My Child’s Success Isn’t My Crowning Glory

In a culture that prizes academic achievement, prayers for our kids can sound like shallow negotiations with God.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

On the third Thursday of November, life in South Korea comes to a standstill. This year, around 350,000 high school seniors and 200,000 repeat exam takers in the country will sit for the Suneung exam, one of the most difficult standardized tests in the world and a critical gateway for students seeking college admission in South Korea.

On exam day, government offices and companies delay their office start times to prevent traffic congestion so students can get to the exam venues by 8 a.m., while the national army halts military training to reduce noise pollution. Police officers have even given rides to students who are running late.

Korea’s churches also take the Suneung exam very seriously. My former church in Seoul held special prayer meetings during the week the exam was held. At these early morning services, parents and grandparents would kneel and pray fervently that God would help their progeny do well academically.

Many Korean Christians view the Suneung exam as one of the fiery trials from which they pray their children will emerge victorious. In their eyes, the world needs more successful Christians who can impact an unbelieving society from positions of influence. To attain such positions, they need to get good grades and enter good colleges. My pastor would ask God to give students “the wisdom of Daniel” (Dan. 1:20) and proclaim that their “small beginnings” would lead to “greatness” in the end (Job 8:7).

Although I was not yet a parent when I attended that church, I felt compelled to join these families in their earnest intercessions to God that their children would grow to be wise and triumphant in this fallen world. Praying for one’s children in this manner seemed reasonable and inspiring. Good grades could glorify God, and the child’s parents and grandparents could also enjoy basking in the glory of raising a gifted young man or woman.

But now, as a mother to five children aged 3 to 12 years old, I’m increasingly convinced that I must change the way I pray for my children’s success. Through studying in seminary, I have come to realize that stories about biblical heroes like Daniel are not about their personal victories but about their dependence on God in seasons of suffering. I’m learning to resist cultural pressures to seek glory through my children’s educational achievements, both in South Korea and America, where my family moved in 2015.

Many Christian mothers I know—me included—feel a compulsion to engineer our children’s educational success. A recent Korean YouTube video parody illustrates this sentiment well. In the 10-minute clip, standup comedian Soo-ji Lee plays the wealthy “Jamie-Mom,” who wears an expensive Moncler puffer jacket and drives her four-year-old son to Daechi, an affluent neighborhood in Seoul that is known for its dense concentration of cram schools.

Jamie-Mom does all the things that a real-life Daechi mom does, like discussing her son’s progress with his English teacher and proudly highlighting his newly discovered talent in learning Chinese. She’s fixated on discovering “prodigy moments” that reveal her son’s hidden talents. She’s determined not to miss even the slightest glimpse of these traits because that’s what “moms are supposed to do,” she says. She talks about the benefit of doing these extracurricular activities in light of her son’s upcoming college admission.

Lee’s video went viral in South Korea, garnering more than eight million views and sparking mixed reactions. Some praised it for its sharp and satirical critique of the brokenness of the Korean education system, while others chastized it for fueling resentment toward well-meaning mothers. “You and I are no different—we all are Jamie-Moms,” one viewer remarked.

I see myself in Jamie-Mom and in the parents and grandparents who prayed so hard for the students taking the Suneung exam. I want my children to succeed in this competitive world and to live free from the anxieties of an uncertain tomorrow.

One friend enrolled her five-year-old child in a K–12 “English alternative school” in Seoul, which offers AP English courses to middle-schoolers and promises admission to Ivy League universities. She could not afford to send her son overseas and felt this school was the next best option. “The decision put our family finances in jeopardy,” she admitted. “Still, you know, we parents have to sacrifice so that our son will glorify God.”

In seeking the best for our kids, we begin to believe it is our sacred duty to sacrifice time, energy, and money so that our children can be set up for success and honor God through their achievements. We feel compelled to do whatever it takes to shield them from suffering, hoping they will glorify God like Daniel and his friends. We cling to promises like “Ask and it will be given to you” (Matt. 7:7).

This shows how the prosperity gospel has inevitably influenced the way we intercede for our children. Our prayers portray God as a genie from whom we expect only favorable things. They also reveal an underlying fear that our children’s academic failures will lead them to suffer, particularly in the South Korean context.

