The Accelerating Cost of a Traffic Accident

More than a decade later, a Kenyan tries to recover from a motorcycle crash.

A road sign warns drivers of an accident-prone black spot on the busy Nakuru-Nairobi Highway in Kenya.

SOPA Images / Contributor / Getty

Joseph Wachana has sat under a large fig tree in Bungoma County, Kenya, for more than ten years now. He earns a few coins from locals who bring their old shoes for repair. Every morning, he jumps on one leg from his home to the fig tree—about 500 meters—supporting himself with a short wooden stick. He returns home the same way at night.

His spot at midodo (fig tree) market contains his investment—a small wooden box holding pieces of leather, different-colored strings, a pair of scissors, knives, and sharpening stones and needles. Next to him is a sack full of old shoes and sandals, along with old handbags.

Wachana—a once-energetic police officer—makes shoes for a living because a road accident in October 2012 left him with one leg.

“I was crossing the road heading home after work, and the next place I found myself was in a hospital bed,” Wachana said. A speeding motorcycle knocked him down on a zebra crossing (a pedestrian crosswalk) in the town of Busia.

Despite Wachana’s serious injuries, it took more than two hours for someone to take him to a hospital. Crowds gathered at the scene, blocking the road and causing a heavy traffic jam. A mob attacked the motorcyclist, focused on beating him up instead of helping Wachana’s bleeding leg.

Only when the police arrived and cordoned off the scene did someone transport him. The local hospital couldn’t offer more than basic first aid to stop the bleeding, so they referred him to Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Eldoret—a three-hour journey away.

According to the World Health Organization’s 2023 Road Traffic Injuries fact sheet, “Delays in detecting and providing care for those involved in a road traffic crash increase the severity of injuries. … Delays of minutes can make the difference between life and death.”

At the hospital in Eldoret, road crash victims filled the casualty unit. Ambulances came and went the whole night. Some patients died before admittance. Others waited for emergency surgery. Men, women, and children screamed in pain.

“It was[n’t] until around nine the following morning when my brother was booked into the [operating] theater,” Wachana’s younger sister Penina Naliaka said. The doctor told the family that Wachana’s leg had broken in multiple places.

Hospital staff said the family needed to bring eight pints of blood before he could have surgery to set the leg. This delayed treatment several more days, as family members traveled to the hospital to donate blood.

“The leg was rotting very fast toward the upper part,” Wachana recalled. “One doctor came and checked it and said the only option was to cut off the leg before the damage reaches the sensitive organs, which could be life threatening.”

Doctors amputated his leg above the knee. “This was a new beginning in my life, but I thank God I am still alive,” he said. “Many people who came in the same hospital never made it. They died.”

Survivors such as Wachana struggle to recover. Financial compensation is sparse, and work opportunities decrease. Some survivors, like Wachana, also lose their families—Wachana’s wife took their children and left when he couldn’t provide.

In Kenya, deaths and injuries from road accidents have increased for years. In 2024, the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) recorded 11,173 road crashes, an almost 12 percent rise from 2023. Casualties totaled 24,245 people in 2024. The country’s traffic-accident death rate more than doubles that of the US—Kenya with 28 deaths per 100,000 people, compared to just under 13 per 100,000 people in the US.

The KNBS attributed most road crashes to reckless and intoxicated driving. Additionally, gig drivers who do not own their vehicles may drive recklessly in an effort to pack as many ridesharing jobs into their days as possible.

Concerned church leaders in Kenya have held special prayer events at “black spots”—areas with high incidents of road crashes—to ask for divine intervention to reduce accidents. Road traffic injuries cost Kenya’s health care system $46 billion annually. As with Wachana, accident victims may face long wait times for transportation from the scene to a health facility for treatment.

Barklay Okero, a community engagement officer at the Kenya Red Cross, warned that post-crash care is severely underdeveloped. He said challenges include ambulance delays due to traffic congestion and limited coverage, lack of public knowledge of how to help those injured in a crash, poor police coordination, and limited access to trauma care.

Kenya’s government has launched the National Road Safety Action Plan 2024–2028 in an attempt to curb the alarming number of accidents. Some county governments have set up quick response centers to improve emergency response along dangerous roads where crashes are frequent.

In Kenya, a police officer who gets injured while on duty is supposed to receive compensation from the government. However, the complicated process prevents many from getting the help they need. In 2024, a task force led by former Kenyan chief justice David Maraga looked into the police injury payout system. Their report showed that many of the injured police officers are left without any meaningful help.

Since compensation claims need to be submitted in Nairobi, victims must travel to the capital to follow up on their claims. In Wachana’s case, that journey takes more than ten hours. And because Wachana was still in uniform but had signed out of work at the time of the accident, it’s unclear whether he qualifies for benefits.

“I tried to follow up, but I did not succeed,” Wachana said. “I ended up spending the little money I had saved.” Yet he has not lost hope. “The Bible assures me that God will never abandon his people.”

- More from Pius Sawa

News

USAID Cuts Leave Yazidi Tents in Tatters

Jayson Casper

One member of the minority religious community found asylum in Europe and sends home his meager grocery store wages.

Yazidis who were displaced from their homes in Iraq.

Lynsey Addario / Contributor / Getty

When Hadi Maao was five years old, his mud-brick home collapsed on him after Muslim extremists detonated car bombs in his northern Iraqi village. Seven years later, in 2014, ISIS jihadists forced his community in the district of Sinjar to flee to the mountains. Now 22, he is an asylum seeker in the Netherlands and sends a quarter of his meager earnings as a grocery shelf stocker to his family still sheltering in a United Nations camp for internally displaced Yazidis.

“Sinjar is not a place to live,” he said. “I’m afraid people are forgetting us.”

US Agency for International Development (USAID) cuts have made things worse, pausing the reconstruction of Yazidi villages and overwhelming medical centers. An evangelical organization is trying to fill the gap, while a new generation of Yazidis living abroad are seeking ways to help. In this three-part series, we will also cover the complications of Christian aid in Sinjar and explain the basics of the Yazidi religion that Maao and his people follow.

Maao is the youngest of four brothers and three sisters. All of his siblings currently live in Sardashti Camp in the Nineveh Valley, 12 miles east of the Syrian border. The money Maao sends home contributes to building a concrete house for his aging mother and father. They currently reside with his cousin’s family in the UN’s standard canvas tent.

At the International Religious Freedom Summit in February, Vice President JD Vance praised the first Trump administration’s action to bring aid to Yazidis and Christians “facing genocidal terror from ISIS.” Yet President Donald Trump’s executive order to freeze foreign funding and the subsequent dismantling of USAID has had a disastrous effect on the camps where Yazidis still live.

The camp is full of tattered tents that allow rain leakage, unhygienic bathroom facilities, and the threat of fire from spark-prone electricity cables, according to on-the-ground sources that CT spoke with. Cuts have halted the building of schools, community centers, and water purification units. An unused transformer, delivered prior to the stop-work order, was placed in storage.

Maao is from the village of Tel Ezer, also known as al-Qahtaniyah, where USAID sponsored one of five nascent youth centers. In the wake of ISIS attacks, the agency created a women’s media platform and sponsored a display of 300 cultural artifacts to showcase the region’s shared Yezidi, Muslim, and Christian heritage. USAID also contributed to building a cemetery in the village of Kocho, in addition to homes for families of 130 victims of ISIS. At least 150,000 were able to leave the camps and returned home.

Since 2003, Iraq received $9.3 billion in USAID assistance, which helped sustain 15,000 small businesses and provided vocational training to 75,000 Iraqis. In Sinjar, 30,000 Yazidis gained access to essential services, including medical clinics in more than a dozen Yazidi camps. One source, speaking on background, said they are now operating at 25 percent capacity. Iraqi government contributions maintain some staff presence, but patient cases rapidly exhaust preexisting supplies without adequate replacement. Authorities are encouraging Yazidis to travel to state facilities, but many are reluctant to return to Muslim areas given the memory of ISIS.

“Our wounds are not yet healed,” Maao said. “Our women have not returned, and the bones of our martyrs are still scattered across our ancient homeland.”

Yazidis are an ancient people whose faith has roots in ancient Mesopotamian and Zoroastrian religion. Aspects resemble Christianity and Islam, but ISIS followed medieval fatwas declaring that the community should be subject to death.

