In Brazil, Evangelicals Rise to Record Levels, But Growth Is Slowing

Franco Iacomini

For the first time, 1 in 4 people in the country are Protestants, but the prediction of outnumbering Catholics by 2032 is unlikely to materialize.

A woman walks before Sunday services at an evangelical church located in a partially deforested section of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil.

Mario Tama / Getty

For the first time in Brazil’s history, evangelical Christians now account for more than a quarter of the population, according to new census figures released Friday.

In the 2022 data, published by the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE), evangelicals numbered 47.4 million people, or 26.9 percent of Brazilians aged 10 and over, up from 21.6 percent in 2010.

The evangelical figures include Pentecostals as well as all other Protestant groups; a denominational breakdown is expected in the coming months.

Meanwhile, the share of Brazil’s historically dominant Catholic population fell from 65.1 percent to 56.7 percent. Those who identified as having no religion increased from 7.9 percent to 9.3 percent. In two states, evangelicals outnumbered Catholics for the first time.

The momentum of evangelicals’ growth, however, is slowing. Between 2000 and 2010, the total number of evangelicals in Brazil rose from 26.2 million to 42.3 million, an increase of more than 16 million people. From 2010 to 2022, the increase was just over 5 million people.

Demographer José Eustáquio Diniz Alves, a retired professor from the National School of Statistical Sciences, said the data doesn’t change trends but delays the moment when the number of evangelicals is expected to surpass the number of Catholics in the country.

In 2020, Alves published academic articles arguing that, based on trends shown in previous censuses, this overtaking could occur in 2032. “In that hypothesis, I was working with a trend of accelerated growth of evangelical churches and a sharp decline in the number of Catholics,” he said. Instead of accelerating, however, Protestantism grew at a slower pace.

As a result, the religious transition “will probably occur in the 2040s or even in the 2050s,” Alves said. In a revised version of his article, he puts 2049 as the possible date.

This deceleration was expected. Anthropologist Livan Chiroma, coordinator of Aliança LAB, the research and missional intelligence department of the Brazilian Evangelical Alliance, detected a cooling trend starting in 2018. By tracking data on evangelicals in public opinion polls, Aliança LAB found that polling institutes stopped betting on continuous growth during this period.

This timing coincides with the presidential election won by Jair Bolsonaro with heavy support from evangelical leaders. “Many believers seek a spiritual space in churches, not a political one,” Alves said. “When religious leaders adopt radical partisan positions, some members feel uncomfortable and even betrayed.”

As evangelical growth slowed, the proportion of people classified as religiously unaffiliated increased—up from 14.6 million in 2010 to 16.4 million in 2022. The nones—including atheists, agnostics, and those who declare no religious identity—account for 9.3 percent of Brazilians, the highest proportion in history.

The census also confirms the profile and the geography of Brazilian evangelicalism, which is predominantly female. Women make up 55.4 percent and men 44.6 percent—in the Brazilian population overall, 51.8 percent are women and 48.2 percent are men.

In general, evangelicals are less white than the national average—38 percent, compared to 44.3 percent—and more Black (12 percent, compared to 10.7 percent of Brazilians overall). Of the Indigenous population (only 1.4 million people), 32.2 percent identify as evangelical.

In another unprecedented shift, evangelicals outnumbered Catholics in two of Brazil’s 27 administrative regions: Acre and Rondônia, both located in the country’s northern Amazon region. In Acre, evangelicals made up 44.4 percent of the population, compared to 38.9 percent Catholics. In Rondônia, the numbers were closer—41.1 percent evangelical and 40.9 percent Catholic.

The growth of evangelical Christianity in the Amazon is a well-documented trend. As early as the 1991 census, when evangelicals made up just 9 percent of the national population, they already surpassed 20 percent in Rondônia. While missionary efforts in the region remain strong, scholars argue that demographic factors play a more decisive role in this expansion.

“We need to see the Amazon in less exotic terms,” said Chiroma. “Missiology tends to view the region through a lens of exoticism—river communities, Amerindians, the ‘noble savage,’ as sociologists put it. But while these groups are present, what’s often overlooked is the growing urbanization of the region, which is where much of this growth is happening.”

One example is Igreja Batista Bíblica Emanuel, a conservative Baptist congregation in the eastern outskirts of Porto Velho, the capital of Rondônia. When the church was founded in 2000, the area was sparsely populated and mostly rural. Since then, Porto Velho’s population has grown by 38 percent, reaching 460,000. Rural plots have given way to makeshift housing and, later, to large-scale public housing developments, bringing with them the same urban challenges faced by other major cities.

Pastor Antônio de Souza, who leads the church, spoke to CT over the phone while police helicopters circled overhead, searching for suspects in the neighborhood’s dirt alleys. The previous Sunday, someone was shot on the empty lot next to the church. “There’s been an urban explosion in Porto Velho, with all the problems that brings,” he said.

In the midst of a population lacking security and care, churches fill a void. “We can evangelize in places where most people can’t even enter,” said Souza.

The country’s most populous region, the Southeast, is also the most religiously diverse. Catholics make up 52.2 percent, evangelicals 28 percent, the religiously unaffiliated 11 percent, and spiritists 2.7 percent.

In the South, 62.4 percent are Catholic, and 23.7 percent are evangelical. In 14 municipalities in Rio Grande do Sul state, though, the number of Catholics exceeds 95 percent. These are mostly small cities with a significant number of Italian and Polish immigrants who are Catholic.

In the Center-West—where the Brazilian capital, Brasília, is located—52.6 percent of residents are Catholic, and 31.4 percent are evangelical.

Brazil’s Northeast is the main stronghold of Catholicism and, consequently, the country’s least evangelical region. In the nine Northeastern states, 63.9 percent of the population identifies as Catholic and 22.5 percent as evangelical.

Piauí state has the lowest proportion of evangelicals at 15.6 percent. The percentage of Catholics is 77.4 percent, the highest in the country.

The lowest percentage of Catholics is in Roraima, in the country’s far north, at 37.9 percent. In that state, 34.3 percent are evangelical, and 16.9 percent are religiously unaffiliated—the highest number in the country.

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Pastors

Preaching After the Poet

Sean Palmer

In the wake of Walter Brueggemann’s passing, we’re left with his challenge: Preach not to explain but to evoke. Not to tame but to testify.

Sojourners / edits by Christianity Today

Walter Brueggemann has died.

But if you’ve ever preached a sermon shaped to surprise, charged with tension, or haunted by hope, then you know his voice has not gone silent. His passing marks the end of a remarkable earthly ministry, but his words are still loose in the world. As Brueggemann himself might say, they’re still dangerous. Because they still dare to speak of God.

Brueggemann never saw preaching as mere instruction or religious pep talks. He insisted, again and again, that real preaching is an act of poetry—dangerous, disruptive, and drenched in God’s imagination.

“The poet/prophet,” he wrote in Finally Comes the Poet “is a voice that shatters settled reality and evokes new possibility in the listening assembly.” That voice, for Brueggemann, was always poetic in its bones—artful, evocative, unsettling. And it was never tame.

Finally Comes the Poet was the book that gave many of us in the pulpit permission to stop preaching like technicians and start preaching like artists. At a time when sermon outlines were becoming indistinguishable from college lectures or TED Talks, Brueggemann reminded us that the gospel doesn’t fit into three alliterated bullet points. It erupts. It lingers. It builds a world and invites us to enter.

For Brueggemann, the sermon’s purpose was not to inform. It was to destabilize. His words didn’t just explain Scripture—they made it quake. He didn’t champion the poet/prophet for stylistic flourish but for theological necessity. He believed, with the biblical prophets, that language could open or close the human heart to God. So we must speak carefully. Or better: daringly.