Students’ rankings on the Suneung exam are closely tied to their future earning potential. Intense academic pressure to excel in this nationwide test has driven up the cost of private education in areas like Daechi, making it increasingly unaffordable for average Korean families. As a result, only people who can bear the high cost of education are more likely to secure high-paying jobs, which in turn enables them to invest in their own children’s education.

Meanwhile, those who fall short academically and fail to attain high-income careers often feel they cannot afford to marry or raise children. Ironically, this drive to secure success for future generations has contributed to the country having the world’s lowest birth rate at 0.75.

In our prosperity gospel–infused mindsets, we may engage in shallow negotiations with God: “If you make my kids successful, I will give you glory.” But God does not need our children to be successful to be glorified. And it is not a mother’s role to shield her children from struggle and suffering.

Praying for our kids to receive the “wisdom of Daniel” for the Suneung exam, as my pastor in South Korea did, could appear to use the biblical prophet as a model for personal achievement. However, Daniel’s life is better understood as a testament to God’s sovereign purposes. God raises up and deposes the kings of the world, restoring hope to his exiled people through individuals like Daniel, who remained faithful amid persecution.

Tellingly, Daniel’s earthly success was not without profound suffering. He was an exile, torn from his country, and possibly made a eunuch. Any glory associated with Daniel—the one in whom the spirit of the holy God dwelt (Dan. 5:14)—belonged to God alone.

The verse in Job 8 that my South Korean pastor also referenced in his prayer—about moving from small beginnings to future greatness—is not about achieving success in life either.

In this chapter, Bildad reprimands Job, urging him to repent so that God might restore his fortunes, even though God has already declared Job righteous. Bildad’s words reflect a flawed theology that equates suffering with divine punishment and obedience with God-given success.

But the Book of Job highlights the inevitability of suffering in the life of the righteous—not as punishment for sin but as part of a deeper spiritual battle instigated by the ultimate enemy, Satan.

These Old Testament passages teach us that while we may feel tempted to shield our children from suffering and pray for them to enjoy smooth, successful lives, we must not stand in the way of God leading them into places where he will teach them true obedience and perseverance through trials.

Reflecting on the lives of Daniel and Job in a more holistic way has helped me reframe how I think about my children’s success. God has placed our family in downtown Dallas, and it is here that my children experience both flourishing and hardship. While they do not have to take the Suneung exam like their Korean peers, they will experience their own fiery trials—including standardized tests at every grade level and the looming pressure of college admissions.

I no longer feel guilty for not providing what the world considers the “best” educational opportunities for my children. I don’t need a Moncler jacket like Jamie-Mom’s or my child’s good grades to symbolize God’s blessings in my life. I don’t have to meet the world’s demands for proof of success, either for myself or for my children.

What I do need is to respond in faith to God’s calling in my life. In this increasingly troubled world, my role as a mother is to lead my children to grow spiritually so that when they face difficulties in life, they will not be afraid but will encounter their ever-present helper amid them.

These days, I’ve stopped merely praying for them to do well in school. Instead, I ask God to deepen their faith as they meet believers and nonbelievers alike. I pray this simple prayer: “Lord, I entrust my children’s lives to you. I pray that they will get to know you, because only that will help them stand firm in their faith when suffering comes.”

Ahrum Yoo is a PhD student in Old Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary.

- More from Ahrum Yoo

Books

Review

Art That Probes the Darkness Sometimes Darkens Itself

Jeffrey Bilbro

Andrew Klavan defends the spiritual value of depicting evil. But he often discounts the spiritual danger involved.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Wikimedia Commons

I don’t watch horror films or read gritty murder mysteries. My favorite detective stories are Alexander McCall Smith’s decidedly tame tales in his The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. I simply don’t like the effect that reading or watching graphic depictions of depravity has on my imagination. There’s a reason that Paul enjoins the Philippians to meditate on what is just and pure and lovely (4:8).

But when Christ tells his disciples to be as innocent as doves, he does so only after commanding them to be as wise as serpents (Matt. 10:16). Obeying both of these injunctions requires real discernment. And this is what Andrew Klavan aims to provide in The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness. As an award-winning crime novelist and screenwriter, Klavan knows plenty about art that probes the depths of evil, and in this book, he reflects on how such art might help Christians discern the light of Christ.