As ISIS expanded its self-proclaimed caliphate in 2014, the extremists drove tens of thousands of Yazidis to take refuge in the mountains. Maao described living in a cave for more than a week in 120-degree weather with little food or water. His father braved a return to a nearby village to get supplies. Another survivor, Hussein Salem, told CT he remembers bullets flying over his head and the lack of medication as his mother fell ill.

Only the airdrops and military support from a US-led coalition preserved their survival.

Maao’s family attempted to return to Tel Ezer in 2021 but did not feel safe. ISIS killed more than 1,200 Yazidis, kidnapped children to serve as soldiers, and enslaved more than 6,000 women in forced marriage and concubinage. One count estimates that 2,500 members of the community are still missing.

Sources said that since the defeat of ISIS, many large international organizations like Doctors Without Borders, World Vision, and Medair provided extensive aid to the Yazidi community. But as world crises multiplied in Ukraine and elsewhere, many aid groups have ceased operations. Smaller groups remain in the camps, many of which are evangelical.

Ashty Bahro, an Iraqi believer of Chaldean Catholic background, runs Zalal Life from Duhok in the Kurdistan region, serving three Yazidi camps and dozens of villages. Beneficiaries of the group’s food distribution, vocational training, and medical services also include area Christians and Syrian refugees.

Two mobile clinics regularly receive 800 people a month—but demand has skyrocketed since the USAID cuts. Last month in Aqry, 50 miles east of his headquarters, police turned away 300 people desperately pounding on the door for services. Previously, they rarely treated more than 20 people per day. Now they receive 70, and the regular demand has doubled.

“Jesus gives me patience,” Bahro said.

Maao had kind words for Christian ministries serving in the area. Through a different organization, he benefited from English language, digital skills, and leadership training. Ongoing mentorship helped him find secular work outside the camp, and he regularly seeks their advice and prayer.

A medical need prompted his harrowing journey to Europe. In 2016, his brother suffered a stroke and could not find local treatment. Frustrated by limited medical service in their isolated setting, in 2021 Maao and his nine-year-old nephew flew from Baghdad to Belarus to join a caravan of migrants. Many were seeking a better life in Europe. Maao’s goal was family reunification through asylum so that his brother could get the treatment he needed.

Relying on referrals for smugglers, they crossed borders while freezing in a forest, fleeing from police, and figuring out how to recover from tear-gas exposure. After two months in and out of detainment, their multination saga finished legally in the Netherlands, where they obtained temporary residency. His brother, his sister-in-law, and their three other children were subsequently welcomed, and his brother’s health is steadily improving.

Life is difficult in the diaspora, Maao said. The Yazidi religion places great importance on local shrines—and there are no comparable buildings outside their homeland. Members are required to marry within their religion. And to limit community mingling with outsiders, basic education had been discouraged until recently.

Maao sees little hope for Yazidis in Iraq. Muslims accuse them of “devil worship,” claiming their peacock angel resembles Lucifer. He says they suffer regular religious discrimination. And as long as his people remain dependent on outside help, they will only continue to stagnate in the villages of Sinjar.

He is critical of the USAID cuts but dreams of a future when American help is no longer needed. He is studying at college as he volunteers to help other refugees. Last January, he told his story to a gathering of 70 social work students hosted by Refugee Work Netherlands. Few of them had even heard of his people, though afterward, some joined his call to help. But a new generation of Yazidis—scattered across the diaspora—can obtain the skills needed to raise awareness and uplift their community in Iraq, he said.

Maao’s desire is to teach his people AI. Ten years ago, he was ignorant of email. He would love to open a center to teach the digital skills he has received and enable Yazidis to develop their economy. In the meanwhile, he has learned to be resilient, has grown in confidence, and sees a future of purpose for himself and his people.

“I miss my family,” he said. “But I can do more for them here than in Sinjar.”

- More from Jayson Casper

News

At a Basement ICE Detention Facility, Clergy Face Barriers to Visit Congregants

Emily Belz in Los Angeles

With informal sites in LA holding a recent uptick in immigration arrestees, pastors and family struggle to get in to visit.

National Guard troops stand outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles where some immigrants are being held.

Spencer Platt / Getty Images

For pastors trying to minister to congregants caught in immigration raids, the first hurdle is finding them.

The informal detention centers used by the Trump administration don’t have clear signs or processes, so visitors coming to offer prayer, counsel, or comfort may have to search for the building and then wait in vain for hours.

Take one facility in downtown Los Angeles. Around the side of the federal court complex, a barricaded, sloping driveway goes down into a gated basement loading dock. Walk around the barricade and down the driveway, and an opening appears on the right to a dark concrete hallway, with “B18” painted on the side of the entrance—the marker for the detention center.

On a hot June afternoon, the family members, clergy, and lawyers who actually found the basement facility lined up in the hallway and spilled into the driveway. There were Iranians, Lebanese, Chinese, and Mexicans—all waiting during afternoon visiting hours to see someone caught in LA’s mass immigration raids, which have taken an increasing number of Christian asylum seekers.

Some in line told CT that the person they were visiting had legal authorization to be in the US. They spoke on condition of anonymity due to fear of retribution. As visiting hours ended, a drone appeared, hovering over the loading dock area where people were waiting.

The federal court complex has a formal detention facility, the Metropolitan Detention Center, but the basement facility is simply a room without beds that’s being used to hold detainees, according to visitors there.

One woman stood in line weeping. Her husband had been arrested that day. She clutched a few chocolate candies that she had grabbed for him, and she was berating herself for bringing something so small.

Pastors from an Indonesian church in the area waited in vain for hours to see one of their congregants who had been arrested days before. Very few who stood in line all afternoon got inside; one successful visitor arrived two hours before the official visiting hours began at 1 p.m. and waited five hours in the dark hallway.

Some left only with the information that the detainee they came to see was no longer in the facility’s system. That could mean the person was transferred out of state or had already been deported.

“There are the informal sites now in play because of the high number of arrests happening in Los Angeles,” said Sergio Perez, a civil rights lawyer in Los Angeles who formerly worked for the US Department of Justice’s civil rights division. “The way this federal government is going about immigration enforcement is not akin to anything I have seen.”

Detentions have increased as the White House immigration boss Stephen Miller set a goal of 3,000 arrests per day.

Perez, now the executive director of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, found out by word of mouth about the basement detention center last week and visited one of the detainees; attorneys have priority to get in, but he still waited hours.

While waiting, Perez spoke with a Pentecostal pastor who came to pray with a congregant arrested by ICE. Like the Indonesian pastors, the pastor he met never got in.

Perez thinks that pastors being unable to meet with their congregants in detention violates the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA)—the federal law protecting religious practice while in custody. Clergy getting access to ICE detainees has been a problem in the past too.

Last week, World Relief published a statement from California evangelical leaders on refugees and immigration, saying in part: “Government must not impose restrictions on churches, individuals, or faith-based organizations that offer spiritual or material support to immigrants—regardless of legal status.”

Churches in the area are now mobilizing visits to one of the main immigration detention facilities, the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, about 60 miles east of Los Angeles.

At a Saturday meeting at Pasadena Covenant Church, pastors encouraged a gym room of about 150 people from area churches to go to the detention centers to visit the detained.

The LA raids are disproportionately affecting Christians because migrants are disproportionately Christian. More than 10 million Christians in the US face the threat of deportation, according to a recent study by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

Young Hispanic churchgoers described to CT sleeplessness and stress over the raids, which have caught up both legal and undocumented immigrants. They found themselves watching videos of these ICE arrests over and over.

With the constant raids in LA, communities feel “persecuted,” said pastor Marcos Canales at his church, La Fuente Ministries. Some churches have posted signs making clear they are a private space, one effort to deter ICE from entering.

Canales’s congregation includes US citizens who now opt to carry their passports everywhere because of the fear of arrest.

“Jesus said, ‘Come to me, all who are weary,’” Canales told his congregation on Sunday. “God sees the cries, pain, the reality that we live. That is being just. God does not close his eyes to what is happening in front of us. That is the God we will pray to. That is the God who says, ‘I have lived through this.’”

Rosa Cándida Ramírez, another pastor at La Fuente, is a US citizen but carries her passport card now, and got her US-citizen parents to get passports too—but she is full of anxiety. She said people in their congregation saw trucks from the Army Corps of Engineers, present to help with fire recovery, and worried that they were ICE agents.

“It feels very dystopian,” Ramirez said. “As a brown-skinned woman, I’m afraid. It could be me.” Her US-citizen dad, who fled the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s, has darker skin and a thicker accent, and she has had conversations with him about what to do if he is arrested.

