To Laugh at the Impossible

President & CEO

God delights in exploding our paltry concepts of what is possible.

Image: Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: saemilee / Getty Images

For today’s musical pairing, Oh Brother by Cyrus Reynolds and Gregg Lehrman, featuring vocals by Novo Amor. See video below.

“Then the Lord said to Abraham, ‘Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Will I really have a child, now that I am old?’ Is anything too hard for the Lord? I will return to you at the appointed time next year, and Sarah will have a son.”Genesis 18:13–14

“[Abraham] is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed—the God who gives life to the death and calls into being things that were not. Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations.”Romans 4:17–18

Day 6. 451,355 confirmed cases, 20,499 deaths globally.

God had promised Abraham land, offspring, and blessing. His descendants would be as numerous as the stars of the sky. And yet the wait between the promise and the fulfillment was agonizingly long.

When messengers of God come to their tent, Abraham and Sarah are already ancient. Sarah hears the promise that she would bear a son, and she laughs. The messenger acknowledges her laughter, which she humorously denies, but then when she gives birth, she names her son Isaac, which means laughter. “God has brought me laughter,” she says, “and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me” (Gen. 21:6).

The story reminds me of when my first child was born. For a long time, I could only see the crown of her head. Then suddenly there came a fierce fighting person into the world, writhing and wailing at the top of her lungs. It was so abrupt and remarkable that I began to laugh aloud too. I had just witnessed the miracle of life springing from the womb. Today she stands in front of me, 11 years old, just as much a miracle as the day she was born.

The apostle Paul makes Abraham’s faith paradigmatic. Against all hope, in hope he believed. He knew it was impossible for him and Sarah to bear a child—and yet he knew by faith it would happen nonetheless. As the messenger said in Genesis, “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” Or as Jesus put it later, “What is impossible with man is possible with God” (Luke 18:27).

God delights in exploding our paltry concepts of what is possible. He brings life from death, beauty from ashes, and healing from tragedy. As the Maker of all things out of nothing, he “calls into being things that were not.”

O Lord, call into being hope where there is none. Call into being a cure. For you are a God who laughs at the impossible.

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The Hallway Through the Sea: This column is a series of daily meditations from the president and CEO of Christianity Today, written specifically for those struggling through the coronavirus pandemic. It will address our sense of fear and isolation and also the ways we find beauty and truth and hope—and Christ himself—in the midst of suffering. The title of the column alludes to the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea. We are a people redeemed from our enslavement to sin, yet we find ourselves living between where we were and where we are meant to be. Danger looms on both sides, but our hope and our faith is that God will deliver us through the sea and into the land of promise.

- More from Timothy Dalrymple

Ideas

The Pandemic in Prison

Bonnie Kristian

Staff Editor

You can’t lock it up without letting it loose.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: Mirko Vitali / EyeEm / Getty Images / Ye Jinghan / Unsplash

The advice to slow and curb the spread of the novel coronavirus is by now familiar: Practice social distancing. Don’t congregate in large groups. And always, always wash your hands.

But what if you live with another person—or two or three—in a 6-by-8 foot cell, and you eat every meal in a cafeteria that seats dozens, and you have no soap?

That’s the situation facing around 1.5 million people in state and federal prisons in America and another 700,000 in local jails. As the COVID-19 pandemic escalates, detention facilities risk becoming “superspreader” sites, rapidly overloading inmates’ medical resources. The United States has the largest prison population and highest known incarceration rate in the world, and incarcerated people are uniquely at risk in this pandemic.

As Christians, we are called to their aid. Jesus listed “proclaim[ing] freedom for the prisoners” among the Spirit’s purposes for his ministry (Luke 4:14-21), and he described care for those in prison as an identifying mark of his followers, connecting those imprisoned to himself (Matthew 25:31-46). Scripture is replete with stories of the wrongfully detained—Joseph, Daniel, Peter, Paul, and Christ, for a night—yet it never makes innocence a condition of our call to care. Rather, as in Hebrews 13:1-3, we are simply exhorted to “remember those in prison as if [we] were together with them in prison,” to treat them as we would hope to be treated were we, but for the grace of God, in their place.

Polling commissioned by Prison Fellowship finds Christians—and especially evangelicals—are more likely than most Americans to want “safe and humane” detention conditions. COVID-19 creates a desperate need to put our faith into action (James 2:14-18).

The single best and most achievable way to do that is to get people out of jail. Most people held in American jails are in pre-trial detention, meaning they’re presumed innocent and haven’t been convicted of their alleged crimes. Thanks to changes in pre-trial procedures, jail populations have exploded in the last three decades, leaving many facilities dangerously overcrowded. This isn’t about public safety: Three in four jail inmates are low-level offenders accused of nonviolent infractions, and many have been cleared for pre-trial release. They remain locked up only because they can’t afford bail.

Some jurisdictions, including Los Angeles County, Ohio’s Cuyahoga County (which includes Cleveland), and Saint Paul, Minnesota, where I live, are evaluating their jail populations to release low-risk inmates to reduce the risks of infection.

There are two ways individual Christians and congregations can help. One is advocacy. Your city or county jail’s policies are significantly controlled by local government: judges, the police chief or sheriff, and the mayor or city council. You can contact these officials (make sure to call, not email) and ask them to release all jail inmates eligible for bail.

If advocacy doesn’t work, the other option is contributing to a bail fund. Bail funds have their roots in the black church’s fight against slavery and Jim Crow, when congregations pooled their money to buy their loved ones’ freedom. Most modern bail funds—like the state-based funds listed in the National Bail Fund Network or local branches of The Bail Project—don’t have a church affiliation. However, you may be able to find a church-connected bail fund where you live.

Look for something like Restoring Justice, a Christian legal aid nonprofit in Houston which partners with area churches as well as Baylor University. Restoring Justice operates a community bail fund, and it is “making emergency, research-based compassion bond motions and arguments” in response to the COVID-19 outbreak.

State and federal prisons pose a thornier problem for pandemic aid. Because prison inmates have already been convicted and sentenced, unlike jail inmates, early release is an unlikely solution. And once coronavirus gets into a prison—which is already happening—it will be incredibly difficult to control.

There are distinctive reasons for the risks in prisons: America’s inmate population is aging and also more likely to have chronic illness or history of drug use. Prisoners’ lives are high-stress, low-nutrition, poorly ventilated, and crowded together in close quarters. And even under ordinary circumstances, inmates frequently don’t have access to adequate medical care. In some states, prisoners are expected to make copays of up to $100 on wages as low as 12 cents an hour.

Prison medical care won’t improve as the novel coronavirus multiplies. If our hospitals are forced to make triage decisions like those in Italy, precious resources likely won’t be allotted to prisoners. That makes prevention paramount. Shockingly, some prisoners are not guaranteed access to hygiene products as basic as soap or tampons; they’re expected to purchase these items from the commissary or go without.

Because policies for state and federal penitentiaries are set at less accessible levels of government, advocacy for prison inmates will be much more difficult than with a local jail. The sort of systemic reform of mass incarceration that would be most useful can’t be accomplished overnight. However, a prison ministry with an established relationship with a local detention facility is likely to know the needs and circumstances of inmates in your area, as well as what you and your church can realistically do to help. It may be that prayer is the only recourse, and Prison Fellowship has put together a guide for how we can pray.