In The Prophetic Imagination, Brueggemann lays out the anatomy of prophetic ministry. He describes the prophet’s work as holding two tasks in tension: evoking grief and summoning hope. In a culture addicted to denial and numbed by consumerism, the prophet speaks to break the spell.

“The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented,” he writes. “For questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before implementation.” That line should be painted on the door of every preacher’s office. In Brueggemann’s world, imagination isn’t escapism—it’s resistance. To preach imaginatively is to defy the powers that be and proclaim another way is possible.

That’s where A Way Other Than Our Own comes in. That little book—structured as a Lenten devotional—is vintage Brueggemann. It’s full of short reflections, sharp phrases, and a deep sense of Scripture as the ground of alternative life. “Lent is about noticing,” he says. Noticing the lies we’ve accepted. Noticing the fears we’ve baptized. Noticing the illusions that masquerade as truth. But also—just as critically—noticing God’s steady, surprising work in the wilderness.

Preaching, for Brueggemann, was wilderness work. It wasn’t about relevance. It was about resistance. And that tone—that urgency, that poetry, that holy defiance—is the legacy many of us carry forward. Not just his theology, but his was way of speaking it to the saints.

He had a gift for phrasing things in ways that made you squirm and smile at the same time. He could drag Israel’s ancient drama right into your living room. Quote Jeremiah and make it sound like he’d been reading the morning paper. Talk about Pharaoh’s rebellion with such clarity, it felt like you could name your own.

Underneath that sharp edge was always a deep pastoral well of compassion. That’s why Prayers for a Privileged People still stuns. In those prayers, Brueggemann speaks not from the scholar’s chair but from the pastor’s heart. He confesses. He pleads. He weeps. His prayers are bruised and bold—full of trembling faith in a God who listens and who still dares to act. Reading them, you get the sense that, for Brueggemann, preaching and prayer are one and the same. Both were ways of speaking honestly to and about God in a world grown cynical.

That honesty—that refusal to sentimentalize God—was one of Brueggemann’s great gifts to the church. He never polished the Prophets. He never smoothed out the Psalms. He let their anguish linger. And he let their hope rise with force.

In an age obsessed with metrics and strategies, Brueggemann called preachers to embrace mystery again. “I want to consider preaching as a poetic construal of an alternative world,” he wrote.

The purpose of such preaching is to cause us to cherish the truth, to open the truth from its pervasive reductionism in our society, to break the fearful rationality that keeps the news from being new.

That’s a tough word to live into. It means the sermon isn’t about control. It’s about trust. You’re not just delivering content; you’re stewarding a holy disruption. That’s risky. But it’s also faithful.

Walter Brueggemann believed the Bible speaks a world into being. And preaching, at its best, participates in that generative speech. So we don’t just explain what the text meant—we let it speak now. We let it summon courage. We let it expose empires. We let it name grief and offer unimaginable joy. That’s what he taught us to do.

For those of us who preach, his legacy isn’t just in the footnotes—it’s in the posture. He taught us to stand before the text with awe. To enter the pulpit with trembling. To honor the poetry of God’s speech, not just the logic of our own. It’s not that he was against clarity—he was against flattening. Against reducing the mystery to technique. Against offering answers where Scripture offers only presence.

In a world where Christianity often sells itself as a system of certainty, Brueggemann invited us to rediscover faith as holy disorientation. “The gospel is not a set of certitudes,” he reminded us, “but an invitation into pilgrimage.” His words always pointed us somewhere: toward the margins, toward the ache of exile, toward the wild fidelity of God.

That’s why his death matters—not just because a scholar has passed but because a poet of the kingdom has gone quiet. Yet his words are still ringing in pulpits and pews around the world. His imagination reshaped ours. His fearless fidelity to the biblical witness gave us a way to speak again—not as marketers, not as managers, but as prophets and poets and people of the Book.

There is a kind of preaching that tells the truth.

And another kind that lets the truth.

Brueggemann showed us how to do the latter.

He taught us how to stand between Pharaoh and the Promised Land and still sing. Still preach. Still trust.

He showed us that the gospel is not polite. It does not settle. It breaks chains and builds futures.

What does his legacy mean for preaching? It means we must stop settling for safe speech. It means our churches must recover a preaching identity that is both poetic and prophetic. It means we must believe again that the Word is alive and that, when we speak it faithfully, it speaks us into newness.

To preach in the shadow of Brueggemann’s life is to accept the risk of awe. It is to believe that the Word of God is not a relic but a river. Not a formula but a fire.

And if we dare to enter it, we may just emerge speaking like poets. Like prophets. Like people who have been undone—and remade—by grace.

So, no, this is not an obituary. This is a thank you. A vow. A prayer.

Thank you, Walter Brueggemann, for teaching us to speak with holy imagination.

We vow to keep preaching with fire and poetry.

And we pray: Lord, let the poets keep coming.

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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Wire Story

Evangelical Consultant Johnnie Moore Appointed to Lead Gaza Aid Effort

Yonat Shimron - Religion News Service

The former religious freedom commissioner and Trump faith adviser steps in after the first weeks of food distributions.

Johnnie Moore

Bill O'Leary / The Washington Post via Getty Images

American evangelicals, driven by a biblical vision to protect Israel, have long been integral to US. diplomacy in the Holy Land. And now they have another player on the team.

Johnnie Moore, the evangelical public relations executive with deep ties in the Middle East, was appointed chairman of the embattled Gaza Humanitarian Foundation on Tuesday.

The Trump administration appointed Mike Huckabee, another prominent evangelical, and a former Southern Baptist pastor who has described himself as a Christian Zionist, as the ambassador to Israel earlier this year.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, created within the past year, is a private group, formed with Israel’s blessing after it sought to circumvent the aid relief previously provided by the United Nations. Israel has long accused the UN of anti-Israeli bias and has alleged that aid from the UN ultimately falls into the hands of Hamas, the militant group.

From March to May, Israel had blocked all food and aid from entering Gaza, a move it said was aimed at pressuring Hamas. When Israel lifted the food blockade in mid-May, chaos ensued at the distribution points, with Israelis opening fire on dozens of Palestinians as they approached the GHF hubs.

Moore, like Huckabee, denied the shootings took place and blamed the media for false reporting.

In a Fox News op-ed published Tuesday, Moore wrote, “Over 7 million meals were delivered free to Gazans—no trucks seized, no aid diverted, no violence at distribution sites.”

The Red Cross and the UN human rights office said 27 people were killed on Tuesday. The Israeli army later acknowledged that it opened fire, though it has not said how many were killed.

Moore, 41, stepped into the role of chairman of the GHF after its previous head, Jake Wood, resigned hours before the initiative was set to begin late last month.

Wood cited concerns over the GHF’s ability to adhere to the “humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence.”

Moore was co-chairman of Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory board during Trump’s first campaign for president in 2016. The following year, Moore and other evangelicals pressed Trump to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. Trump later appointed Moore to serve as a commissioner on the United States Commission for International Religious Freedom.

Moore is part of a much larger group of white evangelicals that forms the backbone of US support for Israel. These evangelicals believe there is an eternal bond between God and the Jewish people and that Christians should support the biblical covenant God made with Abraham and his descendants. Their vision for the state is rooted in the belief that God promised the land of Israel to the Jews in eternity.