“These are conversations I didn’t think I would have,” she said.

At the detention center, visitors brought sweaters because their family members had been arrested in summer attire and word spread that the detention area was very cold. Several who made it inside said the immigrants were kept in a large, crowded room with no beds.

The detainee whom Perez met with described 70 people cramped in one room, he said.

Another immigration attorney came to visit a Chinese client with an asylum claim and work authorization; he said Chinese asylum claims are usually granted. The detained woman had two young daughters and used her one phone call to ask a neighbor to take care of them. The attorney said that in his years of working at the court complex, he has never seen the holding area so packed.

“People are at most supposed to spend an hour or a couple of hours at this site,” said Perez, but now they were being held for days.

Congress is considering dramatica lly increasing the budget for immigration detention to accommodate the growing number of arrests. On Tuesday the Senate passed its version of Republican spending bill, which included the surge in funding for immigration detention.

CT asked ICE about the detention conditions and the visitation rights of clergy but did not receive an immediate response. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, responded to The New York Times’ description of bad detention conditions by saying that detainees “are provided with proper meals, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers.”

For Christians in Los Angeles, that has not always proved to be the case.

- More from Emily Belz

Theology

What Christians Should Know About the Two Islams

Marvin Olasky

Next weekend’s Ashura holiday features both celebration and mourning.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

To understand Islam, we need to understand its major divisions, Sunni and Shiite. One way to start is to grasp the dueling significances of a major Islamic holiday, Ashura, coming up next Saturday evening and Sunday, July 5 and 6. (Muslim holidays, like Jewish ones, go from sundown to sundown.)

Ashura is unusual because for some of the 85–90 percent of Muslims worldwide who are Sunni, it’s a modest day of celebration, but for the 10–13 percent who are Shiite, it’s a volcano of mourning.

With the US Independence Day coming up on Friday, I’ll offer an imaginary parallel. An estimated 300,000 free residents of what became the United States were British loyalists during the Revolutionary War, 15 percent of the total white population of approximately 2 million. (The 450,000 slaves were not asked their opinion, but at least 20,000 escaped to British forces during the war.)

Some loyalists left when the war ended in 1783, but most stayed and eventually pledged allegiance to the new government. But let’s say they had not and remained a disaffected minority. For them and their posterity, the Fourth of July century after century would be a day of misery, not contentment. And that, magnified by religious fervor, is the backstory of Ashura.

For some Sunnis, Ashura commemorates the day Noah’s family left the ark, Joseph gained release from prison, God parted the Red Sea at the behest of Moses, and other great events. For Shiite Muslims, Ashura is a day to mourn the death of Muhammad’s grandson Hussein ibn Ali and most of his male relatives at the battle of Karbala, in modern-day Iraq, in AD 680.

Imam Johari Abdul-Malik, former Muslim chaplain at Howard University, said the dueling interpretations of one day make for an odd fit. “One Muslim community is saying, ‘Happy New Year!’ while the other is saying, ‘It’s so sad that our beloved Hussein was murdered.’ All Muslims are observing something on Ashura, but the spirit of it is quite different.”

The Sunni-Shiite split is most evident in the cold war between Saudi Arabia (Sunni) and Iran (Shiite). Since 2014 it is a hot war by proxy in Yemen. In the United States, most Muslims are Sunnis and are comfortable living as a minority as long as they can abide generally by the Quran and the Hadith, with interpretations and applications provided by a consensus of Muslims. When I taught a Journalism and Religion course at the University of Texas at Austin soon after 9/11, two Sunni Muslim students in my class impressed me with their thoughtful analyses of tensions.

On 9/11, one Sunni extremist, Osama bin Laden, became infamous, but he and other al-Qaeda members were outliers. Most Sunnis say that so long as a government does not prevent Muslims from carrying out their ritual duties, it should not be described as anti-Islamic, and no attempt should be made to overthrow it. Abu Hanifa, a major Sunni thinker more than a millennium ago, said, “Those who face in the direction of Mecca at prayer are true believers and no act of theirs can remove them from the faith.”

Other Muslims, though, hope for sharia, the complete rule of Islamic law. Some of the ardent yearn for a Muslim government similar to the original caliphate, which they say was a just system in which leaders gained authority by consensus. Others opt for autocracy. Outliers argue for violence to achieve a dictatorship of the purportedly righteous.

Shiites believe descendants of Muhammad’s nephew Ali (who married Muhammad’s daughter, Fatimah) should rule because they are part of the Prophet’s bloodline. They also believe Allah gave Muslims a succession of imams—perfect teachers—up to the 12th, known as the Mahdi (guided one).

Most Shiites believe that this last imam disappeared, entered what is called “occultation,” and will return in days of chaos before the Last Judgment to implement God’s rule. Iran, the largest Shiite nation, currently views its supreme leader as the Mahdi’s representative on earth.

Ashura comes in the Muslim month of Muharram, which includes the anniversary of the martyrdom of the fourth Shiite imam, Ali ibn al-Hussein al-Sajjad, believed to have been poisoned to death during Islam’s first century. The history of imams generally is not a happy one. The wife of al-Hasan ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib, the second Shiite imam, purportedly poisoned him. The seventh, eighth, 10th (Ali al-Hadi), and 11th (Hasan al-Askari) imams also supposedly died by poison.

Some say a sense of oppression and threat is fundamental in Shiite Islam. On Ashura, Shiites reenact the “martyrdom of Hussein.” Near the battle site in Karbala, they reenact the burning of tents by Hussein’s victorious enemies and the capture of women and children. There and elsewhere on Ashura, dirge-chanting mourners process through the streets, sometimes flagellating themselves. In Karbala on Ashura afternoon, mourners walk barefoot to the shrine of Hussein.

Sunni extremists have sometimes piled on the psychology of grievance by turning Ashura into a day of violence. Two centuries ago, Sunni radical Ahmad Barelvi preached against Ashura practices and claimed he destroyed thousands of Shiite ritual mourning structures. On Ashura in 2004, a suicide car bomber rammed the funeral march to the Hussein shrine and killed more than 50 worshipers. Stories tell the toll, year after year, such as the bomb explosion in a Pakistani Ashura procession in 2009, or two separate bomb explosions among Ashura mourners in Afghanistan in 2011.

Perhaps in reaction to Shiite mourning, some Sunni scholars over the centuries publicized Ashura as a joyous time when believers should shout their delight. By AD 1300, some Sunnis bathed, dressed up, and shook hands prolifically on Ashura. To this day, many Sunnis in North Africa emphasize Ashura as a day for bonfires, charity, and carnivals.

Last year in New York City, the Shiite view of Ashura gained the most publicity: Middle East Eye reported, “Carrying shrouds, beating their chests and chanting the names of those killed at Karbala, the cortege was led by men largely dressed in black. … There were groups chanting in Farsi, Urdu and Punjabi between the haunting, rhythmic thumping of chests, as mourners faced each other and periodically let out the name of Hussein or Karbala in remembrance.”

- More from Marvin Olasky

News

Singapore Megachurch Pastor Criticized for Lack of Repentance

Isabel Ong

An interview with Kong Hee, who was convicted of fraud years ago, sparked controversy among Chinese Christians.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Youtube

The last time Benjamin Juang heard Singaporean megachurch pastor Kong Hee preach was around two decades ago.

Juang was in high school when Kong toured Taiwan in the early 2000s to promote a new album by his wife, pop star Sun Ho. Juang brought his classmates to an evangelistic concert organized by the couple, and he bought one of Ho’s albums as a gift for a non-Christian friend.

The next time he heard of Kong was a decade later, when Singaporean authorities arrested Kong for siphoning $36 million ($50 million Singapore dollars) from the megachurch he founded, City Harvest Church, to support Ho’s singing career. The church claimed the music was an evangelistic effort to spread the gospel to non-Christians, yet others questioned how such music could support the church’s mission. Kong spent a little over two years in prison for criminal breach of trust and falsification of accounts.

After his release in 2019, Kong took a break from ministry before returning to his position as senior pastor at City Harvest Church.

So when Juang, now a youth pastor at a nondenominational church in Taiwan, heard that Kong was going to be a speaker at a local conference in early May, he signed up out of curiosity. He took notes as conference organizers played a prerecorded video interview between Kong and Peter Wan, senior pastor of The Hope Church in Taipei. While Kong spoke about his past ministry failures and the spiritual renewal and rebirth he felt while in prison, Juang noticed that Kong never mentioned why he was sent to jail or expressed remorse for his actions.