This is a frightening time, and fear tells us to react to scarcity and turmoil by caring only for ourselves. As COVID-19 spreads, our fear will tempt us to forget those in prison. But fear has no part in the generous love we, though weak and wayward, seek to emulate as followers of Jesus (1 John 4:17-18)—the love that came to free us when we were sick with sin. The nature of pandemic keeps us from visiting the “least of these brothers and sisters” in prison, but we can still seek to care for them as for Christ (Matt. 25:40).

Bonnie Kristian is a contributing editor at The Week, a fellow at Defense Priorities, and the author of A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (Hachette).

The Lesser Kingdom: A prophetic, eclectic, and humble take on current issues, public policy, and political events with thoughts on faithful engagement.

- More from Bonnie Kristian

Faith over Fear, Anxiety, and Disaster

Compiled by Alex Mellen and Morgan Lee

Turning to God and others in the midst of hopelessness, despair, and dread.

Karen Cantu / Unsplash

What hope does faith offer for those who struggle with anxiety? How should Christians respond to fear? How can we avoid a default response of worry to things that make us afraid?

Christianity Today has published a number of essays where writers wrestle with anxiety, fear, and worry and their own theological convictions and beliefs. This section is arranged from oldest to newest.

- More from Compiled by Alex Mellen and Morgan Lee

Books

Review

How Corrie ten Boom’s ‘The Hiding Place’ Earned Its Place in the Evangelical Canon

Nathan A. Finn

Stan Guthrie pairs an edifying biography of an evangelical icon with the inside story of her international bestseller.

Illustration by Rick Szuecs / Source images: Unknown photographer / Public domain / CC

In the middle decades of the 20th century, a handful of popular books became something of an informal canon that helped shape postwar evangelical identity and piety. Think, for instance, of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, Billy Graham’s Peace with God, David Wilkerson’s The Cross and the Switchblade, John Stott’s Basic Christianity, Elisabeth Elliot’s Through Gates of Splendor and The Shadow of the Almighty, Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth, Brother Andrew’s God’s Smuggler, or Charles Colson’s Born Again.

Victorious: Corrie ten Boom and The Hiding Place (Volume 1)

Stan Guthrie (Author)

Paraclete Press

176 pages

$12.49

Among these near-canonical writings, Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place, published in 1970, became a bona fide international phenomenon. The book sold millions of copies and was translated into numerous languages. Then, in 1975, it was adapted into a film, which helped to further the reach of ten Boom’s story. As a result, ten Boom herself—by then in her 80s and still active in ministry—became a household name among evangelicals, remaining so until her death in 1983. Her book is still widely read today.

Stan Guthrie tells the story of this landmark evangelical book and the remarkable woman who wrote it in Victorious: Corrie ten Boom and The Hiding Place. Guthrie is a journalist, author, and former Christianity Today editor who has spent his career writing about evangelical faith and practice. In recounting the story of ten Boom and her famous book, Victorious is itself a fine example of another popular evangelical genre: the edifying biography that is meant to both inform readers and inspire them in their own spiritual walks.

‘Jesus Is Victor’

Victorious is both a biography of an evangelical icon and the story of the bestseller that made her such. Guthrie begins by setting the context into which The Hiding Place was introduced. Postwar evangelicalism had emerged independent of fundamentalism through the influence of Billy Graham and others. The movement was committed to a high view of Scripture, the saving work of Christ in his death and resurrection, the importance of individual conversion, and faith-motivated action (especially through evangelism and missions).

Global communism and the youth counterculture of the 1960s presented ongoing threats to evangelical advance. Nevertheless, evangelicals longed for global revival and the second coming of Christ—many believed the latter would follow a mass conversion of unbelieving Jews who would accept Christ as their Messiah. Guthrie argues that the time was ripe for a book about a godly family that opposed the Nazis in part due to a firm commitment to the well-being of the Jews as God’s chosen people.

Guthrie then recounts ten Boom’s life up to the publication of The Hiding Place. She was born into a Dutch Reformed family in 1892. Beginning with her grandfather, Willem, in the 1840s, the ten Booms had been watchmakers by trade. Corrie, who never married, would also become a watchmaker for much of her adult life. (She was the first licensed female watchmaker in the Netherlands.) By the time of World War II, Corrie and her sister Betsie, who was also unmarried, lived with their father, Casper, and were involved in the family business.

Also beginning with Corrie’s grandfather, the ten Booms had been committed Christian Zionists who believed that God would restore the Jews to their biblical homeland in fulfillment of his promises made in the Old Testament. In addition to his watchmaking, Willem was a pastor who was part of several Christian Zionist organizations during his lifetime. The younger ten Booms inherited a Christ-centered commitment to the Jewish people that informed their actions during Nazi occupation.

The family’s motto was “Jesus is Victor,” which Guthrie suggests became an animating theme in Corrie’s life. Like the noted Swedish theologian Gustaf Aulén, Corrie and her family believed that the cross and resurrection demonstrate that Jesus has conquered the powers of evil and that Christians should live in light of that victory. This theological conviction, combined with traditional Calvinist piety and Christian Zionism, formed the religious scaffolding that inspired the actions so famously recounted in The Hiding Place.

When the Nazis occupied the Netherlands, they brought their anti-Jewish policies with them. The ten Boom family became part of a movement to hide Jews and funnel them to safety. A small hidden room was constructed behind a false wall—this was the hiding place that gave the later book its name. The ten Booms themselves were eventually arrested and shipped to labor camps, where many of them died. But not Corrie, whose own faith was buttressed by that of her sister Betsie, who died in Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944. Upon her release, Corrie began a popular speaking ministry that involved sharing her story, spreading the gospel, and advocating for the Jewish people. All of this became the substance of The Hiding Place.

Besides ten Boom herself, the key figures in Guthrie’s book are John and Elizabeth Sherrill. The Sherrills, writers for the popular periodical Guideposts, had already helped co-author bestsellers with David Wilkerson and Brother Andrew, one of Corrie’s closest friends and a periodic ministry partner. In ten Boom, the Sherrills believed they had found a story as compelling as Anne Frank’s, but one that was redemptive and inspiring. The Sherrills helped take ten Boom’s experiences and turn them into a book that quickly became an international bestseller. They also aided in putting ten Boom on the radar of Billy Graham, whose World Wide Pictures produced the film version of The Hiding Place. Into her 70s, ten Boom continued speaking widely and writing books until a series of strokes reduced her to an invalid during the final years of her life.

A Genuine Inspiration

Guthrie closes his book with five chapters addressing aspects of ten Boom’s life and ministry that he suggests the Lord might be calling evangelical readers to emulate. Ten Boom’s primary vocation was that of evangelist, and proclaiming the Good News should remain a calling for all evangelicals. She was a tireless defender of human dignity, especially the dignity of an oft-despised people who have not always enjoyed goodwill from Christians. She cared for Jewish refugees, and while the circumstances have changed, our own world faces a refugee crisis that many evangelicals are attempting to engage faithfully. She cared for her elderly family members and was herself cared for during her declining years, embodying the biblical commands to care for widows. Like many evangelicals, she was committed to sharing the gospel with Jews in particular, though there were some tensions when her ministry downplayed targeted outreach to Jews in an effort to avoid controversy and leave the door open for evangelizing all people, Jew and Gentile alike.