Moore’s pro-Israel views have landed him roles on several boards or task forces of Jewish-led organizations. Those include the Anti-Defamation League and the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, one of Israel’s largest philanthropic organizations. He is the 2017 recipient of the Medal of Valor from the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Moore started out as a spokesman for Liberty University, the school where he also earned a PhD in public policy. He later founded a public relations group, Kairos, which was acquired in 2022 by JDA Worldwide.

During the National Religious Broadcasters convention two years ago, Moore talked on a podcast about his “zealous advocacy” for Israel, saying, “I started going to Israel and going to Israel again and again and again. I found so much of my faith come alive through that experience. … Israel has impacted me far, far more than almost anything else. I almost can’t think of my life as inseparable from Israel in some ways.”

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Died: Walter Brueggemann, Scholar of Prophetic Imagination

Yonat Shimron - Religion News Service

The Old Testament professor was widely taught in seminaries and influenced many mainline and evangelical ministers.

Westminster John Knox Press / edits by Christianity Today

Walter Brueggemann, one of the most widely respected Bible scholars of the past century, died on June 5 at his home in Michigan. He was 92.

The author of more than 100 books of theology and biblical criticism, Brueggemann was professor emeritus of Old Testament studies at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, until his retirement in 2003.

His specialty was the Hebrew Bible and especially the Hebrew prophets, and his books were aimed primarily at clergy and church leaders. But through sermons, Brueggemann’s concepts, have become familiar to many churchgoers.

Though ordained, Brueggemann never served as a pastor of his own church. He was, however, a much sought after and eloquent preacher and lecturer.

“He had incredible way to discern what was happening in the world and the church and to speak into that with a much needed word,” said Conrad L. Kanagy, professor emeritus at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, who wrote a biography of Brueggemann and edited some of his books.

Brueggemann’s books were broadly influential, especially in mainline Protestant circles, but his work impacted many evangelicals as well. His 1978 The Prophetic Imagination sold more than a million copies and remains a classic that is still frequently assigned in seminaries. In the book, he showed how the biblical prophets, called to imagine a different world, disrupted politics and the dominant culture and its assumptions.

“It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing future alternatives to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one,” he wrote.

Brueggemann himself was critical of American consumerism, militarism and nationalism.

“Walter Brueggemann is one of the world’s great teachers about the prophets,” said On Being podcast host Krista Tippett. “He translates their imagination from the chaos of ancient times to our own. He somehow also embodies this tradition’s fearless truth-telling together with fierce hope—and how it conveys ideas with disarming language.”

As news of his death spread online, several evangelical professors spoke of his influence on them.

“His Theology of the Old Testament reframed how I approached the Bible when I was a 23 year old seminary student. His other works continued to challenge me,” Steve Benzer, professor of pastoral ministry and theology at George W. Truett Seminary at Baylor University, said on social media.

Kaz Hayashi, professor of Old Testament at Bethel Seminary in Minnesota called Bruggemann “a great blessing for me and for the church.”

Breuggemann was text-focused but resisted the dominant modes of biblical interpretation because they put distance between the reader and the text. He sought to help pastors hear God’s voice within the biblical text.

Brueggemann was born in Tilden, Nebraska, in 1933. His father, a pastor in the German Evangelical Synod of North America, ordained him. He and his brother, Ed, grew up in Blackburn, Missouri.

As a teenager, Brueggemann and his brother visited a Black church on the edge of town. It later influenced his commitment to social justice.

His academic journey began at Elmhurst College (now university), in Elmhurst, Illinois. He went on to study at Eden Theological Seminary and Union Theological Seminary. He received a Ph.D. in education from St. Louis University, while teaching at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis. He left Eden for Columbia Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian school, in 1986.

Brueggemann, however, remained an active minister in the United Church of Christ. He was a frequent speaker at its conferences as well as a mentor to countless church leaders.

He is survived by his wife, Tia, and by his sons James and John and their families.

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Facing a Precarious Future in Hong Kong

Peter Maize

While Beijing has not yet clamped down on religion in the city, three churches are preparing.

Island Evangelical Community Church (IECC)

Courtesy of IECC

It’s 7:30 p.m. on a Saturday night, and Marian is waiting with her friends for the evening service to begin at Flow Church in Tsim Sha Tsui. She talks animatedly about how she felt after Beijing imposed a strict national security law in 2020 that silenced critics, decimated press freedom, and curtailed civic action in Hong Kong. At the time, Marian was filled with questions about how Christians should respond, “but my former church couldn’t answer my questions,” she said. CT agreed not to use her real name, as criticism of the government is sensitive in Hong Kong.

She started looking for a church that was discussing these issues. Later that year, she heard several sermons by John Chan, the founding pastor of Flow Church, on Romans 12, where Paul urges his readers not to “conform to the pattern of this world.” Chan didn’t shy away from discussing Hong Kong’s political situation but urged Hong Kongers to focus on integrating Christ into their lives without being overly concerned about worldly politics.

“People have questions about how to be a Christian in today’s situation,” Marian says. “Flow had practical answers.”

Marian joined a cell group of a dozen people who quickly became her friends. They meet twice a month and talk about their lives and challenges.

The Cantonese-speaking Flow Church began in 2018, the year before pro-democracy protests rocked Hong Kong, leading the government to clamp down on the former British colony. Chan’s original goal was to establish a church unburdened by traditions or denominational constraints, one that would attract the large contingent of young people, like Marian, who no longer felt a connection with the churches they grew up in.

“I felt God called me to establish a church for these people, one that was relevant to their lives,” Chan said. “They needed something new.” Flow Church has no office, no elders, no permanent home, an ethos summed up in its name. Their worship team sets up each week in a hall owned by another church and packs everything up after the service is over.

This type of flexibility explains how Chan and Flow Church plan to take on the religious persecution that Hong Kong may soon face. So far, the national security law has focused only on politics, not religion. Yet many are preparing for the day when restrictions may be placed on how and where they worship, much like in mainland China.

CT spoke with Flow Church and two international churches about how they are preparing for Hong Kong’s uncertain future and found three different strategies. While Flow Church is taking a malleable approach, the Vine plans to plant smaller churches, and Island Evangelical Community Church (IECC) plans to invest in an expensive new church building.

Many young Hong Kong people who were sympathetic to the goals of the 2019 protest movement joined Flow Church. Although the church did not overtly support the protests, its leaders provided counseling and mental health resources to young people who were impacted by the conflict.

“We’re not critiquing the government,” Chan said about the church’s stance. “We’re focused on the Bible.”

Chan believes that Hong Kong churches are within a 10-year grace period before the government imposes any significant changes. He says Flow is willing to cooperate to a certain degree. For example, he would put a Chinese flag on their stage if the government requires it. (In a June 12th call, Chan clarified that the church would try to seek alternatives or compromises rather than strictly following certain government directives, such as displaying a flag in the building.)

Yet for requirements that go against the Bible, “we will follow Jesus,” Chan said. “We will not compromise our faith. We’re mentally prepared for the future.”

That preparation includes a deliberate decision not to keep a database of members and an expectation that the Flow Church might disappear soon.

“We don’t expect Flow to have a long future,” Chan said. “The church is an event, a happening. We will focus on our lives.”

Flow Church has regular attendance of about 400 people each week, with up to 8,000 more online. Hong Kongers who have resettled overseas have started Flow Church branches. “We’re a megachurch,” he says with a laugh. “But not financially.” While offering collections cover the bills, only about 30 people give regularly, Chan said.

Chan noted that he doesn’t plan to plant more churches in Hong Kong because his focus is on “spiritual space, not physical space.” Instead, he sees his role as building relationships with people and facilitating small groups. That approach differs from how the Vine, an international church based in the busy urban area of Wan Chai, is planning for the future.