“Maybe they didn’t want to shift the focus [and turn] this into an apology video,” Juang said he thought at the time. “Maybe because pastor Kong Hee had already apologized … or maybe pastor Peter told him not to mention it and focus on his personal journey.”

The video, which The Hope Church later posted on its YouTube page, racked up more than 250,000 views and stirred controversy among Chinese Christians in Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and North America. Some questioned whether Kong was truly repentant and whether it was wise for him to return to ministry. Others defended the pastor, claiming that the interview showed how Kong’s trials had led him to turn his life around.

The discussion brought out issues of repentance and prosperity-gospel teachings—topics that Chinese churches in these regions are increasingly concerned about. It also revealed ideological divides among Chinese Christians online.

Juang felt that backlash as he posted four nuanced YouTube videos in response to Kong’s interview. In one, he explained that the video interview with Wan was never meant to be an apology video. In another, to address the misconception that Kong had filled his own pockets with church money, he clarified why Kong had been sent to jail. Negative comments poured in.

“I don’t support Kong,” Juang said. “I don’t know if he’s repented yet. I don’t know if he’s as humble as he claimed. I am against the prosperity gospel. … I agree with all the other YouTubers.”

But Juang bemoans how Chinese Christians are becoming more biased and divided, “just as hateful as everybody else.”

With a head of white hair and a broad smile, Kong Hee, 60, is one of the most prominent pastors in Singapore, where 18.9 percent of the population identifies as Christian.

According to the church’s website, Kong grew up Anglican and began church planting as a college student after hearing God say to him, “Kong, do you love Me more than all that the world can offer you? Will you live fully for Me and serve Me for the rest of your life?”

In 1989, he and his wife cofounded City Harvest Church with a congregation of 20 young people. The Pentecostal church, formerly part of the Assemblies of God, grew rapidly, as Singaporeans were drawn by Kong’s effusive, charismatic preaching style. At its peak in 2012, City Harvest had 33,000 congregants. Today, the church averages nearly 24,000 people each week and gathers at two locations in Singapore: a large downtown mall and a church building in the west of the city-state.

As a high school student in Taiwan, Juang thought Kong was cool. “He’s funny. He’s charismatic. … His entire presentation [was] more interesting and more geared towards younger people,” he said.

Asher Lum, a Singaporean Christian, agreed. Lum was a university student when he attended an Easter evangelistic rally in 2000 organized by the church. There he decided to believe in Jesus.

Kong’s preaching was instrumental in helping the engineer live out his newfound faith. The vibrant, energetic church was filled with young adults, and Kong’s messages often spoke about how to relate the Bible to the workplace and family relationships, Lum said.

Yet others criticized City Harvest for promoting the prosperity gospel, including claims that congregants who gave larger tithes would receive more blessings in their lives, such as job promotions.

To better reach young people, Kong and Ho launched the Crossover Project in 2000 with the goal of using secular music to “communicate the love of God to unchurched youth,” according to City News, the church’s in-house publication. Kong said the idea came to him when he visited Taiwan and noticed that although hardly any young people attended church, many would show up when Ho sang familiar pop songs.

Ho’s first Mandopop album debuted in 2002, and she went on to record four more albums with Warner Music Taiwan, with several albums reaching double or triple platinum. Later, Ho released English-language singles like Fancy Free that reached the top of Billboard’s dance charts.

In 2007, Ho attempted to break into the US market by releasing her single China Wine with rapper Wyclef Jean. The music video drew extensive criticism from Christians for Ho’s scantily clad outfits, her suggestive dance moves, and the song’s lack of Christian messaging. Plans for a US album halted in 2010 as Singapore authorities began to investigate City Harvest’s use of church funds to invest in the Crossover Project.

Although Ho was never charged, Singapore’s Commissioner of Charities accused Kong of diverting funds to the project while claiming to use the money to help build a sister church in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. A witness testified that the church-building funds were used for promoting Ho’s music career instead. City Harvest, which had also purchased $500,000 worth of Ho’s unsold albums, said it was not illegal to use the church’s money for the Crossover Project, because it was in line with the church’s constitution.

On June 26, 2012, Singapore police arrested Kong and four church leaders and charged them in court the next day.

During that time, many congregants left City Harvest. One attendee, Andrew Koay, wrote that he had decided to leave and attend another church. “I wasn’t taught to think about the messages; instead, I felt encouraged to take everything superiors say as gospel truth because my leader is ‘God’s anointed,’” he wrote.

Meanwhile, others like Lum decided to stay. When Lum first heard the news that Kong had been arrested, he felt confused and devastated. He had heard exciting updates that the Crossover Project had led to a revival in Taiwan and that Taiwanese Christians were moving to Singapore to study at the church’s School of Theology.

“We thought we were doing something for God, and suddenly everything stopped,” he said. “Did we [do] something wrong as a church?”

Lum acknowledged that there could have been “some technicality about funding that went wrong.” But he remains convinced that the motives behind the project were pure. “We are not perfect people,” Lum said. “There are things that we are also not proud of. But God help[ed] us. God [forgave] us.”

In 2017, the Singapore High Court sentenced Kong to three-and-a-half years in jail after he appealed against his original eight-year sentence meted out in 2015. Five other church leaders also served reduced jail terms ranging from seven months to three years and two months for their roles in misusing church funds.

On August 22, 2019, Singapore authorities released Kong from prison after two years and four months for good behavior. Two days later, he went back to City Harvest Church. “I want all of you to know that I’m so sorry, so sorry for any pain, anxiety, disappointment, or grief that you have suffered because of me,” he said in a four-minute speech to church members.

“I hope to serve together with you in this house of God in the many, many years to come.”

He returned to the pulpit in August 2020.

Kong spoke candidly with Wan about his regrets about his attitudes and actions as the leader of a prominent, growing church. The “old Kong” was angry, intense, impatient, unforgiving, and excessively goal-oriented. Kong also said he had been “not so happy” in the past because of the stresses of his ministry, and feared he wouldn’t be successful.

“What’s the point of gaining a church and [losing] your soul?” Kong asked Wan.

Kong shared one instance where his temper flared. When an evangelistic crusade the church had organized in Singapore Indoor Stadium was not up to his standards, he gathered his key leaders and pastors together in a room, banged his hand on the table, and shouted at them at the top of his lungs.

In the heat of his anger, he threw a pen at a fellow pastor, an act which hurt the latter’s feelings deeply, Kong said. Kong then shared about how this action affected his relationship with his colleague.

For Juang, the fact that Kong had repented of his pride and self-righteous leadership style made the video a “better testimony” than if he had repented only for mismanaging church funds. Juang remembers feeling troubled as a high schooler when he noticed Kong speaking arrogantly from the pulpit.

“That kind of apology is something you rarely see among Chinese pastors,” Juang said.

Kong also admitted to Wan that when he and Ho were promoting the Crossover Project, he had begun to think he was a celebrity, and he thanked God for granting him a reset to that mindset.

Yet Kong also praised the project, noting that the Holy Spirit had led them to “the right door, the right people.” When Wan asked Kong if he would change his approach to the Crossover Project today, the pastor was noncommittal. “You can never please both sides,” he said. “To the church, you have become worldly. Then to the world, you are not worldly enough.”

Singaporean pastor Jenni Ho-Huan believes Kong’s recounting of the Crossover Project serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of success—including spiritual success. Prayers about God opening or closing doors treat God like a doorman, and open doors can be temptations and distractions, she argued.

“If he had spoken more about these dimensions and how his church now operates differently, relying more on a team approach, going slower, it would be more heartening,” Ho-Huan said.

Most of the negative comments focused on the fact that Kong did not mention or recognize in the video interview that he had sinned against God with the embezzlement. Some also chastised Kong for saying he had learned to forgive while in prison; his punishment was just, they said, as he had broken Singapore’s laws.

In the interview with Wan, Kong focused on the fact that his criminal trial and conviction marked that period with “a lot of soul-searching.” He also expressed gratitude to God for that “season of hardship,” which he came to realize was “an awakening.” He listed Watchman Nee, Teresa of Ávila, and Martin Luther as figures who were influential in teaching him to slow down and surrender.