Ten Boom is a genuinely inspirational figure who is worthy of recovering for such a time as this. She was a woman of stellar character. We live in a time when evangelical leaders bring public scandal upon themselves and their movement at an alarmingly regular rate. She was a woman who used her gifts to promote the gospel in a very public way. We live in a time when many women, even in conservative complementarian circles, are asking fresh questions about how they might use their gifts for kingdom purposes. She was a woman of courage and conviction. We live in a time when a myriad of threats and temptations—both internal and external to evangelicalism—threaten the vitality of our movement. She was a woman of evangelistic fervor. We live in a time that, in many ways, is post-Christian and increasingly anti-Christian—which is to say, a time that is ripe for the harvest.

In Victorious, Guthrie has reminded us of an evangelical icon who, though flawed (as all sinners are), was nevertheless genuinely virtuous. Evangelicals need more well-researched edifying biographies written for a general audience. Books like this help us to be faithful in our generation, just as those who came before us were found faithful in their own day.

Nathan A. Finn is provost and dean of the university faculty at North Greenville University. He is the co-editor, with Aaron Lumpkin, of The Sum and Substance of the Gospel: The Christ-Centered Piety of Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Reformation Heritage Books).

- More from Nathan A. Finn

Ideas

An Easter Without Going to Church

Daniel Harrell

The pandemic has laid an egg on our worship.

Lokibaho / Getty Images

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a formal recommendation that public gatherings be postponed or canceled for the next eight weeks. For organizations that serve high-risk populations, the threshold is 10 people, though most churches aren’t even doing that. Easter worship (April 12) as we’ve known it is doomed. Early on, many pastors probably presumed that preaching to cameras rather than congregations wasn’t going to encompass a whole season.

Events are moving quickly from bad to worse. No doubt pastors worry that two months of canceled worship services will provide the proverbial straw to break the camel’s back of congregational decline. For years we preachers told our congregations how “coming to church doesn’t make you a Christian” (usually followed by the tread-bare analogy about how being in a garage doesn’t make you a car). We never really meant to be taken seriously. Fewer and fewer adults already report attending church in America. What’s going to happen when this last remnant gets used to spending Sundays at home? Like everything in this anxious moment, it’s too soon to tell.

The first Easter found the most faithful huddled away from their congregations, hiding out with a different fear. Instead of a pandemic, the disciples were afraid of the religious and political authorities who’d crucified Jesus and were likely coming after them too. Perhaps they also feared Jesus. After all, they’d sworn never to deny or disown him, but when everything went south, they’d scrambled and fled, leaving a small group of women to keep the faith afloat. And now Jesus was loose! The disciples’ socially-distant hideout proved a bad barrier. Jesus appeared in their midst (John 20:19–21) to forgive and to bless and, a few weeks hence, to empower with his very Spirit.

It is this same Holy Spirit who has empowered Christians to serve and to love through every crisis—from pandemics to natural disasters and world wars. Researcher Lyman Stone reminds us how Christians historically sacrificed for others during epidemics and plagues. Christians built the first hospitals where caring for the sick could happen safely. Their courageous conviction to love and care for the least and the poor bore witness to the Spirit’s power. The result was more an expanding than diminishing church and the spread of the gospel.

Controversially, Stone goes on to advocate for congregational worship for the sake of community. To be the body of Christ on earth requires we meet together as physical bodies. Stone adds that seeing one another in gathered space is not only a matter of supporting one another but a way to keep tabs on each other’s well-being.

However, even if we do practice stringent hygiene and social distancing, coming together as congregations in the face of this pandemic actually mars our witness. Rather than looking courageous and faithful, we come off looking callous and even foolish, not unlike the snake handlers who insisted on playing with poison as a proof of true faith. Better the recent encouragement from Wheaton College’s Esau McCaulley: “The church’s absence, its literal emptying, can function as a symbol of its trust in God’s ability to meet us regardless of the location. The church remains the church whether gathered or scattered.”

The church remains the church online, too. During a season of illness when I couldn’t attend church in person, I benefited from what theologian Deanna Thompson calls “the virtual body of Christ.” Relying on digital church during her own deadly illness, Thompson writes, “I received a prayer shawl from my local church community on the day I was diagnosed, [but] through the spreading of my story digitally, five more prayer shawls arrived in the mail from church communities across the country. It’s possible to read this as a (most wonderful) digital extension of the local church.”

In northeast Minneapolis at the beginning of the pandemic, pastor Stephanie O’Brien reported that her congregation designed a flyer to distribute throughout the neighborhood offering childcare help, transportation, grocery shopping, or anything else to love their neighbors. Though not coming together as a large group to worship, they can, assisted by social media and virtual reality, provide physical hands and feet to people in critical need. This is happening all across the country.

Empowered by the Holy Spirit, we might expect other unexpected blessings during this pandemonious Lent: extra alms to donate to the poor, time to meditate and to pray, and a growing concern for the needs of the world and even the planet, the imposition of self-denial and silence.

Turn to the Easter story proper and you find remarkable silence, the greatest in all Scripture. Nowhere does the Bible offer a description of the Resurrection itself, no language telling us how exactly how it happened, no speculation as to what went on in the tomb that first Easter morning.

Instead, the risen Jesus simply and shockingly shows up to his disciples huddled in fear. In time, this merry band of uneducated fishermen, outcasts, and losers upended the Empire. Salvation arrived for all believing humanity. Read to the end of the New Testament, and this same gospel redeems the entire cosmos. All of this emanates out of a glorious emptiness we celebrate Easter morning, whether gathered or scattered.

Daniel Harrell is Christianity Today’s editor in chief.

- More from Daniel Harrell

Pastors

How Are Pastors Handling Ungathered Worship?

Compiled by Kyle Rohane

Six church leaders share about their adaptations, innovations, and frustrations as they respond to COVID-19.

ConvertKit / Unsplash

Pastors are used to thinking on their feet. Sermon prep is set aside when a beloved church member is injured and taken to the hospital. A carefully written prayer is discarded when God lays a pressing concern on the pastor’s heart. Church leaders improvise as often as any jazz musician. But the past few weeks have presented an especially difficult challenge. While any week of ministry requires flexibility, the threat of COVID-19 has flummoxed both veteran and novice ministers. Government orders to avoid large—and increasingly smaller—gatherings have forced pastors to throw out their playbooks and experiment in their approaches to weekly worship.

In this unprecedented season, pastors will benefit from watching each other carefully as they learn through trial and error what approaches are most effective in shepherding anxious and lonely people through this pandemic. We asked several pastors to share the new things they have tried over the last two weeks. In their responses, you will find creative ideas for serving isolated people, as well as honest admissions about the frustration of canceled services and sermons delivered to a camera instead of a room filled with God’s people.