Unlike in China, where only foreign-passport holders can attend international churches, Hong Kongers make up a majority of the worshipers at the city’s international congregations. They are drawn not only by the English-language services but also by the more casual and relational style.

The Vine’s multistory building seats hundreds and has multiple meeting spaces. But the church’s senior pastor, Andrew Gardener, says the Vine is intent on planting smaller churches around Hong Kong with fewer than 200 people each.

The first church plant is located near Hong Kong’s border with Shenzhen, China, and has a nonprofit status separate from the main Vine Church. This allows the new church more autonomy and its own identity. Because it’s in an area where English is not widely spoken, the church has both English and Cantonese services.

“I would rather have a group of smaller churches tailor-made for the communities we are trying to reach than one large church in a static location that we expect everyone to come to,” Gardener said. “It’s a great way to serve Hong Kong.”

Gardener agrees with Chan that currently the Hong Kong government is refraining from intruding into religious affairs. Some international pastors believe that the government is systematically working its way through other sectors of society before turning its attention to churches. Gardener said opportunities to share the gospel are still open, and the Vine is able to hold Alpha courses in schools and corporate offices around the city.

“Day to day, nothing of substance has changed,” he noted.

Still, some Cantonese-language churches have come under the Hong Kong government’s scrutiny for being alleged incubators of “soft resistance”—the government’s vague term for actions that subtly oppose the new system imposed in 2020. Several Hong Kong clergy have been arrested in recent years on national security–related offenses, and others have chosen voluntary exile.

International churches face different challenges as the government suspects them of being tied to “foreign forces” and disapproves of their ministries to refugees, according to pastors CT spoke to.

Some of these churches have become the targets of anonymous attacks that use email and other means to accuse them of assisting anti-government forces in Hong Kong, according to international church pastors.

“The Vine is committed to justice work in our city, and at times this has put us on the government’s radar,” Gardener said. “But it’s community service—it’s not political.”

Meanwhile, another international church, IECC, is planning to plant its roots in one central location. While it currently rents several floors of a skyscraper for worship space, the congregation recently purchased a decrepit former theater and adjacent structure, which they plan to renovate into a new 100,000-square-foot church building.

The building costs nearly $100 million and will require an additional $30 million in renovation costs. Senior pastor Brett Hilliard said some church members and Christians outside the church have questioned why IECC would spend so much money on a massive new church building in Hong Kong when uncertainty looms.

“It’s a great investment, considering that we’re already spending a lot on rent,” Hilliard said. But beyond the financial considerations, “this makes a statement to the community that we choose faith over fear,” Hilliard said. “The church isn’t going away.”

Hilliard plans to use the ground floor of the building for “redemptive retail,” such as cafés and shops staffed by people with disabilities or ex-convicts.

Like many churches, IECC had difficult choices to make when protests engulfed Hong Kong in 2019 and the government cracked down.

“We didn’t participate or condemn,” Hilliard said. He acknowledged the challenge of maintaining a focus on the gospel message during that chaotic time when “our worship team included several police officers while some members of the congregation sat with placards that they intended to take to the protest after the service.”

That was six years ago. Today, Hilliard says he feels no overt pressure to avoid any topics. He stays away from predicting what the Hong Kong government will do but believes IECC will be able to gather as they serve the community and focus on the gospel message. He encourages the congregation to put aside political allegiances as they prepare for the future.

Meanwhile, during the Saturday night Flow Church service Marian attended, hundreds of young people sang worship songs like “Jesus Be the Center” and prayed for their city, one another, and their future.

Marian noted that she and her cell group are prepared for the day when the church is shut down. “It’s likely to happen,” she said. “If one day we can’t go to church, then the cell groups will be able to carry on.”

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Kenya Keeps Losing Nurses It Can’t Afford to Keep

Pius Sawa

A Christian nurse looks to God and emigration for a way out of debt and overwork.

Nurses check a patient registry book at a hospital in Kenya.

Michel Lunanga / Stringer / Getty

Every time she opens her email, 35-year-old Caroline Mutama looks for a notification from US government officials to see if they have set the date for her visa interview at the US Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. She hopes to work as a nurse in Illinois. Mutama has already processed the travel documents for herself, her husband, and her two children.

Now all she can do is wait.

On weekdays, Mutama wakes up early, feeds her children, and prepares her oldest child for school. Then she walks five kilometers (about three miles) to her job as a registered nurse and midwife at Shiyunzu Health Center in Kakamega County. Like many nurses in Kenya, she works long hours for low pay.

Kenya’s frequent worker strikes—due to poor salaries and benefits—have undermined her efforts to make a living. She owes money to her bank, to her friends, and to her microloan savings group. Her husband has been unemployed since the COVID-19 pandemic shut down his company.

With her future in Kenya looking grim, Mutama has joined a rising number of Kenyan nurses hoping to immigrate to the United States or Europe in search of better pay and working conditions. In 2023, she began the application process for an EB-3 visa, which allows skilled workers and professionals to immigrate to the United States.

In February 2025, the Kenya National Union of Nurses raised alarm over the “acute shortage of nurses” in the country, a shortage that’s forcing some health facilities to close. In some cases, chronic understaffing has led to rationing care and to patients’ deaths in some emergency situations.

About 4,000 doctors and nurses leave Kenya every year, said Ouma Oluga, former secretary general of the Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union. TruMerit, an organization that processes nurses’ credentials to see if they are eligible to emigrate, reported that Kenya accounts for 6.5 percent of African nurses applying for VisaScreen certification—a key requirement for foreign-trained nurses in the US. This places Kenya first in Africa and third in the world after Philippines and Canada. In July 2021, Kenya signed a bilateral labor agreement with the UK to send 20,000 nurses to UK hospitals. By April 2024, 280 Kenyan nurses had immigrated to the UK via this program.

Kenya’s public hospitals can’t afford to lose these nurses, but they can’t afford to keep them either.

“While we are complaining we’re having a brain drain of doctors and nurses who are going to the Western world, we as a government are not able to afford to employ them because we do not have the resources,” Tharaka Nithi County governor Muthoni Njuki told a national news network.

Kenya president William Ruto admitted last year that the country only absorbs 200,000 of the 1 million qualified workers who enter the job market each year. This includes recent nursing school graduates. Nationwide economic struggles since Ruto’s government took power in September 2022 haven’t helped. Kenyan nurses continue to live and work in subpar conditions, despite frequent nurses’ union strikes.

Nurses have long struggled with high workloads and poor resources. For example, one study showed that a single neonatal nurse may be responsible for up to 40 sick babies at a time—all requiring a high degree of care.

In 2024, the council of governors in Kenya raised concern over the high rate of health workers leaving the country because the government couldn’t pay them well.

Some estimates place registered nurses’ salary range at 23,000 to 140,000 Kenyan shillings per month (about $178–$1,084 USD), including nursing directors. Kenya’s minimum wage is 15,200 shillings per month (about $118 USD). The median pay for a nurse in the US is $7,800 per month.

“We train our students for the international markets,” said Eunice Nyasiri Atsali, a nurse trainer at Kenyatta University. “The situation [in Kenya] is worse today because government has relocated the nurses to the counties and most of the counties have no capacity to pay the nurses. A degree-holder nurse is now earning 25,000 Kenya shillings [about $194 USD].”

Some nurses have fallen into debt. Traditional banks may deny loans to nurses if their account balances are too low, forcing them to look elsewhere for credit. Ruto’s government has also introduced new taxes—such as a those imposed on all public employees in Finance Bill 2024, sparking antitax demonstrations by Ruto’s critics last year.

