes

Monday: Peace in the Storm

Today’s Reading: Psalms 46 and 112

Psalm 46 declares with confidence, “We will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea” (v. 2). Our world, like the psalmist’s world, is in collapse: a pandemic, a recession, racial injustice, wildfires, hurricanes, floods, and a tense election season. Our earth is giving way and the mountains are falling into the sea.

What strikes me about this psalm is its call for stillness: “Be still, and know that I am God” (v. 10). This stillness is not the byproduct of resolved troubles. The psalmist remains surrounded by the uproar of nations and natural disasters. Even there, in the tumult, God commands stillness. It brings to mind Jesus sleeping in the boat during a storm (Mark 8:23–27). His trust was so great that he could rest amid the crashing waves. Such supernatural peace is available to any of us who knows who God is.

In verse 10, God explains why we can be still: “I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.” God knows how this story unfolds. He wins in the end. That sure knowledge shapes how we respond to life’s challenges. This God—the one who will come out on top—is with us (vv. 7, 11). He is our fortress in the storm.

Our hope arises from the very center of trouble—unflustered and unafraid—not because we have confidence in ourselves, but because the one who knows all and sees all is with us.

This is the hope of Advent. Jesus took on flesh, entering the messy stage of human history. He was born crying into a world of hurt, where Rome exacted unfair taxes and kept its thumb on Israel’s worship. And when Jesus returns for our final redemption, he’ll reenter a world still plagued with its share of troubles.

As Psalm 112 puts it, “Even in darkness light dawns for the upright . . . they will have no fear of bad news; their hearts are steadfast, trusting in the Lord” (vv. 4, 7). Steadfast hearts know how the story ends, so they can weather the storms with confidence. This is our hope.

—Carmen Joy Imes

Tuesday: An Astonishing Transformation

Today’s Reading: Isaiah 2:1–5

Isaiah 2 relays a vision of the Lord’s house on its mountain, which is indeed where the temple was located. But in the vision, the mountain has become the highest mountain in the world, and it’s therefore become a worldwide tourist attraction with “all nations” streaming to it. The reason people are coming is that they want to learn from the Lord. From there the Lord’s teaching will go out, and from there he will make the decisions between peoples that will bring their conflicts to an end.

It’s a crazy picture, for more than one reason. The practical one is that Zion, the mountain on which the Lord’s house sat, was only an insignificant little promontory in the midst of more impressive heights (even the Mount of Olives is higher). But I assume the vision isn’t talking about a literal change in physical geography.

More to the point is the fact that Isaiah has just been describing Jerusalem as a city that’s like a prostitute—a place where there’s no faithfulness, no truthfulness, no proper government, and no care for the vulnerable (1:21–23). But he has followed that assessment with a promise about the city being cleaned up and being called “Faithful City” again, “City of Righteousness” once more (v. 26). And that’s when Isaiah adds this vision of an astonishing second transformation (2:1–5). Given the first transformation, maybe this vision of the world being drawn to Jerusalem could be fulfilled.

I was in a prayer meeting last week in which one of my colleagues commented that we live in the context of a fourfold crisis: a health care crisis, a racial crisis, a governmental crisis, and an economic crisis. It isn’t a context in which people are turning to those who belong to Jesus as if we know how to approach these crises; it doesn’t seem that they are turning to the people of God in the way Isaiah’s vision pictures people being drawn to Jerusalem. But that is still God’s promise.

When Jesus came, he came as God’s “Yes” to all his promises (2 Cor. 1:20). He didn’t fulfill all of them there and then, but he did guarantee that they will find fulfillment. May we respond to this vision and promise just as Isaiah urged his own people: “Come . . . Let us walk in the light of the Lord.”