Time to Grieve

Jon Tyson, lead pastor of Church of the City New York:

I have lived in New York City for 15 years and have been involved in church planting and mission in some of the most challenging ministry contexts. Our church has been here during crises too. We weathered the 2008 financial meltdown, and when the city was hit by hurricane Sandy in 2012, the church served, sacrificed, and gave in such a way that that many in our city were thanking God for the presence of the Christians they had formerly dismissed.

So you would expect that we would be ready for a challenge like COVID-19. We have been divinely prepared for such a time as this, I thought. As I looked online, all I saw were glowing portraits of opportunity. The gospel would go viral, prayer would spread from house to house like in the book of Acts, and our gathering-centric consumer instincts would be disciplined and pruned.

But none of that felt true on Saturday as I pressed record on the best camera I could find and began to preach in a small room without a congregation—basically by myself. It didn’t feel like the opportunity of a lifetime. It just felt sad. I missed my people. It didn’t matter that our online presence would turn out to be far larger than our typical Sunday gatherings. I didn’t ache for online presence; I ached for actual presence, the communion of the saints, the body of Christ.

I missed standing in the lobby and being able to tell the kind of week my friends had by the strain in their smile. I missed the idiosyncratic laughter during the sermon, people coming forward for prayer, kids running around the lobby like they own it, and lingering worship leading people to deeper prayer and confession. In Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer.” Last Sunday I felt no joy or strength—just faithfulness to a message I have come to cherish and longing for people who have become my family.

I know that the church is not a building. I know Sunday is just a part of church life, but last Sunday felt like a condensed symbol of loss. It highlighted the fact that, despite our best efforts at connecting through technology, there is no substitute for embodied love. It hurt to know that our people would feel the loss, too. No matter the quality of the broadcast, they would trade it for a moment worshiping together—shaking hands, hugging, raising their voices, and receiving Communion.

“I long to see you, so that I may be filled with joy,” Paul wrote to Timothy (2 Tim. 1:4). Standing in front of the camera, those words took on a new meaning. I will adjust to the new reality. I will do what I can to redeem this moment. And because of the amazing team I do ministry with, I know we will do it well. But I also need to be able to grieve—to acknowledge the loss and the strange sense that things may never go back to the way they were. I am grateful for Zoom and the technology that lets us broadcast live, but I am most grateful for the reminder of the value that God puts on physical presence. The Word took on flesh and made his dwelling among us.

Equipping the Priesthood of All Believers

Chad Ashby, pastor of College Street Baptist Church in Newberry, South Carolina:

After seven and a half years of pastoring, few ministry firsts remain for me. But last Sunday I experienced two. It was my first time benching a prepared sermon in favor of a Saturday-night meditation on Revelation 1: “Fear not …” It was also my first time announcing the cancellation of Sunday worship gatherings. I’ve never canceled—not for snow, sleet, power outage, broken air conditioning, or even personal illness. It was a weird Sunday.

In light of the CDC’s recommendation against gatherings of more than 50, we weighed the options. Our members aren’t particularly tech savvy, although most could find their way to a livestream if necessary. But I didn’t love the idea of preparing and preaching sermons into a camera in an empty sanctuary for weeks on end. That option also seemed to ignore the opportunity at hand.

In my mind, mandatory social distancing provides a theological test. Do we really believe in the priesthood of all believers? Have my sermons been training our members to read the Bible for themselves and to teach it to others? Are our members equipped for ministry?

We decided to empower our members to lead their households in worship during the quarantine. I quickly put together a basic booklet for members. Each week contains a Bible passage from Luke’s gospel with questions to help leaders engage with listeners. It includes a place to take prayer requests, a written prayer, and a familiar hymn. The liturgy was intentionally sparse and required zero preparation.

We also created a COVID-19 buddy system. Each member was given a shut-in buddy, a member buddy, and a ministry partner buddy to contact every week. They have been encouraged to pray over the phone, share an encouraging verse, send texts, and make sure there aren’t any pressing needs. We packaged these two resources with addressed envelopes so members could send in their weekly offering as well.

Quarantining has been a practical reminder that my job is not to do all the ministry, but “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” (Eph. 4:12, ESV). Our prayer is that the new patterns of ministry established during this season will bear fruit long after the virus is eradicated. In the coming days, my goal will be to use online and phone interactions not to build a preacher-centric ministry but to disperse tools and training for members to minister to each other. Hopefully, I will discover that this is what I’ve been doing all along, as the coronavirus “will test what sort of work each one has done” (1 Cor. 3:13, ESV).

Unity Amid Adversity

Evan Wickham, lead pastor of Park Hill Church in San Diego, California:

In this moment, God is allowing the world to be disrupted. Did we really think spiritual renewal would come if everything stayed the same? Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying COVID-19 is some divinely sanctioned means to our revivalist ideological ends. But in times like this, the gospel of “God with us” carries a heightened weight of hope.

At Park Hill Church, we are doing everything we can to lead our people into hope-filled, Spirit-driven creativity. Like everyone else, we feel like we’re barely treading water! But people are gracious. No one has left a negative Yelp review about a bad livestream experience. The self-proclaimed Sunday experience experts have gone silent. More than any other time in my life as a second-generation pastor, it truly feels like we’re in this together.

Our team senses massive kingdom opportunity here. This pandemic has created a pipeline for accelerated apprenticeship. Leadership everywhere is flattening and widening. Instead of having our pastoral team record polished daily devotional videos, we are inviting all willing church members to record “Park Hill Daily” prayer and Scripture reading videos from their mobile devices for our central YouTube channel. Instead of a sermon monologue, we are posting teaching dialogues between multiple leaders to our podcast feed. Then our communities meet over Zoom throughout the week to discuss the teaching and pray for each other. On Sundays, everyone joins a simple hour of worship and prayer streamed over YouTube Live from our living room. At noon on Monday through Saturday, we invite the whole church to gather via Zoom for an hour of prayer. Tomorrow I’ll be hosting a conversation with a guest speaker over Zoom Webinar, and we will invite the church to participate through Q&A panels. We’ll record the event and post it to our podcast immediately for those who couldn't attend. While we grieve the loss of physical presence, we also believe God is allowing the sap to be drawn back into the tree for a season. This is not just a forced Sabbath. It is a mandated Lent. And we walk boldly into the wilderness with Jesus to receive his gift there. When we gather together again, the tree will be in full bloom, and hope will be on full display.

Our First Livestream

Mark Carlsson, senior pastor at Good Shepherd Church in Naperville, Illinois:

Good Shepherd Church hosted our first-ever online worship service last weekend. Online services have been requested for some time, and the current global crisis expedited the introduction and execution of it. By hosting online services through Facebook Live, we were able to reach people locally and globally, and it provided a sense of community as people from various parts of the world were able to interact through the live chat function.

We still have some kinks to work out, though. We want to edit the broadcast to include lyrics, prayers, and liturgy at various points. In addition, speaking in a studio environment rather than to a room full of people felt unnatural and my message felt more scripted than usual. I missed the personal response of the congregation while speaking. There is just no substitute for in-person, face-to-face worship. But I am sure my delivery will improve as we get more accustomed to the current environment and then eventually switch to filming our regular live worship services filled with people.

A few people expressed disappointment that we did not let the congregation vote on the decision to go to online-only services for at least the next few weeks, but besides that, the response has been overwhelmingly positive among all age groups.