Because of these challenges, many nurses do not want to remain in Kenya.

Mutama worries about family obligations in addition to her debts. Family funds helped her through school, but she hasn’t been able to repay them. Her three sisters and brother are now unemployed. Mutama said she feels guilty she can’t support everyone on her salary.

“[When I get to the US,] I will do my best to see that I support my siblings,” Mutama said. “I need their prayers so that I succeed. And when I move to the US, I will not forget them.”

Mutama’s application process hasn’t been easy. She’s had to prepare for nurses’ licensing exams and an English proficiency test, fill out visa applications, and wait endlessly for approval.

“Going to the US is not a joke. There are no shortcuts for nurses,” Mutama said. “The process is quite complicated, as you must be qualified to work as a nurse in the US.”

She has stayed up all night reading online materials on her laptop to prepare for licensing exams. Night shifts at her small health center receive fewer new patients than daytime shifts do. She said she took those shifts whenever possible so she could study while at work.

In early 2024, she raised money for an airline ticket so she could travel to South Africa to sit for her licensing exams. Three days prior to travel, she had only half the money she needed. A friend loaned her the remaining money at the last minute.

“This was the hand of God,” Mutama said.

She passed the exams for licensure—valid in the state of Illinois—but many of her friends did not. Eighteen months later, Mutama passed her English proficiency exam in Kenya.

But immigration policies have complicated the process. In 2020, the US slowed visa retrogression due to COVID-19. Processing backlogs at the US Embassy in Nairobi continue.

Mutama still waits for that all-important email, but she prays to God for the visa process to reopen soon and end her waiting.

“I hope that God will open the way for me,” she said.

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News

Evangelical Fault Lines Revealed in South Korean Election

Isabel Ong with Jennifer Park in South Korea

Some Christians are troubled by politicians’ anti-Communist rhetoric. Others are preoccupied with it.

A woman comes out of a booth to cast her early vote in a polling station for the presidential election in South Korea.

Chung Sung-Jun / Getty

Third time’s the charm for Democratic Party candidate Lee Jae-myung, now South Korea’s 14th president.

The 61-year-old former human rights lawyer ran for presidency twice unsuccessfully, first in 2017 and then in 2022, when he lost narrowly to impeached president Yoon Suk Yeol.

In the June 3 snap election—triggered by Parliament’s impeachment of Yoon on April 4 for breaching the constitution and other laws by declaring martial law—Lee beat five other presidential candidates and garnered close to 3 million votes more than Kim Moon-soo from the ruling conservative People Power Party.

When 36-year-old Yoon Go-eun (no relation to Yoon Suk Yeol) cast her ballot last Thursday during the early voting period at an elementary school in Gangnam, Seoul, she prayed God would raise up someone who could bring peace to the nation in a time of confusion.

Since Yoon’s martial law declaration last December, South Korea has experienced a season of political turmoil. Millions of people took to the streets for months, either protesting against Yoon or shoring up support for him.

Yoon Go-eun, a middle school teacher who attends a Presbyterian megachurch in Seoul, pinned her hopes on Lee. “In this moment of national instability, we need a leader who is capable, pragmatic, and able to restore order, especially in light of the recent crisis involving discussions of martial law,” she said.

When Yoon heard Lee had won, she felt a sense of release, “as if things were finally falling into place.” She thought of Proverbs 16:9 (“In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps”) and prayed that God would help Lee to carry out his responsibilities for the good of the people.

Although Kim, the conservative candidate who trailed behind Lee, is a churchgoer, Yoon did not vote for him. She’s troubled by Kim’s associations with pastor Jun Kwang-hoon and far-right ideologies, like the belief that there are Communist forces secretly colluding with China to aid North Korea within the country.

In South Korea, far-right politics are characterized by an anti-Communist and anti-China posture. These ideas have become entrenched within some Korean evangelical circles, leading them to label people who “criticise conservativism or conservative policies as pro-North Korean communists and antichrists,” Hawaii Pacific University professor Yong Jae Kim wrote in 2023.

Yoon felt disappointed by Kim Moon-soo’s lack of contrition for remarks he made last year that the Jeju islanders involved in an uprising between 1947 and 1954 were part of a “Communist riot.” In that incident, Korean military forces killed around 30,000 citizens on the island for protesting against the 1948 election in the belief that the results would divide the country permanently.

“To me, this is not the fruit of a healthy, biblically grounded faith,” Yoon said. “Such positions distort the gospel—and make me question whether [Kim] is truly a Christian.”

Yoon is not alone. The Korean evangelicals whom CT interviewed reflect a deepening political polarization in their voting decisions. Some favored Lee because they are against anti-Communist rhetoric, and others supported Kim because they believe he can protect South Korea from Communist influences.

Like Yoon, Kim Jiwon (no relation to Kim Moon-soo) voted for Lee. The 45-year-old manager at a logistics company, who worships at Jeju Youngnak Presbyterian Church, kept thinking of Jesus’ command to love our neighbors as he prayed over the election.

Although Kim does not think Lee’s policies are perfect, he felt they reflect “more consistent concern for issues of justice, equality, and the well-being of marginalized people.”

The new South Korean president grew up in poverty, working as a child laborer at factories, where he suffered a wrist injury that left him with a permanent disability. After securing a full scholarship to Seoul’s Chung-Ang University to study law, he became a human rights lawyer who defended industrial-accident victims and residents facing eviction amid urban redevelopment projects.

“We will not tolerate violations of rules that harm others—such as endangering lives, infringing workers’ rights, oppressing the weak or manipulating stock markets for unfair gain,” he said in his inaugural speech.

Lee begins his term immediately even as he faces five trials for various charges, including corruption, involvement in suspicious development projects, illegal money transfers to North Korea, misuse of official funds, and instigation of perjury.

Despite these scandals, Lee gained approval across the country as he led efforts to impeach Yoon. Ahead of the election, around half (50.2%) of Koreans polled in a nationwide survey were supportive of Lee.

Conservative candidate Kim Moon-soo, meanwhile, opposed Yoon’s impeachment, did not cut ties with Yoon, and refused to bow to the nation as an apology for declaring martial law.

Kim Moon-soo has also used divisive language, like referring to Koreans who fought for democracy during President Park Chung-hee’s dictatorship in the ’60s and ’70s as “commies,” Kim Jiwon said.

When Kim Moon-soo was a teenager, his high school suspended him for protesting against Park Chung-hee. Today, however, the presidential candidate “defends authoritarian measures and justifies state violence, including the possibility of martial law under the former president,” Kim Jiwon said. “To me, these are not the actions of someone who has faith.”

But some evangelicals think otherwise. They support Kim Moon-soo because of his hard-line stance against Communist infiltration in the country.

Kang Gwi-ran, a 60-year-old pro-Yoon supporter and Presbyterian pastor in Seoul, voted for Kim, as she believes South Korea is “politically, economically, and culturally infiltrated by the Chinese Communist regime.” She prayed fervently that Kim would be elected so he could carry out Yoon’s vision to eradicate pro-China influences in the country.

Kim and members of his party have accused Lee’s party of undermining the country’s ties to America by seeking stronger linkages with China. Right-wing YouTube channels also claimed that the impeached Yoon was a victim of China’s electoral influence.

“China was our enemy, whose Communist Party invaded our country during the Korean War,” Kim said in a televised presidential debate last month. “Then how can we treat China at the same level with the United States?”

“The church must awaken and help save the nation” from such “dangers,” Kang added.

Other evangelicals, like 70-year-old Gil Min-hwa, voted for Kim because she wants to see North and South Korea reunified. In her view, Kim values the alliance between South Korea and the US, which would help encourage a reunification that is “led by the South and grounded in democratic principles.”