“All I can say is that I didn’t hear any confession of wrongdoing, only that the ministry was huge, the ministry was too busy, the ministry used to be too aggressive, the prison was boring, the prison was not air-conditioned in the summer,” a Christian YouTuber in Taiwan known as DK opined in a video on his channel, which garnered more than 68,000 views.

“We all know that repentance, the premise, is the most central and precious point of the Christian faith,” another popular Taiwanese Christian YouTuber, Li En, said in a video that received 91,000 views. “I can only say I don’t know [whether Kong has repented] because I don’t see him mentioning anything about that in this video like this.”

Yet others disagreed. “I can feel total transformation on [pastor] Kong from [his] conversation, and his humble, transparent, and inner peace,” one viewer said. Another wrote, “Seeing Pastor Kong Hee’s life turned over and renewed by the Lord in prison, I feel happy and grateful from the bottom of my heart.”

City Harvest church members like Theresa Tan believe that Kong and the church are “bearing much fruit in repentance,” similar to what Scripture says in Luke 3:8.

When Kong returned to the church in 2019, he shared “with great honesty about how God led him to realize he had been too concerned about success and [about how] Jesus asked him if he was enough for him,” said Tan, who was part of the church’s staff for 15 years and is now managing editor of Singaporean Christian publication Salt&Light.

Tan also sees it in how different City Harvest has become. Prior to the court case, the church closely tracked the number of church members, as it was an important sign that they were carrying out the Great Commission, Tan said. But over the past six years, the church has learned to slow down.

Numbers are no longer “a chief concern—souls being saved are. And that could be one soul at a time,” she said.

Kong’s messages from the pulpit have also shifted. His sermons in 2013 and 2014 rallied congregants to be more than conquerors in seemingly insurmountable situations or expounded on God’s grand mission for the church.

Now, Kong talks about cultivating spiritual disciplines like practicing the presence of God daily. In a 2023 message, he quoted 1 Thessalonians 4:10–11, where Paul urges believers to make it their ambition to lead a quiet life, and declared, “The more I walk with Jesus, the more I understand this: There is a beauty and glory in being quiet.”

Kong’s sermons prioritize the importance of silence and solitude, says Tan. One practice Kong encouraged congregants to do was to follow Jesus’ example of going away and praying by themselves. “It’s something that is hard for Singaporeans to really come away and be with God, right? But he models it very well for us,” Tan said.

When she worked at the church from 2008 to 2023 to run its digital publication City News, Tan went on a three-day silent retreat with other staff, which felt hard to do initially. Today, she often spends a day alone with God. “It’s something that the pastor taught us,” she said. “It really makes you grow in your relationship with the Lord.”

At the end of the day, Ho-Huan believes it is not her place to say whether Kong has repented.

“The people who should take [Kong] to account are his family and fellow leaders or even other pastors in the city who are his friends,” Ho-Huan said. She noticed some marks of repentance in Kong’s sharing, such as the relinquishing of material goods, a maturing of his personality, a turning away from his previous ways of exerting control, and his experience of peace.

Yet Kong returning to lead City Harvest Church “does create problems, not because of a criminal record but because the spiritual record is muddy,” Ho-Huan said.

Kin Yip Louie, theological studies professor at Hong Kong’s China Graduate School of Theology, agrees. In his view, although Kong is aware of what led to his fall, he should also avoid situations that present similar temptations.

“Don’t be a senior pastor; just be a teaching pastor,” Louie said. “Don’t touch any money or administration duty. Just teach the Bible.”

[Editor’s note: Tan noted in a July 8 message that Kong had stepped down from executive duties, which includes handling church finances, in 2010.]

Additional reporting by Ivan Cen

- More from Isabel Ong

News

Wire Story

Supreme Court Allows Religious Parents to Opt Out of LGBTQ Books in Class

Timothy Cockes - Baptist Press

Ruling says district’s refusal to allow students to skip lessons violates free exercise protections.

The Supreme Court heard arguments in Mahmoud v. Taylor in April.

Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images

The United States Supreme Court ruled Friday that parents of public-school children in Montgomery County, Maryland, have a right to opt their kids out of classroom reading times with books the school board labels as LGBTQ inclusive.

These books were introduced as part of a new curriculum in 2022 that included more than 20 new inclusivity books for pre-K through eighth-grade students. They promote storylines that teach gender is more a construct than a biological fact.

Some examples of books that may be read to students include Pride Puppy about a dog lost at a Pride parade or Uncle Bobby’s Wedding in which Bobby’s niece is confused by her uncle’s marriage to a man, but her mother “corrects” her.

The school board’s opt-out option for students was discontinued a year after the curriculum was introduced, leading a coalition of more than 300 Christian, Muslim and Jewish parents to file a lawsuit known as Mahmoud v. Taylor. Tamer Mahmoud, the petitioner in the case, is a Muslim Montgomery County parent, while the defendant in the case is Thomas Taylor, Montgomery County superintendent.

The coalition of parents claimed the board reversed decades of policy when it withdrew a previous commitment to tell parents when such curricula would be included and to allow parents to opt their children out of instruction at those times.

The school board said allowing parents to opt out became too burdensome and that discontinuing the practice was not a violation of the parents’ religious freedom. This argument prevailed in two lower courts.

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision conversely sided with the parents, granting them a preliminary injunction and restoring their right to opt their children out of these storybook times.

The decision states that the school board’s introduction of the inclusivity books, their decision to withhold notice from parents and then forbid opting out of the program “substantially interferes with the religious development of petitioners’ children.”

The decision agreed with the argument of the parents that the school board’s policies “unconstitutionally burden their religious exercise.” It recognized that one of the most important religious acts for people of faith is the religious education of their children, and this practice of religious education receives a “generous” amount of constitutional protection.

The High Court rejected school board’s description of the books as merely “exposure to objectionable ideas” or as lessons in “mutual respect.”

The Court said the storybooks “unmistakably convey a particular viewpoint about same-sex marriage and gender.” The books are designed to present certain values and beliefs as things to be celebrated, and certain contrary values and beliefs as things to be rejected.

Additionally, the Board specifically encouraged teachers to reinforce this viewpoint and to reprimand any students who disagree.

The Court further rejected the school board’s assertion that parents are free to place their children in a private school or educate them at home if they disapprove of what is being taught.

The decision explains public education is a public benefit, and the government cannot “condition its availability.”

The opinion of the Court was delivered by Justice Alito. Justice Sotomayor filed a dissenting opinion and was joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson.

“I’m encouraged by the Court’s ruling today to protect the rights of parents to raise their children according to their deeply held convictions, even as they are educated in public schools,” said Brent Leatherwood, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC).

“As the primary teachers of their home, parents should have the right to opt their children out of curriculum that actively undermines their religious convictions regarding marriage, family, gender, and sexuality. Religious families should be accommodated so that parents do not have to worry that their children will be indoctrinated in an educational setting.”

ERLC was among 10 faith groups siding with the parents in an amicus brief submitted in March … Other faith groups joining the ERLC in the brief include The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, the Anglican Church in North America and the Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty.

Also supporting the parents in amicus briefs were US Acting Solicitor General Sarah M. Harris, attorneys general from 26 states, 66 members of Congress, 35 members of the Maryland Legislature, as well as legal scholars, historians and others.

Oral arguments in the case were held April 22. In the hearing spanning more than two hours, the liberal justices considered the question of whether removing unwanted books in the school system was a local issue while Alito spotlighted a concern that the books contain a “clear” message that some may agree with but many religious people definitively do not agree with.

Leatherwood identified after the oral arguments that the conservative wing of justices seemed skeptical of the school board’s arguments, ultimately leading to the High Court’s majority decision backing the parents.

“Schools are for education — not indoctrination,” Leatherwood said. “The case before the court is a straightforward one. Parents, as the primary stewards of their children, have a right to shield their children from radical gender ideology material that burdens their religious exercise.”

- More from Timothy Cockes - Baptist Press

Pastors

The Sermon as Sacred Art

Sean Palmer

To preach with power, you must do more than explain. You must create like an artist—crafting something beautiful, true, and alive.

edits by CT Pastors | illustration by cienpies / Gettty

If you preach long enough, a hard truth will emerge: You can preach a sermon that’s sharp, sound, and theologically airtight—and still watch it bounce off the congregation like a tennis ball off a brick wall. The people in the pews may nod their heads, but their hearts remain untouched. They might intellectually agree, but there’s no movement. No change. No growth.

Why does this happen?