Courageous and Faithful Giving

Jay Kim, oversees teaching and leadership at Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, California:

Like most churches in America, and so many around the world, our leadership team has been in constant conversation these past couple of weeks, as information and mandated protocols have changed with increasing speed. Much of our discussion has focused on shifting the way we gather (or, currently, do not gather)—both the church at large and our team of staff and volunteers. While being physically separated is a tremendous loss, adhering to government directives and, more crucially, serving the common good out of love for neighbor makes this the wise and responsible choice.

So online we go, for now. While it is the right decision, it comes at a series of great costs. The most important is the loss of embodied presence, but there is another pragmatic cost that we, like so many church leaders today, are navigating: the expected decline in financial giving. Our leadership team is attempting to address the possibility head on, transparently and unapologetically. We’re leaning into it as a chance to exemplify the sort of courage and faith we long to see in the everyday lives of our people and ourselves.

Along these lines, we’ve delivered distinct invitations to two types of people in our church. First, we’re inviting those whose financial situations are not being adversely affected to continue giving faithfully and generously in the coming weeks and months. We’re asking those with financial means to prayerfully consider giving above and beyond in this next season. Doing so will be vital to moving the mission of our church forward, now and in the future. We know it will be an act of courage and faith in a time like this.

Second, we’re asking those who are experiencing (or will soon experience) severe financial hardship—hourly wage workers who are losing income, those living paycheck to paycheck, single parents dealing with the challenges of childcare, and others—to share specific needs with us via a simple online form so we can rally around them. We are committing to financially support those in need during a time of fiscal uncertainty as a church. This, too, is a significant risk requiring courage and faith.

More than ingenuity, creativity, or technological prowess, I hope and pray the story people tell of the church during this strange time will be the story of courage and faith.

Creative Service Opportunities

Forrest Jenan, lead pastor of Neighborhood Church in Visalia, California:

When I woke up to the news last week that California was limiting gathering sizes to 250 people, I jokingly asked one of my seminary professors why he didn’t teach a class on “Leading Your Church Through a Pandemic.”

I remember driving to the office feeling wholly unprepared. Yet I was convinced the movement of Jesus was meant for moments just like this. I kept thinking about how we would make a difference. I wanted our team to ask questions like, “How are we going to be a hopeful and helpful presence to our city?” and “When people look back on this time, what do we want to be remembered for?”

Our team held an anything-goes brainstorming session. We threw out ideas to see what might stick. What emerged were some concrete ways in which we could help our neighbors and church family.

To help our city, we began providing childcare through kids’ day camps for essential personnel (first responders and hospital staff). We also decided to partner with a local elementary school in a challenging neighborhood by providing and handing out bags of groceries on Fridays while the families were at school lunch drop-off sites. Many of the families in this neighborhood lean heavily on the breakfasts and lunches provided by the schools. We wanted to make sure they had enough food to make it through the weekend in a season when many parents may be losing work hours or losing their jobs altogether.

We also wanted to help our people maintain emotional and spiritual health during this season. To do that, we moved our weekly services and small groups online and added new groups to engage people who were not already connected. To help people commune with God, we encouraged them to visit our website twice a day to hear a brief, devotional reflection. Each morning, we read a Scripture passage, and in the evening, we provide a quick thought or word of encouragement. These short video devotionals serve as touchpoints for the people in our church. We also moved our church counseling services online so people can still meet one on one with a peer counselor.

We’re also providing weekly Drive-Thru Family Fun Packs. We fill these packs with fun activities for families to do together. This caught the attention of our county family services department, and we hand-deliver a couple dozen fun packs to its offices every week.

If you ask me next week what our church is doing, all of this might have changed! The restrictions placed on daily life are shifting all the time. Our posture is simple: Adapt to change. Be resilient. Be patient. These are challenging, scary times. But I’m convinced this is when the church can shine. As my friend Bruxy Cavey recently said of this crisis, “The church was made for this. It has grown throughout history through compassionately loving the world when it’s hurt the most.”

- More from Compiled by Kyle Rohane

News

ECFA Names New President

Kate Shellnutt

The former VP takes over following its 40th anniversary and record membership growth despite last year’s Harvest Bible Chapel controversy.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: Courtesy of ECFA / Annie Spratt / Unsplash

Last week, the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA) named its new president: Michael Martin, who previously served the organization’s executive vice president.

Dan Busby, his predecessor, had been involved with ECFA for 31 years of its 40-year history and spent more than a decade as president. ECFA membership nearly doubled to 2,400 during his tenure.

Martin takes over following a year of record growth for ECFA but also continued scrutiny over prominent members that were eventually forced out for significant violations, such as Harvest Bible Chapel.

When ECFA began in 1979, CT applauded its efforts to provide a financial seal of approval and help evangelical groups “more readily prove to the public that they have nothing to hide.” At that time, 65 percent of Americans expressed confidence in the church as an institution, per Gallup polling. By 2019, it was down to 36 percent.

“There isn’t the implicit trust that there used to be for churches, for Christian ministries,” Martin said in an interview with CT. “More and more people are recognizing that we need to have that third-party accountability, some way to demonstrate outwardly the integrity that we have.”

The growth of non-denominational churches, networks, and ministries has also resulted in more organizations seeking out outside review. The ECFA’s fastest growing segment of membership is churches, now up to 300 congregations (including most of the 100 largest in the country).

Even as societal expectations have changed and its membership has shifted, the accountability organization has stayed focused on its financial stewardship standards, such as an independent governing board, financial oversight, available financial statements, appropriate use of donor funds, and integrity in operations and compensation.

“The command has always been in Scripture about being above reproach, but I think in today’s era, organizations have to step that up even multiplied times over,” said Martin, who’s trained as an attorney and accountant and has worked for ECFA since 2011. “With the internet, we’re in a day and age where information can travel faster than ever and everybody’s a reporter.”

A 2019 investigation by World magazine critiqued ECFA for “proceed[ing] slowly with ministries getting into trouble.” In the same way the #MeToo movement in the church was spurred by watchdog bloggers, online voices have been quick to call out and investigate financial wrongdoing by Christian organizations.

Prompted by a whistleblower, Warren Throckmorton followed the case of Gospel for Asia on his blog before it was ousted from ECFA in 2015 for misleading donors. While Julie Roys wrote about financial mismanagement at James MacDonald’s Harvest Bible Chapel in 2018 and 2019, an ECFA investigation determined the church to be “full compliance” with its standards. Then, after ECFA discovered new information that had been withheld by Harvest, the church lost its member status last April.

Martin declined to comment on specific organizations, only saying, “Even from situations like that, where you have a high-profile member that ultimately has to be terminated, there are lessons learned. EFCA’s model will continue to grow and become stronger over time.”

Critics believe these cases represent a failure by the ECFA to ensure its members are indeed in compliance and as trustworthy as its seal is meant to indicate. Throckmorton told CT he wants to see more transparency in the membership and investigation process under its new leadership, and for ECFA to “actually be a watchdog and not a lapdog for evangelical institutional interests.”

The organization makes it clear that it is not an auditor or fraud examiner. As a member-based organization, ECFA is made of up groups that join on their own and agree to comply with the standards, so its watchdog role is limited by design.