“I believe God desires to use a unified Korea to play a key role in global evangelization,” said Gil, a retired pastor in the central city of Daejeon.

Two years ago, North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un declared that unification between North and South was “impossible,” breaking from the country’s historical approach—articulated by Kim Il Sung in 1991—of seeking unification through establishing a confederacy with two systems.

Presidential candidates Kim and Lee have adopted starkly different approaches to reunification. Kim condemned North Korea’s human rights abuses and pushed to boost South Korean military prowess against North Korean nuclear threats.

Lee, meanwhile, pledged to rekindle dialogue and communication channels between North and South and make improvements to policies relating to North Korean defectors and humanitarian aid to the North.

Gil remains undeterred by Kim’s loss. “I will continue to trust God’s sovereign plan,” she said. “He can use both good and evil for his purposes.”

As anxiety over South Korea’s future and its newly minted leader continue to rock evangelical relationships in South Korea, Yoon finds that her church has been a refuge from the ongoing political storm.

At one small group meeting with fellow Christians who held dissimilar views, the group had honest conversations with one another and prayed for wisdom and for God’s justice to prevail, instead of praying only for their preferred election outcomes.

“Moments like these have shown me that our church values humility and love even amid political differences,” Yoon said. “We must stop using Scripture to justify our political opinions. The Bible is not a partisan weapon.”

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Culture

Review

What’s the Point of ‘The Life of Chuck’?

Hannah Long

A new movie based on a Stephen King novella aims at profundity—and comes up short.

Tom Hiddleston as Charles Krantz in The Life of Chuck.

Neon

There’s a scrap of homespun philosophy that resembles, at first glance, Christian anthropology. Life’s value doesn’t come from the big things but from the small. The most precious of things is the ordinary. Such are the implicit theses of a subgenre one might term “life-affirming cinema.” At one point in the new film The Life of Chuck, Nick Offerman’s faux-authoritative narrator, observing strangers caught up in an impromptu dance, says, “That is why God made the world. Just that.”

Although it’s not exclusive to the 1990s, I often associate the life-affirming subgenre with that era. Its mood is ubiquitous, from Dead Poets Society to The Shawshank Redemption to Forrest Gump. These films value simplicity, authenticity, and innocence over sophistication, structure, and society, a sort of transcendentalism for the modern age.

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, it’s Shawshank and The Green Mile author Stephen King who wrote the short story upon which The Life of Chuck is based. It’s as pure a specimen of life-affirming cinema as is possible to find. Expanded here to full length by writer-director Mike Flanagan, the film’s premise is rich with opportunities for reflection on mortality, human value, and vocation.

But instead of turning to philosophers or theologians for answers, the film hangs itself on one line of Walt Whitman, his most famous: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” It’s too slender a strand upon which to suspend such heavy realities.

The story starts in a bourgeois apocalypse. A teacher, Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor), reasons with parents over their children’s infractions, though it all seems rather pointless. After all, the world is ending. Every disaster has hit simultaneously—internet outages, earthquakes, famines. Somehow, a grim but functioning suburban life remains in the ennui of a dying world, and Marty and his ex-wife Felicia (Karen Gillan) find each other before the stars blink out, one by one. We probably shouldn’t be surprised, Marty says, because, as Carl Sagan explained in the documentary Cosmos, we’re living in the last moments of the universe.

Contrasted against this dystopia is one bright spot: a chipper ad resembling a retirement card for a smiling man. “Thank you, Chuck! Thirty-nine great years,” the ad exults. It’s a sort of grim, ironic meme, the origin of which is lost. No one remembers who Chuck (Tom Hiddleston) is anymore.

Not even Chuck, because as it turns out, all of this is the “universe” in his head. He’s in a coma, dying in the arms of his wife, at the age of 39. The next two acts of the film follow one life-affirming day, not in the middle of his life but nine months from its end, when he impulsively dances to the beat of a drummer. Then the film finally jumps back to childhood (where he’s portrayed by a winsome Jacob Tremblay as an adolescent, and Benjamin Pajak as a child). At a young age, he’s orphaned; his early life is shaped by his grandparents’ tastes, his school career as a dancer, and his final confrontation with a premonition of what Sagan knew: The end is inevitable.

Over the course of Chuck’s childhood, we discern the origin of both his imagined apocalypse and his dance in the second act. He associates dancing primarily with his grandmother (Mia Sara), who would swing her hips to rock music while cooking. Arithmetic, meanwhile, Chuck connects with his grandfather, Albie (Mark Hamill), who once softened a stern speech about the poor job market for dancers by waxing poetic about numbers. (Chuck will eventually become an accountant.) Albie’s speech is one of the story’s more graceful moments, avoiding tired clichés that may have made the old man an easy villain—the grim authority figure on the side of math, certainty, and death.

But Albie is associated with death all the same. The only moment in the film shot like Stephen King’s normal horror milieu is when Chuck decides to look into the locked cupola, the one room in the house banned from his entry.

If we really are living in the last gasp of the universe, how can we fully live under this shadow? Knowing death will come, what is the use of dancing? The math never lies.

The film’s pretensions to profundity come up short here, partly due to failures of craft. You can hear the typewriter behind each character. Everyone loves to soliloquize, even a charming neighbor who drops his chipper small talk to meander about how the end is near. It may make sense when everyone is in one person’s head, as in the beginning act, but the tic continues through the other stories. This is all topped off by a cloying and unnecessary voice-over. One wishes the script had mined a richer vein of transcendentalist rhetoric than one line of Whitman or plumbed a deeper well of cultural knowledge than Cosmos.

But does the film at least ask the right questions? Why do we celebrate celebrities, sports stars, and astronauts instead of the ordinary man? Why do we look for fame and glory when we should rather rejoice in the perfection of a flower or savor a well-prepared meal?

Ultimately, what doesn’t land about The Life of Chuck is that the life it affirms is so curated that it doesn’t ring true. In such stories, the “ordinary” is never actually ordinary. The ordinary man, supposedly an Everyman pacing through a universal life, in fact often shows extraordinary virtues and talents and an exceptionally childlike innocence. He rarely breaks from his secular sainthood to descend to the level of foibles and flaws.

At first, he may seem like a Christ figure, but he’s not. He’s the natural man, untouched by society. Instead of having a heart tempted by sin, the life-affirming hero has an inner light which external forces—society, death—seek to snuff. His purity is achieved by living an authentic, mindful life. He doesn’t need to be saved. He has pulled himself up by his spiritual bootstraps.

Christians, rather than trusting in these self-oriented virtues, believe that purity leads to authenticity, not the other way around. And whence comes purity? From without and within at the same time, through the work of God. It may seem a fine distinction, but it explains why there’s always something a bit phony about the Everyman hero.

There’s a sentimentality in life-affirming stories that shortchanges the viewer. The problem with sentiment is not that it glamorizes bad things but that it makes good things into ultimate things (to paraphrase Tim Keller).

If life is really just a collection of experiences and memories, is the meaning of life then to be found in the multiplying of those things? A sort of tourism as telos? At a certain point, the “multitudes” in our heads, the other people remembered, are only valuable to the degree that we value them. If the self is all—Chuck’s “wonderful” self, living life fully—then when his world ends, the world ends. There’s a narcissism and a nihilism beneath this chipper exterior of a film mimicking transcendence without actually providing it.

Of course, that sounds more serious than it should—this is still a movie where a boy teaches his class to moon walk. And Chuck is indeed wonderful, but it would be nice for someone to remind him, as Gandalf does Bilbo at the end of The Hobbit, that he is “only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all.” And as Bilbo responds, “Thank goodness!”