—John Goldingay

Wednesday: On Building a Highway

Today’s Reading: Isaiah 40:1–11

Over the past two or three decades, the Israeli National Roads Authority has built an impressive network of highways through the country. One current project is an urban artery with tunnels and bridges that will take people straight into the center of Jerusalem from the point where the Tel Aviv highway reaches the edge of the city. The trouble is that the construction involves disturbing some Roman graves from 1,900 years ago, which has sparked protests. But people want to get to Jerusalem, fast, and they feel the need for a highway that overcomes the obstacles—a bit like the one God commissions in Isaiah 40. “In the wilderness clear Yahweh’s way, make straight in the steppe a causeway for our God” (v. 3, FT).

In the summer of 587 B.C., God essentially walked out on Jerusalem. He’d had it with his people’s unfaithfulness. His glory left, as Ezekiel 10 puts it. And when God walked out, Nebuchadnezzar was free to walk in. Nebuchadnezzar set about devastating the city so thoroughly that he rendered it more or less uninhabitable and had to locate his provincial headquarters elsewhere, in Mizpah.

Nothing happened for half a century. Then, in Isaiah 40, God told one of his aides to commission supernatural contractors to lay out a superhighway with flyovers and underpasses for him to return to the city, bringing his scattered people with him. And God did return. Some of those in exile came too, and they did their best to make the city habitable again. The Book of Ezra relates how they rebuilt the temple and God returned to live there and meet with them there once again.

On the whole, things were better between God and his people for the next 500 years, though for most of that time they remained under the authority of a series of imperial powers. They still longed for their independence.

In A.D. 30, along came John the Baptizer, picking up Isaiah 40 and proclaiming that people needed to turn to God and be washed clean. And again, God was saying, Build me a highway, I’m coming back, and I’m going to sort out your destiny (see Matt. 3:3). This time the highway was a moral and religious one, and John was commissioned to build it.

In effect, each Advent God is again saying to us, as he says in Isaiah 40, Build me a highway. You want to see Jesus? He’s coming.

—John Goldingay

Thursday: A Bold, Dangerous Prayer

Today’s Reading: Isaiah 64:1–9

We wish you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that at your presence mountains would shake! This is the prayer of Isaiah 64. The order of chapters in Isaiah suggests that this prayer belongs in a time after the Persians have terminated Babylonian control of the Middle East. The trouble is that Judah has found that this power transition is not much of an improvement. Prophets have told Judah that God would put all the superpowers down, but that time never seemed to come. Persia taking over from Babylon underlines the point. Everything changes, but everything stays the same. So tear the sky apart and come and sort things out, Lord!

But in the next chapter, Isaiah 65, God blows a fuse and essentially says, You’ve got some nerve! God seems to be responding with anger to the effrontery of what the Judahites say in Isaiah 64.

When Jesus came, God did tear the sky apart and come to sort things out. The Gospels don’t use that language in connection with the Incarnation, though they do use similar language in connection with the coming of the Holy Spirit on Jesus at his baptism (Mark 1:10), with Jesus’ transfiguration (Mark 9:7), and with his prayer when he is about to be executed (John 12:28–29).

Then, a few decades later, some people who believe in Jesus are asking a similar question as the Judahites: Why does everything still stay the same? (2 Peter 3:4). In effect, they too are praying, We wish you would tear the heavens and come down! Peter responds to them in a confrontational way, too. He reminds his recipients that the world has been shaken before, by water, and it will be again, but by fire (vv. 5–7).

Both the Judahites and the early Christians were essentially little people under the control of a big empire. Most of us are not. In many ways, we are the empire. When we pray, like Isaiah 64, “We wish you would tear open the heavens and come down, come and sort out the imperial powers, come deal with injustice,” God’s response may be frightening. We’ll find God doing some sorting out in our own lives. When we pray Come down, Lord!, we invite God to confront us and convict us.

—John Goldingay

Friday: Light and Life

Today’s Reading: Isaiah 9:2; John 1:4–5, 9

Some of us have grown up in cities, so we don’t really know what darkness is. In cities, there’s always a light on somewhere, and you can see by that light. But others of us grew up in the country, well beyond city lights—where darkness is darkness indeed. Where it can get so dark that you cannot even see your hand in front of your face.