Because while minds engage, hearts lead. The heart, as both artists and preachers eventually discover, speaks a language only art can truly translate. We’re not just rational beings who occasionally have an emotional lapse. In truth, we’re deeply emotional creatures who occasionally dabble in reason. As a preacher, I understand that to truly transform the behavior of my listeners, the shift must happen at the affective level, not the intellectual level. This is why all people fail to do the good they know they should do and do the wrong they know is wrong.

Preaching that transforms

Consider the difference between sermons that inform and sermons that transform. The former traffics in ideas, exegesis, and argument. The latter traffics in beauty, mystery, and vulnerability. You can connect to someone’s mind through a clever turn of phrase or a well-structured outline. But to reach the heart, you need to offer them something more—something alive, something beautiful, something that risks vulnerability. You need art.

In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron insists that creativity is not a luxury reserved for the chosen few but a spiritual birthright. “The refusal to be creative,” she writes, “is self-will and counter to our true nature.” What Cameron understands—and what every preacher must learn—is that creativity is the pathway to the heart. This isn’t just theory. It’s something I’ve experienced firsthand.

This past Lenten season, I dedicated myself to the discipline of what Cameron calls “Morning Pages.” It’s the daily practice of writing three pages of stream of consciousness thought each morning. At first, it felt a little self-indulgent. But over time, it became a formative spiritual discipline that stripped away my armor of self-protection and helped me encounter my own soul in fresh and creative ways. For communicators, we cannot hope to touch another’s soul until we’ve been willing to encounter our own.

Vulnerability, beauty, and the preacher’s role

Artistry, at its best, is an act of vulnerability. It reveals the artist’s own longing, doubt, and hope. In the same way, a sermon that dares to be art exposes the preacher’s own heart. It is not content to merely explain the text; it seeks to embody it, to incarnate its beauty and its terror, its hope and its heartbreak. As Rick Rubin writes in The Creative Act, “The reason we’re alive is to express ourselves in the world. And creating art may be the most effective and beautiful method of doing so.”

Rubin reminds us that creativity is not about polish or perfection. It’s about presence. It means being fully engaged in the moment, listening to your own inner voice, and trusting that what you bring, even if it’s flawed or unfinished, still matters.

The best sermons are not those that impress us with the preacher’s intellect but those that invite us into the preacher’s heart. In the best cases, that heart is immersed in Jesus and the Jesus revealed in Scripture. They are sermons that feel less like lectures and more like poetry, less like arguments and more like songs.

God’s design for beauty

The biblical story of the temple is a story about art. When God commands the construction of the tabernacle—and later, the temple—he doesn’t just simply provide a blueprint and a list of materials. He commissions artists, calling them by name:

Then the LORD said to Moses, “See, I have chosen Bezalel son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills—to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood, and to engage in all kinds of crafts. Moreover, I have appointed Oholiab son of Ahisamak, of the tribe of Dan, to help him. Also I have given ability to all the skilled workers to make everything I have commanded you.” (Exodus 31:1–6)

God calls Bezalel and Oholiab by name and fills them with the Spirit. Not for battles or leadership. Not for briefings or lectures. But for the purpose of artistry. The tabernacle and temple are not merely functional spaces; they are works of art, using gold and embroidery, carved cherubim, and radiant stones. Every detail was crafted to inspire awe, invite worship, and draw the worshiper’s heart toward the heart of God.

The temple was far more than a building. It was a signpost of the intersection between heaven and earth, the transcendent and the tangible. Its beauty wasn’t ornamental but essential. It stirred the heart, awakened longing, and reminded God’s people that he isn’t merely an idea to understand but a presence to encounter.

The sermon as sacred art

If the temple required artists, why should the sermon be different? The preacher is called not only to explain the mysteries of God but to embody them—to craft sermons that are themselves acts of sacred art. This does not mean every sermon must be a performance or every preacher a poet. It means that every sermon must risk beauty. It must risk vulnerability. It must risk the possibility that it might not just inform but transform.

The tools of the artist—imagination, metaphor, story, silence—belong to the preacher too. When we preach with artistry, we are not only inviting people to think about God but to experience him. We help them feel the ache of longing and the thrill of hope. And we invite them to bring their whole selves—their wounds and their wonder, their doubts and their desires—into the presence of the living God.

From head to heart

People don’t live from their minds alone. They live from their hearts—the seat of desire, where hope stirs and fear hides. In Scripture, the heart is more than emotion. It is the control center of the whole person. It’s the place from which we love, forgive, risk, and trust.

This is why Solomon says: “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it” (Prov. 4:23).

It is the heart that moves us to action. So when we preach to the heart, we’re not bypassing truth for feeling—we’re aiming at the very core of a person’s being, where true transformation begins.

As James K. A. Smith writes in You Are What You Love, “Our wants and longings and desires are at the core of our identity, the wellspring from which our actions and behavior flow.” A sermon that speaks only to the mind may win an argument, but it won’t change a life. Only one that connects with the heart can do that.

Art is the bridge between the mind and the heart. It is the language of the soul, the music that moves us when words alone fall short. As Julia Cameron puts it, “Art brings things to light. It illuminates us. It sheds light on our lingering darkness. It casts a beam into the heart of our own darkness and says, ‘See?’ ”

The artistic sermon does the same. It dares to shine light into hidden places, to name the longing and the loss. It invites the congregation not just to understand but to feel. Not just to agree, but to be changed.

Preaching, at its best, is an act of sacred artistry. It is the work of crafting beauty from words, of inviting the congregation into an encounter with the living God. It is the creative work of connecting not just with minds but with hearts—the true center from which people live and move and have their being.

We should not be content with preaching sermons that merely inform. May we dare to create sermons that are themselves works of art—sermons that risk beauty, risk vulnerability, and risk the possibility of transformation. For it is art that reaches the heart. And it is the heart, and only the heart, from which true life flows.

Sean Palmer is the teaching pastor at Ecclesia Houston, a writer, a speaking coach, and the author of Speaking by the Numbers.

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Pastors

Why this Theology Conference Might Belong on a Pastor’s Calendar

Ronni Kurtz

A theology professor makes the case that ETS—a gathering often viewed as just for scholars—offers surprising value for pastors seeking to grow, stay sharp, and shepherd wisely.

skynesher / Getty

What happens in seminary classrooms today often shows up in your pews tomorrow. To faithfully shepherd your church in the years to come, you must know where theology is heading. Few gatherings handle this better than the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS).

Many pastors haven’t heard of this gathering. Or if they have, they probably assume it’s a gathering for academics—not shepherds. But what if that assumption is costing you something? What if ETS actually is a hidden gem that could sharpen your theology, broaden your perspective, and renew your pastoral calling?

The ETS annual meeting may not have the flash or fanfare of mainstream ministry conferences, but its value for thoughtful, future-minded pastors is hard to overstate. It’s affordable, consistent, theologically rich, and—perhaps most importantly—unapologetically serious about doctrine. If you’re willing to look past the jargon and the name tags, you might find something that deepens your convictions and equips you for more faithful ministry to your church and community.

The Evangelical Theological Society describes itself as a “group of scholars, teachers, pastors, students, and others dedicated to the oral exchange and written expression of theological thought and research.” Its annual meeting, typically held in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving and hosted in various cities around the country, gathers thousands of evangelicals committed to serious theological inquiry. It’s a place where research interests are presented and discussed and theological ideas are developed and refined.

While ETS is primarily geared toward those with academic interests in mind, I believe more pastors would benefit from attending. I understand why some might scoff at the idea that a local church pastor might spend their time and resources on what seems like an ivory tower gathering. But I am becoming increasingly convinced that if a pastor had a small stipend for personal development or continued training, this could be one of the wisest ways to invest those funds—especially when considering the cost-to-benefit ratio compared to other options on the pastoral conference circuit.

Though this list is far from exhaustive, I have five potential benefits in mind for why a pastor or pastoral staff should consider attending the ETS annual meeting.

1. The ever-fluctuating conference circuit

It is hardly news that the conference landscape has shifted over the past decade. Major conferences like Together for the Gospel have shut down. Various evangelical circles continue to fragment. Conferences pastors once frequenteed are either changing or disappearing altogether.

Smaller, localized gatherings for niche audiences are popping up more frequently (which I find to be a rather good idea for localized partnerships to develop). And of course, a few major national conferences remain worth attending (I recommend TGC National, Sing!, CrossCon, etc.).