“It’s not perfect by any means because it’s voluntary,” Frank Sommerville, a Texas-based attorney, CPA, and editorial adviser for Church Law and Tax (a fellow CT publication) told the Religion News Service last year. “But the goal was to create a gold standard, for lack of a better word, for people to know that these entities, these Christian organizations, have met the minimum standards. … Their role is, if you’re not in compliance, if it’s out of ignorance, you work with them to bring them into compliance.”

Martin put it this way: “It’s a redemptive approach. We’re really trying to build organizations up rather than tear them down.”

A growing part of ECFA’s work is helping members improve their financial stewardship, become more effective, and avoid the kinds of financial missteps that could get them in trouble. He hosts the Excellence in Church Administration podcast and helps create a range of webinars, trainings, books, and other resources to promote compliance with ECFA standards and best practices.

Warren Cole Smith, president of the watchdog site Ministry Watch, believes the volume of online chatter around evangelical organizations and leaders makes it even more crucial for Christian donors to find voices they can trust to hold ministries accountable.

“I think the ECFA can play and at times has played a crucial role in the Christian ecosystem,” he said. “However, there are some problems with depending entirely on the ECFA for accountability and transparency when they are not truly independent,” noting that it relies on membership fees from the organizations it oversees, with bigger nonprofits paying more. (According to the Form 990 posted on the ECFA site, the organization brought in $3.75 million from its members in 2018.)

ECFA states, “With over 2,400 supporting members, ECFA’s determinations regarding compliance with its standards are not influenced by the annual membership fee of individual organizations. Rather, review criteria have been objectively identified and are uniformly applied to all member organizations.”

While some questioned the value of the ECFA seal amid controversial departures, and some dropped membership due to cost-cutting (World reported this was the case for a few Christian colleges), overall its membership trajectory is up. Martin says it’s as relevant and needed as ever “in a culture that is desperate to know where to turn and who to trust.”

A graduate of Oral Roberts University and Regent Law School, Martin is pushing to keep the organization providing relevant guidance for whatever financial stewardship issues could arise next. Right now, that means offering resources around the novel coronavirus.

“At some level it’s impacting all of our members,” he told CT. “This is one of those times where … I would hope that ECFA would help organizations to reinforce accountability, good stewardship, and through that process, confidence that as a nation we’d come back together and recover from this.”

- More from Kate Shellnutt

News

Hospital Restrictions Bar Chaplains from Ministering Bedside

Griffin Paul Jackson

At a time when patients and staff are desperate for hope, many spiritual leaders must offer their solace from a distance.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: Shaun Menary / Lightstock / Boy_Anupong / Getty Images

As medical facilities restrict visitors and ration protective gear amid the coronavirus pandemic, more hospital chaplains have been forced to do their job at a distance, while ministering to an onslaught of weary patients, families, and health care staff.

“Due to supply shortages of masks, this means that isolation rooms may involve phone calls, notes, letters, a wave through the door rather than (a chaplain being) inside the room,” said Heidi Greider, manager of spiritual care at Seattle Children’s Hospital.

Though individual institutions ultimately determine their own policies, guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention play a factor. CDC guidance issued in February urged facilities to limit visitors, and as the outbreak has worsened, hospitals with COVID-19 patients have continued to tighten restrictions, including on chaplains.

Tim Kinnersley, lead chaplain at Northside Hospital Cherokee in Canton, Georgia, just got word this week that his hospital put a hold on all in-person chaplain visits to reduce the number of potential carriers coming in and out of the facility.

His case is not an anomaly. Another chaplain recalled how over two weeks her hospital went from allowing any guests to only permitting visits in end-of-life situations. In some cases, even medical staff are limited to one or two per room when the patient is known to be infected.

As the pandemic spread, CT heard reports of chaplains losing access to facilities—hospitals, hospices, nursing homes, and prisons—across the country, including in New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Florida, Texas, and Kansas.

COVID-19 represents an unprecedented burden on the health care system and patients themselves, often isolated from family members and left wondering about their fate as researchers try to better understand the new disease.

“My chaplains know that a big part of their calling in this time is to be present and encourage everyone they encounter,” said Greider in Seattle, an early epicenter for coronavirus in the US. “Their calm demeanor, smiles, and even laughter are needed in this time.” Whether or not they are allowed to minister bedside, chaplains are in demand more than ever.

Chaplains are used to fast-paced, high-stress environments in trauma bays and emergency rooms, and some chaplaincy programs even use mock pandemic scenarios as practice. From the start of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States, chaplains have sat on task forces assembled to address the virus.

“Chaplains are trained health care professionals,” Brent Bond, senior director of chaplaincy for the North American Mission Board (NAMB), told CT on Friday. “Many have gone through extensive training to be prepared for situations like this.”

Staying bedside

In some health networks, chaplains are considered essential members of the care team and encouraged to keep interacting face to face (or mask to mask). Chaplains are enlisted to meet with patients all the way from admissions rooms to emergency rooms and surgery wards.

But under the current restrictions on guests, most chaplains will have to wait for explicit invitations to enter a hospital room, if they are allowed in at all, rather than making the rounds and visiting room by room.

Like other health care workers, chaplains wear extra protective gear, including masks and gloves, even to visit non-COVID-19 patients, in order to reduce the risk of exposure. Chaplains seeing infected patients in-person need to take extra sanitizing precautions and keep their visits short.

Because patients are restricted from seeing family and friends, the chaplains who are able and willing to visit are playing an even more crucial role providing comfort and company.

“The fact that the chaplain is there to listen and to attend to the patients is actually something we’re seeing that’s invaluable to the holistic care of the patients,” said Doug Carver, a retired Army chaplain and executive director for chaplaincy for NAMB, where he helps lead more than 3,700 Southern Baptist chaplains.

With 728 deaths in the US as of Wednesday, and more patients being put on life support, the worst-case fear for many hospitalized due to the virus is that they would end up dying alone there.

“For end-of-life situations, the chaplains in many of these institutions are still allowed to provide that ‘ministry of presence’ at the time of death or transition,” said Bond. “I think that is continuing in most of the hospitals.”

Chaplains are engaging in more life-and-death discussions overall, as the reality of death becomes more immediate.

“Our chaplains are doing such a wonderful job dying to self, that they would stand there providing pastoral care,” said Carver. “The test of a true pastor is that they have words to sustain weary souls, that they really are a balm in Gilead. That’s what our chaplains are doing.”

Tele-chaplaincy

Phone visits and video-conferencing are becoming the norm, especially in the hardest-hit areas. In some cases, this is simply to reduce the risk of spreading the disease. In others, hospitals can no longer spare the protective gear to allow chaplains to visit in person.

In England, National Health Service went as far as saying patients dying from the virus should be encouraged to offer their farewells via video calls like Skype.

Veterans Affairs institutions have been conducting forms of tele-chaplaincy long before the current outbreak. Some institutions are also providing chaplaincy hotlines for patients to call, in addition to making resources available online.

“It is a different feel, for sure, because when I’m in the presence of a patient, and especially when I’m praying for them, I will typically hold their hand or place my hand on their shoulder, and then you’d have eye contact,” said Kinnersley. “On the phone, none of that is possible.”