Hannah Long is an Appalachian writer living in New York City. Her writing has appeared in Angelus News, The Dispatch, and Plough Magazine.

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Ideas

The Real Problem with AI Prayers

Alastair Roberts

A computer’s praise or petition sounds a lot like our human Christianese. That doesn’t make them equivalent.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Pexels, Unsplash

At a recent Gospel Coalition conference, celebrity pastor John Piper told his audience about a task he had given ChatGPT: Write a prayer informed by the theology of Don Carson. He proceeded to read the resulting text. ChatGPT’s “prayer” seemed to tick all the theological boxes; the crowd murmured, seemingly impressed. But John Piper was not. He declared that such a “prayer” was not a prayer at all, being the product of a soulless machine rather than the expression of a worshipful human heart.

Recent developments in artificial intelligence have raised unsettling questions about our own humanity; indeed, each new advance in AI technology might seem to erode a once-secure realm of human uniqueness. Formerly situated in the vast expanse between beasts and the gods, our territory is now threatened by the rising capacities of our creations, raising the specter of our obsolescence. What remains to set human beings apart? As AI leaves a wave of redundancies in its wake, will it make humanity itself redundant?

These questions about human distinctiveness are important. People are made in the image of God; code is not. I imagine that’s much of what John Piper was getting at in his critique.

But his exercise also raised interesting questions about language itself. Machine-generated prayers really can sound just like human-generated ones, prone as we are to fall back on generic formulations and common clichés. If an AI prayer isn’t truly prayer, what implications might that have for our own praise and petition, which too often evince our programming in Christianese and other habitual forms?

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warns his disciples not to “heap up empty phrases [“use vain repetitions,” in other translations] as the Gentiles do” (Matt. 6:7, ESV throughout). He then proceeds to teach the disciples the specific words of the Lord’s Prayer.

At first blush, it might seem that such a prescribed prayer is contrary to the warning of the preceding verses. Rather than “empty phrases,” staid and overly familiar, we should privilege spontaneity in our communication with God.

But in the AI era, the “spontaneity” of our prayers (indeed, of anything we say) might be less convincing. Large language models have shown us that speech initially presumed to manifest thoughtful, individual, creative expression may merely be routinized functions operating on generic data, no internal reflection required.

In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus addressed the problem of “vain repetitions” not by extolling the authenticity of spontaneous and personally composed—or generated?—prayers but by giving his hearers a specific prayer, with petitions whose depths his followers have meditated on for around 2,000 years.

Clearly, Jesus’ prior warnings must have some bearing on how we use the Lord’s Prayer. If we mindlessly and distractedly repeat its words with no regard for their import, we might as well be turning a Tibetan prayer wheel, automating the practice. Critics of liturgy have frequently complained of “reading set prayers” and often with genuine cause. Set prayers are there to be prayed. The words must become our words.

The words are ours neither by virtue of composition nor, in the context of a liturgy, by virtue of spontaneity or individuality. We did not come up with the words of the Lord’s Prayer, and we did not independently determine to pray them at a certain juncture in a service. While our mouths might be speaking the words, this does not seem to be sufficient to make them truly ours either. Scripture frequently calls for an integration of heart, word, and action, condemning these who honor God with their lips while their hearts are far from him (Matt. 15:8).

If we look for our human uniqueness in our capacity to produce textual artifacts, AI poses an existential threat. Not only does it show the difficulty of distinguishing the products of machines from those of human beings; it also reveals just how mindless and machine-like much human speech and writing can be, especially in a bureaucratic society.

Yet there is another way of regarding our relationship to language, a relationship more apparent in a society before the dominance of the written and printed word. In an oral culture, words are encountered not in autonomous texts but in speakers, ceremonies, and performances—in poets and singers, liturgies and plays, storytellers and orators, priests and public readers, politicians and philosophers. The primary vehicle of the word is the person.

While the apparent difference between human beings and AI as generators of words might be diminishing, the difference between human beings and AI as creatures of the word is vast and categorical.

Evangelicals have typically thought about Holy Scripture according to the mindset of literate moderns: Holy Scripture is equated with the physical object of our personal Bibles, which we study for knowledge of God. Yet Holy Scripture itself presents us with a more complicated picture. Yes, there are physical scriptural texts external to us—this is important. However, throughout the Scripture, God’s Word is progressively taking humanity itself as its proper vehicle. Also, for much of the history of the people of God, Holy Scripture was chiefly encountered not in the latent textual object of a privately owned Bible but in the living words of public reading and preaching, in liturgies, in the singing of psalms, and in texts treasured in personal memory.

The Lord is a speaking God. He delivers the Law to his people at Sinai, calling them to give their assent to it, to observe all its commandments, to take them to heart, and to serve him in love. The Law is an external word, standing over against resistant people and judging them for their rebellion.

The Book of Psalms opens with the figure of the blessed man who delights in and meditates on the Law day and night (1:1–2). It describes a righteous man who has the Law in his heart, speaking justice and having wisdom (37:30–31). In the Psalms, the second-person imperatives of the Law are encountered in the form of first-person expressions of delight and commitment—“Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day” (119:97).

The Book of Psalms depicts and encourages a relationship with the Law characterized by meditation, memorization, delight, elevation of words in song, and collective performance. Something similar can be seen in the Wisdom Literature, where external commands of the Law give way to the declarations of the wise man, who has internalized the wisdom and justice of the Law and can speak with insight and authority.

In the Prophets, human beings become bearers of God’s word in a new, more pronounced way. Ezekiel ate the scroll so that he could speak God’s word to the people with authority (Ezek. 3:1–9). Isaiah’s lips were touched with a coal from the divine altar so that he could speak with a burning holiness (Isa. 6:5–8). Jeremiah’s mouth was touched so that he might bear God’s words and thus be equipped with authority over nations “to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant” (Jer. 1:9–10).

In Jesus Christ, the Word of God comes to humanity in person. In Jesus, the wisdom, authority, righteousness, justice, and life of God’s Word is fully realized in the medium of our flesh. Although the world would not contain the books that could be written about him, Jesus himself never wrote a book. He himself is the Word.

And he is forming people as living words. In 2 Corinthians 3:3, the apostle Paul described the Corinthian Christians as a “letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.” Elsewhere, in Colossians 3:16, he spoke of “the word of Christ dwell[ing] in you richly” in the singing of psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. The church is a living message of Christ, a people who are formed as word bearers as Holy Scripture is metabolized into us through memorization, meditation, song, prayer, sermons, reading, and praise.

This, of course, is the purpose of something like the Lord’s Prayer: that in constantly returning to these words, we might be formed by them, becoming the sort of people who can pray them fully. Spontaneity and originality can be worthwhile in their place, but far more important than the words that we produce are the words that go down into our bones and are treasured in our hearts.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates observes how writing can substitute external reminder for internal memory and therefore risk encouraging forgetfulness in those who depend on it. Relying on writing, they no longer need to take words into themselves, forfeiting wisdom in the process.

In many respects, AI is a radical intensification of the externalization of the word first encouraged by writing. Perhaps its greatest danger is a deeper forgetfulness and forfeiture of wisdom. Within creation, it is only in human beings that the word enjoys its proper living character, being found with delight, wisdom, willing obedience, justice, and authority. Although AI can simulate the products of such creatures, it remains lifeless.

When we pray, presenting ourselves to God as creatures of his words is more important than presenting our own verbal creations. The words of our seemingly spontaneous prayers, seldom as original or expressive as they might appear, are of considerably less value than hearts and lives that treasure, internalize, and embody God’s own words. This is worship that no AI will ever be able to offer.