Despite these changes in the conference circuit, the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society has remained remarkably consistent. It’s now in its 76th year and seems to have some staying power with no signs of slowing down. In a world of ever-shifting options, ETS may offer pastors and church leaders a reliable choice for ongoing theological development and team building that could prove to be a staple in their calendars.

2. The return on investment

One of the most compelling arguments for why pastors should consider attending the ETS Annual Meeting is simply the return on investment. It is not uncommon for national conference tickets to be in the $250+ range. For some pastors and churches, a single ticket may be the entirety of their development budget.

ETS, by contrast, is far more accessible: Even for non-members (the most expensive option), registration is only $150. The return on the investment is different from what you might expect from your normal conference experience, but it is significant.

Each year, leading evangelical theologians give plenary addresses and participate on panels alongside younger and up-and-coming evangelical thinkers presenting new research.

If one were to look for a lineup of speakers to rival those who speak at ETS, the cost would be significantly higher. ETS offers this access at a fraction of the cost.

3. Getting a head start on theological conversations

While not everything you hear at ETS will feel directly “relevant” for your local ministry, one thing you will likely hear is what’s coming down the theological pipeline. There’s a rather consistent pattern: What shows up in the academy tends to make its way to the pews. Consider the open theism discussion of yesteryears or the Trinity debates in 2016. These weren’t abstract academic conversations; they eventually became hot topics in churches and on social media.

Because professional theologians are typically the ones to train future pastors in seminary, it is not surprising to see that the passions of professors often become the passions of pastors. Therefore, it can be good and wise for a pastor to keep a pulse on current academic conversations.

With hundreds of presentations and panels each year, you will likely find a few different theological conversations worth engaging.

4. The bookstore

A rather practical reason pastors should consider attending ETS is the bookstore. Major evangelical academic publishers such as Zondervan, IVP, Baker, Crossway, B&H, Kregel, Reformation Heritage, P&R, and many more show up each year with their inventory deeply discounted. It is one of the few spaces each year where you can physically hold available books and give them a look through. Most books at the ETS bookstore range from 25 to 50 percent off, which is difficult to beat. If you’re a book lover or stocking your church’s resource shelves, the savings alone may justify the trip.

5. Keeping the academy and church together

This argument may reveal my own desires a bit. I am passionate about keeping the life of the academy and the life of the church together. And I believe it is not just pastors who will benefit from attending the convention, but also the convention will benefit from having pastors in attendance.

While I do not want all academic conversations to feel the need to always get into “practical” matters, we need spaces for deep intellectual work without always rushing to application and ministerial concerns. But we need academic theology that remembers its home. The local church is the proper soil for Christian theology, and if theology ever becomes divorced from the church—both universal and local—it withers.

If it became a norm for both academics and pastors to be in attendance at theological presentations, academics might feel more freedom to reflect on why varying theological ideas bear significance in the local church.

To be clear, I do not want to see the annual gathering of the Evangelical Theological Society to become a mere conference for pastors. There are already very few spaces left for intellectual conversations to play out, and I do not desire to lose one. For some of the conversations that take place at ETS, the presence of pastors encourages presenters to press into ways a theological idea might God’s people. This would not be a distraction from the intellectual development of theological ideas but the completion of them.

What pastors should know when attending ETS

If you’re considering attending the ETS Annual Meeting, it helps to know a few things beforehand. Consider the following practical tips to make the most of your time:

Plan ahead for the schedule. There will be hundreds of presentations, plenary sessions, and panels all packed into a three-day span. You will not be able to attend everything. Choosing one session is a decision to miss two or three others, soI have found it to be a helpful exercise to get away for a few hours to plan my priorities.

Just as a personal example, here are a few things I try to prioritize when planning my ETS schedule:

First, connect with friends and colleagues you might not otherwise see. Given that many of my academic relationships only come together face-to-face once a year at ETS, this is rather important for me. These are not just theologians working in research; these are friends I deeply appreciate.

Second, explore topics of interest. Sometimes I will attend presentations or sessions on a topic I have been considering, even if I’m unfamiliar with the presenter. This has often come with the double benefit of discovering new theologians worth following.

Third, seek out individuals of interest. Other times, I’ll attend a presentation not because of the topic, but because of the person presenting. Fred Sanders, for example, always sharpens my mind and inflames my affection for the Lord. Even if he is presenting on something I may not be interested in, I still make attending his session a priority.

Fourth, do not overfill your schedule. With so many presentations and panels available, it is easy to jam-pack your schedule to the point of exhaustion. While you should try to take advantage of the event, you should do so while still enjoying the gathering. So a word of advice—save plenty of time to slowly browse and peruse the bookstore, try good restaurants in the city, find good coffee, and visit places of interest. Your mind will likely be more apt to keep up with some high-level thinking if your body and mind aren’t totally exhausted from the meeting.

Finally, let theological inquiry lead you to worship. ETS is full of ideas—doctrines, passages, debates, and historical insights. It is easy to simply sit and consume presentations without taking the time to digest. Give yourself space to process. Begin each day in prayer. Take thoughtful notes. And at the day’s end, revisit what you’ve heard. Think about how these truths might shape your own soul and the souls of those God has entrusted to you.

Ronni Kurtz is assistant professor of systematic theology at Midwestern Seminary and author of several books, including Proclaiming the Triune God and Light Unapproachable.

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News

Pastor Accuses Black Church Leaders of Taking Target Donation During Boycott

Haleluya Hadero

Four predominantly Black denominations are facing blowback from Jamal Bryant, who has led a months-long boycott of the retailer.

Jamal Bryant, a prominent Georgia-based minister, is criticizing four Black denominations that he claims have together accepted a $300,000 donation from Target at a time when many are boycotting the company for scaling back its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

Bryant, who pastors New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest, Georgia, launched the boycott as a 40-day economic fast against Target during Lent. In April, he announced the fast would continue as a full boycott because the retailer had not met demands, including depositing $250 million into Black-owned banks and restoring its DEI principles.

Speaking to his megachurch on Sunday, Bryant said he believed Target was going around him to engage with other Black church leaders.

He also claimed the company gave a $300,000 donation—“chump change,” he said—split between four Black denominations estimated to represent roughly 17 million congregants: the National Baptist Convention USA (NBCUSA), the National Missionary Baptist Convention of America, the National Baptist Convention of America International, and the Church of God in Christ.

“I do not have ire with the Black church, because I recognize the fingerprints of satanic principality,” Bryant told his church, which was previously led by the late bishop Eddie Long. “I am not declaring war on any of those Baptist conventions. I am declaring war [on] the spirit of division.”

Bryant has emphasized the collective power of Black consumers and has used faith as a rallying cry to stick to demands that Target meet its pledges to economically empower the community.

One of the denominations he mentioned has previously acknowledged donations from Target, but none responded to a request for comment sent by Christianity Today. An NBCUSA spokesperson told The Christian Post Wednesday the “four presidents of the Convention” will gather and respond before the end of the week.

NBCUSA’s president, Boise Kimber, highlighted the denomination’s partnership with Target during the denomination’s convention in Montgomery, Alabama, this month.

In an undated news release circulating on social media, Kimber wrote that NBCUSA and Target are working on a three-year plan around economic development and educational support that would be “very beneficial to the African American community.”

Kimber said Target has also given the denomination a “generous donation” that will help it “provide scholarships, support senior citizens, and invest in entrepreneurship programs that uplift our people and the future.”

“If I thought Target was not sincere in their commitment to the African American community—I would be the first one on the picket line,” Kimber wrote. “Our communication with Target has been at the highest level and we are continuing the dialogue.”

A spokesperson for Target declined to confirm the amount it gave but said in a statement that the company is “proud to be partnering with NBCUSA to make a meaningful impact in communities across the country by supporting access to education, economic development initiatives, and entrepreneurship programs.”

Many companies turbocharged their DEI policies after the police killing of George Floyd, which sparked nationwide protests for racial justice and conversations about lingering racial inequities in America. Target, in particular, was outspoken about its DEI initiatives and was honored for its work in 2022 by an organization that focuses on developing Black executives.

When the company began phasing out some DEI initiatives in January, it said it would end goals around hiring and promoting more women and racial minorities. The Associated Press reported at the time that the retailer would also end its goals around recruiting more suppliers and businesses owned by racial minorities, women, veterans, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities. The company further said it would no longer participate in an annual index put together by the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ-advocacy organization.