Before coronavirus, he said he had only worked with one or two patients in his career that necessitated phone calls instead of in-person visits.

Some chaplains are getting more involved with broader spiritual care beyond one-on-one counseling with patients.

“A noticeable change for me is the focus on providing more support to hospital staff, being available to listen and help staff process anxious feelings and to help them reduce stress,” said Chris Mason, chaplaincy program coordinator for Augusta Health in Virginia. “If there is a surge, chaplains may be spending more significant amounts of time ministering to hospital staff, providing support to help them so they may continue to function at a high level.”

Chaplains are also sending “words of the day” via text and email, offering devotionals, and making use of social media.

“Every morning, I pray over the hospital loud speaker. Starting today, I’m sharing my #pandemicprayers. Pray for our hospitals and healthcare workers: nurses, docs, CNAs, security, dietary, EVS—all of us. And #GetMePPE,” tweeted Aimee Niles, a hospital chaplain in Portland, Oregon.

“#GetMePPE so I and other #chaplains can be present amid pain. It may seem like we aren’t essential, but we are. We’re what’s left when everything else has failed. And we are called to be there by our Creator. Let us,” she posted.

‘Light in Dark Times’

Complications around the pandemic don’t end in the ICU; they also stretch to funeral homes and cemeteries.

In Washington State, funerals have been massively restricted for a 15-day period. Georgia is seeing stricter guidelines as well, after infections were linked to a pair of recent funerals in the state. While CDC guidance currently states that funerals can continue, even for victims of COVID-19, some hospice chaplains have been restricted from leading funerals at all.

“I am hearing funeral homes, chaplains, and other clergy working together to find alternatives to large gatherings by using technology to bring grieving families and friends together and providing a means of honoring the memory of their loved one,” said Mason. “We recognize funerals, memorial services, and other similar types of observances are an important part of the grieving process and I am glad to see these continue, even though they are being conducted differently.”

Greider said one of the chaplains at her institution participated in a funeral service last week, conducting a simple graveside service rather than gathering in a sanctuary. An indoor service will be scheduled for a future date.

With COVID-19 infections continuing to rise—the United States had about 54,000 cases as of Wednesday—chaplains’ care has become even more essential, as other points of intimate contact for patients have been blocked.

“It’s important for people to be aware that spirituality does play a major role in the outcomes of patients, and the chaplain’s presence is important for more than just end-of-life care,” Bond said. “They are ambassadors of hope. They are guides who bring light in dark times. They are often seen as people who have been down this trail with others and can provide a comforting presence.”

- More from Griffin Paul Jackson

Theology

Forgive Us Our Self-Interested Love

Krish Kandiah

Jesus’ generous sacrifice calls us far beyond our own inclinations.

Humphrey Muleba / Unsplash

“I could never do what you do. I would love the fostered children too much to ever let them go.” I hear this a lot. And when I do, I often feel a bit angry. At the heart of this sentiment—albeit from well-meaning, friendly people—there seems to be a fundamentally misplaced understanding of love.

First, this response could be interpreted to assume some pretty sad things about the love I have for the foster children in my care. It could come across like these people see me as a cold-hearted automaton who doesn’t get emotionally attached or invested. But the reality is that it breaks my heart to hear about the traumas each child I’ve cared for has endured. The truth is that every single time I hand a child over to his permanent family, a gut-twisting wrench of grief tears through me.

Second, this response seems, in some ways, to reveal a flawed understanding of the nature of love itself. It’s an approach to love that is so afraid of getting hurt it doesn’t get involved at all. The implication is that this sort of love would rather leave broken children without any homes than risk bringing heartache into one’s own home. It’s a love that is focused on self-preservation. It’s a love that thinks first and foremost about one’s own well-being and ends up justifying inaction in the face of injustice.

In our own individual ways, we are all susceptible to this sort of self-interested love. Left to our own devices, we humans naturally gravitate toward self-preservation. And, unfortunately, I believe this faulty understanding of love has infiltrated the church.

While we may believe that our standard of love comes from our understanding of the Cross, sadly there is much that betrays this might not be the case. For some, the Cross has primarily become a battleground for debates over the nature of the Atonement, the fight for penal substitution, or the forensic achievements of the death of Christ. For others, the Cross has become simply a moral example with no further impact on faith or life. But this kind of reductionism diminishes the Cross rather than protects it and undermines our discipleship rather than raises the bar so that we can truly love as Jesus loved.

The beautiful lingering account in John’s gospel of the last few hours before Jesus was arrested begins with these words: “Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end” (13:1). The events that follow this include Jesus washing his disciples’ feet, preparing them for his departure, promising them both persecution and the presence of the Holy Spirit, and going to Calvary to sacrifice himself for the world.

The death of Jesus on the cross is effective; it accomplishes our redemption. But the Cross is also demonstrative of God’s love for us. Paul joins these two ideas together in Romans 5:8, saying, “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” This link is in John’s gospel too, illustrated in the way Jesus describes the gravity of the situation and leaves his disciples with a most simple—but most challenging—command: “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (13:34–35).

Jesus’ life of love is not a self-preserving love. It is not a hands-off-for-fear-of-getting-hurt love. It is not a passive love. It is not a love that refuses to deeply invest in relationship. What we see in Christ is sacrificial love. Merciful love. Love that values the well-being of others above itself. Love that will generously and fully pour itself out, whatever the cost, in order that the beloved might benefit, flourish, and thrive.

Jesus’ self-sacrificial death for his people is the benchmark for Christian love. This is not an option or a suggestion: It is a command from Christ himself. While the unique sacrifice that Jesus offered can never be repeated or duplicated, the Bible is still clear: Jesus’ death on the cross serves as the model for Christian discipleship time and again. Consider these exhortations: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25). “In humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. . . . [H]ave the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who . . . humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!” (Phil. 2:3–8). “Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps” (1 Pet. 2:21).

As the Cross is demonstrative for our discipleship, the work of the Cross within us shapes and transforms the love we have for other people. Mysteriously, even as we are commanded to love like Christ (which involves our will and decision), it’s also true that, by his Spirit, Christ is producing this love in us. The transforming grace of God is remaking us into the likeness of Christ. Similar to our salvation, in our love both human volition and divine sovereignty are at play.

Not only does Jesus say that his love is to be the standard of love we show in the world and the defining feature of our discipleship, but he also claims it will be our clearest and most effective evangelistic tool: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35).

All sorts of people from all walks of life will understand that we belong to Christ because of the practical outworking of our love. We are told to love God, love each other, love our neighbor, love the stranger, and love our enemies. I am not sure that leaves anyone on the planet out of the envelope of Christian care, love, and compassion that Jesus commands of us!

It’s time that our definition of love be more deeply grounded on the Cross of Christ rather than the norms of our culture or our own self-interested inclinations. People who see the Cross differently and want to show Christ’s radical, generous, self-sacrificial love to others also see the world differently—and act accordingly. This might mean offering forgiveness to an offender or showing kindness to those who hurt you. It might mean welcoming a vulnerable child into your family through fostering or adoption or basing your next career move on a desire to maximize service to the needy. It may mean sharing your spare room, your precious time, or your most valuable possessions with the homeless, the elderly, the refugee, or those with a physical or mental illness.