Alastair Roberts is an adjunct Senior Fellow for the Theopolis Institute and a professor at Davenant Hall. You can follow his work on The Anchored Argosy Substack.

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News

Mexican Evangelicals Navigate Ministry in Cartel Strongholds

Franco Iacomini

Rural churches face the threat of violence, extortion, kidnappings, and forced displacement.

Members of Guerreros Buscadores pray at the Izaguirre Ranch where they located three human crematoriums while searching for their relatives in Mexico.

Ulises Ruiz / Contributor / Getty

When members of Iglesia Bautista Refugio de Generaciones go out to evangelize, pastor Esaú Aguilar knows they will have company.

Los halcones (“the falcons”), young men working for local drug cartel bosses, flock right behind them.

In El Refugio, a small town west of Guadalajara, Mexico, the halcones alert criminals when police, rival gangs, or any other group could threaten business. The 7,000-person town is located in the center of the Mexican state of Jalisco, home to one of the smallest evangelical populations in the country (just 4.7%) as well as to the powerful Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, considered a terrorist organization by the American government.

In March of this year, authorities discovered Rancho Izaguirre, a training camp and killing site run by the cartel. This “Mexican Auschwitz,” as the newspaper El País called it, is a 10-minute drive from Aguilar’s rural church.

At the ranch, a 2.5-acre compound with a single small building and a pair of rearing horses painted on its front gates, authorities found ashes and bone fragments, as well as 200 pairs of shoes, hundreds of clothing items, backpacks, and books.

People searching for missing loved ones can consult an online catalog of the findings. A Bible and a pair of sneakers collected at Rancho Izaguirre led a family to identify their daughter.

The drug cartels impose such fear over large sectors of Mexican society that the site’s discovery brought a kind of strange relief to Aguilar.

“We are in a complicated area,” the pastor said. “When all this happened, we felt a little more at peace. Many soldiers came, and the soldiers are more respected than the ordinary police.”

According to government reports analyzed by the newspaper El Universal, criminal organizations operate in 75 percent of Mexico—making it almost impossible for the country’s churches and ministries not to feel threatened by the cartels.

Most of the time, criminal groups don’t choose churches or evangelicals as primary targets. The cartel leaders “say we are taking care of their families,” said Constantino Varas, president of the Convención Nacional Bautista de México.

But even without gang leaders directly forcing places of worship to close, their presence makes churchgoers feel uneasy.

“In some cases, there were no services because there was no quorum,” said Varas. “Families had to flee because gangs were recruiting all the young people, and there were no people to gather with.”

Last year, churches in at least 10 municipalities in Southern Mexico closed their doors over fears of cartel violence.

Reports spread of criminal gangs kidnapping and extorting pastors.

“These criminal organizations have obvious financial interests. When someone receives donations or has a large amount of tithes, they can become a target,” said Teresa Flores, director of the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Latin America (OLIRE).

Flores said authorities usually don’t treat such violence as religious persecution. Since it’s widespread, it cannot be labeled as “systematic hostility or ill-treatment encountered by an individual or group because of their religious beliefs.”

But criminal activity in Mexico still puts pressure on the country’s evangelical minority.

“Violence leads to changes in worship times or days because people can’t go out at night, for example,” Flores said. “It also causes people to not attend the services because it might be risky; shootings may occur.”

These incidents interfere with the work of religious ministries, which are promoters of peace. “Churches work to give hope and make the community more resilient; they help people navigate this space of violence,” she said.

Chiapas, located along the southern border with Guatemala, is the most evangelical state in Mexico, with a third of the population identifying as Protestant or evangelical. It’s also one of the places where persecution against evangelicalism is more prevalent.

In regions inhabited by Indigenous ethnic groups, who practice a form of Catholicism blended with local spiritual practices, Protestant converts face community retaliation that can turn violent. Some may have basic services like clean water and electricity cut off, and children from evangelical families can be barred from attending community schools.

The persecution has intensified in recent years, as criminal groups form alliances with local leaders who were already exerting pressure on evangelicals, Flores said.

“For many years we’ve had people close to us who speak about this intersection of organized crime and persecution in some communities in that area,” she said. “That alliance is not something public, and these are things very difficult to quantify in a report.”

One ministry worker described how villagers in Chiapas ask missionaries to help them travel elsewhere to access services that they’ve been blocked from, like going to the doctor or requesting documents at a government office.

“In one occasion, the criminals had stolen all the cars in the town,” the worker said. (CT is not identifying her by name because of the safety risks in the region.)

The criminal organizations in these areas leverage the special treatment and accommodations Indigenous communities have been granted by Mexican law to run their communities according to their ancestral practices—called usos y costumbres (“uses and customs”).

Local sources told CT that the cartels illegally take control of ejidos—land designated for communal farming—through threats or bribes.

Currently, the region faces an ongoing territory dispute between the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación and the Sinaloa Cartel, with both recognizing the area as a hub for smuggling drugs and migrants bound for the US.

Conflict in the region dates back decades. Paramilitary fighters that once belonged to the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, a Marxist-oriented guerrilla group, now work for the cartels. And violence is spreading into the local communities, ministry leaders say.

“Before, [the drug traffickers] didn’t mess with the people, but they have been getting involved with society over the last three years,” said one evangelical pastor, who is not being named to protect his safety.

The drug dealers in town demand that local leaders send people to help block highways or collect money from merchants. Those who refuse risk beatings or torture.

The cartel’s requests for volunteers have also reached the evangelical pastor’s church. “We decided not to go, so they imposed a fine,” the pastor said. It’s 800 pesos (around $40 USD) per person per day. The upkeep of the cartel camps also weighs on the community—a monthly fee of 100 pesos to feed the gang members.

More than a fine, people fear that those recruited for a task won’t ever come back.

Criminal organizations in Mexico rely on forced recruitment—kidnapping young people from homes or luring them with false job offers on social media. According to the Network for Children’s Rights in Mexico, at least 145,000 children and teenagers are at risk, most between the ages of 12 and 14.

In rare, more specific cases, the groups sell recruits on the criminal lifestyle with free housing, food, and military training, offering high salaries to former police officers and military personnel. Once in organized crime, they can be assigned to different jobs, like working in clandestine call centers that run frauds of various types or even becoming hitmen for the cartel.

Authorities believe the compound in Jalisco, Rancho Izaguirre, served as a center for forced recruitment.

“Families in our congregations, relatives, neighbors have been affected by the disappearances,” said Moisés Contreras Pelayo, pastor of Iglesia Bautista Vida Nueva in Tala (Jalisco), 12 miles east of Rancho Izaguirre. “My neighbor on one side, her son disappeared two years ago, and it is now known that he had been at Rancho Izaguirre.”

In search of her son, the woman joined a group of madres buscadoras, mothers who look for their missing children. One of these groups discovered Rancho Izaguirre and reported it to authorities. The women involved have since received death threats, and one was killed in April.

Up the road from the gruesome site, El Refugio de Generaciones continues to gather 15 to 20 people to worship on Sundays. Pastor Aguilar hands out evangelistic pamphlets, but even with their proximity, he has not heard of anyone involved with the cartels approaching the church.

Aguilar divides his time between church duties and his job at a tomato packaging company—now at risk of closure due to US tariffs on Mexico.

He prays for the young people who get trapped by the cartels.

“It’s a life of slavery and sin,” he said. “The only thing that can free you from it is the Lord Jesus Christ.”

- More from Franco Iacomini

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