Other companies have also retreated from DEI policies in the past year. Legal scrutiny on the programs have increased since the fall of affirmative action. Corporations also feel renewed pressure from President Donald Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders and from conservative activists who argue the policies are themselves discriminatory against many white and Asian people.

Two years ago, Target faced a major backlash—and a boycott—from conservatives after it sold swimsuits that were designed for transgender people as well as designs from a brand that sold occult-themed LGBTQ clothing and accessories outside of Target.

Bryant has invited an LGBTQ-affirming guest on his podcast and preached at a conference hosted by an affirming church in Atlanta, but his boycott messaging has focused on the race portion of Target’s DEI policies rather than on LGBTQ representation.

Last month, Bryant announced the boycott would extend to Dollar General, which reportedly fired its chief diversity officer and removed language around diversity from a recent financial filing.

When speaking to his congregants on Sunday, Bryant said he had called the president of one denomination and told him he had a week to confirm in writing that his organization stands with the boycott.

“White supremacy takes delight in us fighting one another,” he said on Sunday. “Do you understand how powerful we would be if Black people would just stick together and stop stabbing each other in the back and live with love of Jesus Christ?”

Haleluya Hadero is the Black church editor at Christianity Today.

- More from Haleluya Hadero

News

Who Offers (Living) Water in Mexico’s Drought?

Morgan Lee in Ciudad Victoria, Mexico

Tamaulipas residents deal with rations, outages, and sanitation challenges as tensions with the US persist over the scarce resource.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Courtesy of Morgan Lee

Plastic bottles may be the closest thing to decorations in Magdalena Reyes Valderrama’s three-room home in northeastern Mexico. She’s hung a clock in the pink-walled walkway. A TV sits on a tablecloth depicting oranges. Laundry that the 100-degree heat has long since dried hangs on clotheslines and occasionally flutters in the breeze.

A brittle plastic chair sits here, and a solitary sock lies there. A campaign poster advertises current Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo. When Reyes is nervous, she reaches for the nearest available cloth, her grandson’s T-shirt. She folds it and uses it to slap her right shin. Sometimes, she uses it to wipe her tears. Lately, life hasn’t played out as she hoped it would.

Reyes, now 73, met her accordion-playing husband as a teenager. They had seven children and lots of fun, attending party after wedding after quinceañera. She didn’t attend much school growing up, but her husband supported their family. He never hit her, she says. Then he died of lung cancer in 2017 the year before their 50th wedding anniversary.

That death sent Reyes briefly to work for the first time. Now she survives on a pension of 3,000 pesos ($158 USD) per month. She owns her house, but money goes fast. Electricity to power the home’s three box fans costs 350 pesos a month. Her groceries—oil, salt, eggs, tomatoes, onions, rice—cost at least 500 pesos a month, so she eats two meals a day at the government’s meal program for seniors.

What else does she wish she could buy? Reyes pauses and looks away. She takes the folded T-shirt and wipes her eyes with it. Meat. Steak. Kentucky (the chicken of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame).

When she does cook, gas to heat her food costs 200–300 pesos. She can’t afford the gas to heat bath water, so she uses an immersive water heater, a footlong piece of metal that turns hot when its plugged in. The heat melts the handle and electric cord, so she’s had to buy three of the devices in the past year, 150 pesos each time.

Another cost is the water itself, the reason for the plastic bottles on the foyer windowsill and 22 other bottles on a cement ledge. These, along with two large metal vats, a handful of buckets, and a 750-liter tank beneath a statue of Mary, compose Reyes’s teammates in her relentless quest to make sure her household of seven has enough water.

At 7 a.m. on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, she starts running the tap, filling every vessel she can find. Ideally, this will quench the family’s thirst, sanitize their house, and wash their dishes, clothes, and bodies over the rest of the week. Reyes and the other 390,000 residents of Ciudad Victoria, a city that rests just over 1,000 feet above sea level and is nestled between two mountain ranges, do not take water for granted.

Ciudad Victoria is the capital of Tamaulipas, the northeastern Mexico state nestled just below the Texas border. It’s also the only northern state not experiencing drought—this year. From 2021 to 2024, local government officials rationed water for households and cut it for crops, measures that led residents to protest and left companies facing operational challenges.

A year ago, 80 percent of Tamaulipas faced water shortages. Then Tropical Storm Alberto watered the area, and that’s evident in an explosion of leafy plants, bushes, and trees. Nevertheless, the lush flora belies harsh truths. Vincente Guerrero Dam, which sits about 25 miles outside the city and supplies it with 70 percent of its water, sits at only 60 percent capacity.

Padilla, a town of 13,000 is adjacent to the dam. The government in the 1970s flooded Padilla’s original location and moved its infrastructure several miles away. The community is so evangelical, local Baptist pastor Juan López López happily points out, that the government constructed the evangelical church (not a Catholic congregation) when it rebuilt the town.

Padilla residents rely on local wells for their water, but they do need the dam. López’s household has water every day, though not at all hours. Next to his house sits a multicolored skiff. When the water in the dam is plentiful, he uses his boat to catch thousands of fish. Now, with the dam short hundreds of thousands of gallons of water and with an increase in carnivorous fish, his livelihood has taken a hit. “With the compassion of God,” López said, “we are living in the last days.”

Outside Tamaulipas, Mexico’s inland northern states are enduring extreme drought, and the country’s water reserves are at historic lows. Animals die of thirst. Farmers in Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Nuevo León, the other states that share a border with the US, consider giving up.

Their Texan counterparts also are troubled, and politics has taken over. The US has demanded its neighbor make good on a treaty whereby Mexico “must send 1.75 million acre-feet of water to the US from the Rio Grande every five years.” That’s over 570 billion gallons. Mexico has said it cannot keep up with deliveries because of the drought. In the five-year cycle that concludes in October, Mexico has so far sent less than 30 percent of the required water.

In April, US president Donald Trump threatened to hit Mexico with sanctions “because Mexico has been stealing the water from Texas Farmers.” But Chihuahua governor María Eugenia Campos said, “We can’t give what we don’t have. No one is obligated to do the impossible.”

Others say Mexico could do more for a “foreseen crisis” that has persisted for years. In 2002, about 100 American farmers used tractors to block a bridge on the border to demand that Mexico pay a long-standing water debt to the United States. Mexico has not addressed its water challenges, as countries like Australia with significant arid territory have done. In part because of the expense, Mexico has only four desalination plants. (Last year, Tamaulipas did lease some desalination plants from Dubai.)

Mexico “does not take sufficient advantage of wastewater reuse, which can be used to recharge aquifers, for consumption in industrial facilities, for agricultural irrigation or for urban use,” reported one website, Global Issues, in 2023. Numerous water-reuse plants either are inefficient or have improperly maintained facilities, meaning the country has less water to use.

Further, Mexican farmers have increased the size of their farms while relying on aging and inefficient irrigation infrastructure. “I think all of us, those of us who farm, are aware that we are wasting a lot of water,” Fidel Hidalgo Tarano, a farmer, told PBS News, but “a sprinkler irrigation system or belt system … takes a lot of money.”

Mexico ultimately responded to Trump’s comments by agreeing to send water in the next six months, a promise that, if delivered upon, would be close to more water than the country has delivered to the US in the past four years. In January, the Tamaulipas government announced a $200 million plan to “modernize and upgrade” 200 kilometers of irrigation canals. A Ciudad Victoria aqueduct is currently in its bidding phase.

Meanwhile, the nonprofit The Bucket Ministry has distributed water filters to close to 10,000 Ciudad Victoria residents. Reyes’s household uses one. With 5.2-gallon (20-liter) jugs of filtered water selling for 17 pesos, family members had previously drunk water directly from the tap even when it gave them headaches or diarrhea.

Filters sometimes lead to church relationships. Two ministry leaders who attend evangelical church Amor Viviente—Living Love—helped Reyes’s tighten her filter correctly. They later sat and prayed with her for an hour and talked about her late husband and her mother, also deceased. She dropped her grandson’s T-shirt and opened her palm to accept a tiny seed symbolizing the genesis of faith.

Other Ciudad Victoria residents said the situation is out of their hands. One, Daniel Franco does not have a deed for the land he lives on with family members. They have no running water and fill their 450-, 200-, and 100-kiloliter tanks (a kiloliter is 264 gallons) and two smaller tanks with water from a city truck. But the truck comes only every other month, with no announcement of departures from schedule.

- More from Morgan Lee

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