This is the image in Isaiah 9:2—that the darkness of sin is so deep and complete, it incapacitates and immobilizes. You can’t walk in it with any certainty. You don’t know where you’re going. You’re lost. The darkness here symbolizes the blindness and death that come from sin.

But God solves this problem of sin and death with Christmas. The very people who walked in darkness “have seen a great light.” They didn’t turn the light on; rather, on them light has shone. God breaks into the darkness of sin with new hope, new vision, and with a new life of righteousness.

We shouldn’t be surprised that almost every Gospel comes back to this prophecy from Isaiah in describing how Jesus came into the world. For example, when John tells us about Jesus’ birth—the Incarnation—he reaches for this symbol of light. “In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. . . . The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world” (John 1:4–5, 9).

Jesus is that true light. This season is about God sending this light into the world to give salvation to all who would believe in him. Christmas is not about the lights on the tree or the lights decorating the house. At their very best, these are merely weak symbols for a much more powerful light that gives life to the world.

Isaiah saw it 700 years before Jesus’ birth. Two thousand years ago, the apostles laid eyes on that very light in the face of the Lord Jesus Christ. And today, he’s given us that light in the message of the gospel. Everyone who is in darkness must repent of sin and believe in this light in order to come into the kingdom of God. This is how the Lord changes us. This is the message of light bringing life.

—Thabiti Anyabwile

This article is adapted from a sermon Thabiti Anyabwile preached on December 17, 2017. Used by permission.

Saturday: A Son Is Given

Today’s Reading: Isaiah 7:14; 9:6–7

Isaiah 9:6–7 is a glorious, prophetic biography of Jesus. The son Isaiah describes is the “Wonderful Counselor.” The word wonderful is the same word often used in the Old Testament to describe miracles—the “wonders” God did in the world. And counselor brings to mind the wisdom of God. This is Jesus, our wonderful, miraculous counselor who speaks to us and guides us that we might walk in the paths of righteousness.

This son is the “Mighty God.” This is the unique child Isaiah 7:14 said would be born of a virgin and named “Immanuel,” which means “God with us.” Mighty and strong, there is no weakness in God at all. Even as a babe in a manger, Jesus was upholding the universe by the word of his power.

This son is the “Everlasting Father.” This doesn’t mean he’s the same as God the Father; the Father and Son are different persons of the Trinity. Rather, this could be translated to say he is the father of the ages, outside of time; and in his attitude toward his people, he is always fatherly. Psalm 103:13 puts it this way: “As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him.” Over and over in the Gospels, we’re told that Jesus saw people and had compassion. He is a savior with the tenderness of a dad toward his children.

And this son is the “Prince of Peace.” Matthew Henry of Jesus, “As the Prince of Peace, he reconciles us to God. He is the Giver of peace in the heart and conscience; and when his kingdom is fully established, men shall learn war no more.”

Jesus is a wonder. His counsel never fails. He is the almighty God. He has a father’s heart. He brings a royal peace to all who believe in him. He’s so much more than just another baby. He is God come into the world. And don’t miss the most important phrase: He is given to us.

He is ours, if we will accept him. In all of his wisdom, all of his power, and all of his fatherly love, this same Jesus comes into the hearts of those who trust in him. This is the Son the world was waiting for. And he has come into the world to give himself to us.

—Thabiti Anyabwile

This article is adapted from a sermon Thabiti Anyabwile preached on December 17, 2017. Used by permission.

Contributors:

Photos courtesy of contributors.

Thabiti Anyabwile is a pastor at Anacostia River Church in Washington, DC. He is the author of several books, including Exalting Jesus in Luke.

John Goldingay is senior professor of Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary. His translation of the entire Old Testament is The First Testament.

Carmen Joy Imes is associate professor of Old Testament at Prairie College and the author of Bearing God’s Name: Why Sinai Still Matters.

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In this series

Sunday: What God Sees

Monday: Peace in the Storm

Tuesday: An Astonishing Transformation

Wednesday: On Building a Highway

Thursday: A Bold, Dangerous Prayer

Friday: Light and Life

Saturday: A Son Is Given

Contributors:

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