For me this also means that just as I have been forgiven, I am learning to forgive others—even those who might seem to suggest that I don’t love my children enough. Indeed, as we saw in Romans 5:8, if Christ in his love was willing to lay down his life for us while we were still sinners, then how can any of us who are his followers seek to do any less?

Krish Kandiah is the founding director of Home for Good (a UK-based nonprofit). He serves on the faculty of Regent College (Vancouver) and is the author of 13 books including Paradoxology: Why Christianity Was Never Meant to Be Simple and God Is Stranger.

This piece is part of The Cross , CT’s special issue featuring articles and Bible study sessions for Lent, Easter, or any time of year. You can learn more about purchasing bulk print copies of The Cross for your church or small group at OrderCT.com/TheCross. If you are a CT subscriber, you can download a free digital copy of The Cross at MoreCT.com/TheCross.

- More from Krish Kandiah

News

Wire Story

Are Church Services Considered ‘Essential’? Depends Where You Live

Elana Schor – Associated Press

Several states are offering religious exemptions to restrictions around public gatherings.

Kevin Wallace, lead pastor of Redemption to the Nations church in Chattanooga, preaches to his congregation about trusting God amid the coronavirus threat.

Troy Stolt / Chattanooga Times Free Press via AP

As multiple governors issue orders to curb large gatherings and implore residents to stay home in a bid to slow the spread of the coronavirus, at least a half-dozen states have exempted some level of religious activity.

The divergent treatment of faith in some states’ pandemic-fighting orders comes as a few houses of worship across the nation continue to greet people in person, despite federal public health guidance to avoid gatherings larger than 10 people and decisions by most religious leaders to shift services online. While the pandemic has heightened political tensions, the states including religious exceptions in their orders designed to combat the pandemic are led by governors in both parties.

In Michigan, for instance, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced a stay-at-home order on Monday that banned all gatherings outside of individual households. Guidance on the order noted that “a place of religious worship, when used for religious worship, is not subject to penalty” for violating it, a standard that the state had applied to its previous order curbing gatherings.

In Tennessee, where Republican Gov. Bill Lee issued a Sunday order limiting gatherings to 10 people, Pastor Greg Locke said he plans to keep having service at Global Vision Bible Church in Mt. Juliet. Locke said that he plans to be in touch with attorneys about remaining open, and that he is providing essential services to locals still recovering from tornadoes that slammed the state earlier this month.

“I don’t think a church staying open in days of chaos, when people need hope—I don’t think that should be controversial,” said Locke, describing himself as “shocked” by the degree of public pushback he received for continuing to hold services.

Religious gatherings were exempted from Ohio’s stay-at-home order, issued Sunday by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine. Solid Rock, an Ohio megachurch whose Cincinnati location hosted an event for evangelical supporters of President Donald Trump last month, held an in-person service on Sunday and said on its website that it would exert a constitutional right to continue meeting.

“We do believe that it is important for our doors to remain open for whomever to come to worship and pray during this time of great challenge in our country,” the church stated, noting that it wants to “help keep people safe.”

DeWine posted a Sunday warning on his Twitter account, asking “religious leaders to think about their congregations” as they weigh state guidelines crafted for public health reasons.

“We did not order religious organizations to close, but my message to EVERYONE is that this is serious. When you are coming together, whether in a church or wherever – this is dangerous,” DeWine tweeted.

Another pastor who took heat for holding in-person service on Sunday, Tom Walters of Pennsylvania’s Word of Life Church, posted an apology on the church’s Facebook page and said he would move to online-only worship amid the virus.

“Please believe me when I say that it was not out of arrogance or defiance” that the church met, Walters wrote, “but solely for the purpose of praying for our churches, communities, and nation.”

Other states declining to force closures of places of worship include Pennsylvania, where the list of essential businesses permitted to keep operating includes “religious organizations,” and New York, where all nonessential businesses across the state were ordered closed as of Sunday night. Guidance accompanying that order said that “houses of worship are not ordered closed,” but “it is strongly recommended no congregate services be held and social distance maintained.”

Tony Suarez, executive vice president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and a member of President Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory board during the 2016 campaign, tweeted on Tuesday that he was “thankful” to see the number of states “listing churches as ‘essential services’.”

States that did not exempt religious activity in their pandemic-related shutdown orders include Oregon, whose Democratic governor moved to prohibit nonessential gatherings on Monday, and Maryland, whose Republican governor’s list of activities limited to 10 people on Monday included the “spiritual (and) religious.”

California’s stay-at-home order, by contrast, classified ”faith based services that are provided through streaming or other technology” as an essential function.

Frederick Gedicks, a Brigham Young University professor who specializes in religion and the law, said arguments exist for both accepting and rejecting exemptions for worship.

On the one hand, Gedicks said, religion could be considered “especially important during a national emergency”—but from another perspective, “it’s not singling out or targeting religion” to constrain worship at a time when most secular activity is also getting reined in.

Gedicks added that states’ divergent approaches during the current pandemic are no more problematic than they’ve been on other issues: “What we’re discovering now is the limitations of federalism in a time of national crisis.”

Columbia University law professor Katherine Franke said that since “the overwhelming majority of at least Christian congregations are meeting online,” state officials may have issued the exemptions in the hopes the impact would be minimal, assuming “most people will do the right thing.”

Indeed, many faith leaders have gone to creative lengths to continue delivering spiritual support during the pandemic. In states such as Utah, where a mass gathering to welcome back returning Mormon missionaries sparked criticism from the state’s GOP leaders, Catholic priests have offered to hear drive-up confessions that heed social distancing rules crafted to stop the virus.

But a handful of other houses of worship continued to meet. One Louisiana pastor reportedly welcomed hundreds to his church on Sunday, flouting public health restrictions for the second straight week and earning a rebuke from Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards.

Edwards exempted travel “to and from an individual’s place of worship” in his state’s most recent stay-at-home order, which restricts gatherings larger than 10 people.

Next-door in Mississippi, Republican Gov. Tate Reeves has not ordered business closures or limits on social behavior. During a Sunday prayer session he led on Facebook, Reeves asked that residents have “the wisdom to do what’s right, not only for themselves but what’s right for all of their fellow Mississippians.”

For most people, the virus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia. The vast majority of people recover.

Associated Press writer Emily Wagster Pettus contributed from Jackson, Mississippi.

- More from Elana Schor – Associated Press

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A Genuine Inspiration

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Time to Grieve

Jon Tyson, lead pastor of Church of the City New York:

Equipping the Priesthood of All Believers

Chad Ashby, pastor of College Street Baptist Church in Newberry, South Carolina:

Unity Amid Adversity

Evan Wickham, lead pastor of Park Hill Church in San Diego, California:

Our First Livestream

Mark Carlsson, senior pastor at Good Shepherd Church in Naperville, Illinois:

Courageous and Faithful Giving

Jay Kim, oversees teaching and leadership at Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, California:

Creative Service Opportunities

Forrest Jenan, lead pastor of Neighborhood Church in Visalia, California:

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Staying bedside

Tele-chaplaincy

‘Light in Dark Times’

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