Klavan labors to articulate art’s power to guide our lives east of Eden, helping us live in hope of Christ’s ultimate redemption of all suffering and death. Although these efforts are often unsatisfying, he helpfully focuses readers’ attention on essential questions. He knows that Christian artists shouldn’t take their cues from Hallmark. Instead, by boldly facing grotesque evil, they can help us recognize the sin that marks our own lives.

While murder, as Klavan writes, is the ultimate “denial of [another] person’s reality and an offense against the God who holds that reality dear,” all sin similarly blasphemes God’s good creation. And by confronting us with the twisted, rebellious nature of sin at its most extreme, artists can prod us to recognize and repent of the sins we cherish and rationalize. “When an artist uses his imagination to create a true work of art about murder,” Klavan declares, “he is confronting death with art, making creation out of destruction, containing evil within an act of love.”

This is a stirring and faithful vision for art, but for the most part Klavan fails to articulate how we can distinguish between “true” works of art that frame evil within a redemptive vision and false creations that voyeuristically celebrate or excuse evil.

The book follows a loose, associative structure that begins with three murders and some artistic or philosophical responses to them. Then, in three shorter chapters, Klavan reflects on avenues through which he’s glimpsed the love that harmonizes jangling acts of human disobedience into divine concord.

In 1834, Pierre François Lacenaire brutally killed a man and his mother. Afterward, he set France and all of Europe on fire with his insouciant defense and his self-aggrandizing journals, in which he explained, in Klavan’s words, that “his crimes weren’t crimes, they were a rebellion against [a] cruel society.” Fyodor Dostoevsky based the protagonist of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, on this Parisian, calling him an “enigmatic, frightening, and gripping” man of “boundless vanity.”

But while Dostoevsky sought to understand and expose Lacenaire’s self-justifying logic, others celebrated it. Some, like the 1920s murderers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, saw such flagrant violations of social mores as justified in the aftermath of the death of God. For Leopold, writes Klavan, “the ultimate proof that you were this Nietzschean ubermensch, … the proof that you were beyond good and evil and immune to error, would be to commit the perfect murder.”

In discussing a 1929 play, Rope, inspired by Leopold and Loeb’s crime, Klavan warns that even those who shudder at grotesque murder can justify their own lawless acts as rebellion “against the corruption and hypocrisy of society.” His primary target seems to be progressive liberal elites, the “anxious, educated urbanites” who relish Woody Allen films because they “dramatiz[e] the cultural elite’s attempt to free itself from the logical conclusion of a moral order: the existence of a God who holds the lives of others dear.”

Fair enough, and Klavan singles out hypocrisies likely prevalent among his friends and collaborators in Hollywood: “the activist who dismisses the humanity of the unborn” and “the academic who justifies a terrorist’s slaughter.” Yet he overlooks plenty of examples that might hit closer to home among fans of his show on The Daily Wire—a president who praises those who assault police officers and breach the Capitol grounds to protest election results, for instance. As Klavan himself notes earlier, “the terrible gift of Christianity—if it is Christianity true to Christ—is that you cannot accommodate your own sin.”

In the second chapter, Klavan turns his focus to Ed Gein’s 1950s crime spree in a small Wisconsin town. Gein’s perverted rituals with his victims’ corpses, all performed under the noses of his unsuspecting neighbors, inspired crime novelist Robert Bloch to write a fictionalized, Freudian account of Gein. Alfred Hitchcock then bought the rights to this book and made it into his film Psycho.

Klavan reads Psycho as “the tragedy of the age,” a narrative that shows the horror wrought by the lie that we realize our authentic selves in pursuit of our desires. He furthers this point through examinations of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Bob Clark’s Black Christmas, and other slasher films. Klavan clarifies that most films in this genre are “exploitative garbage, featuring half-naked women ripped to pieces for thrills,” which would seem to undercut their value, even if they show the dark side of a culture liberated from repression.

The third murder Klavan considers is the first one chronologically: Cain’s killing of Abel. He briefly mentions John Steinbeck’s remarkable novel East of Eden, which probes the significance of this story. But this chapter mostly takes readers on a whirlwind tour through Lord Byron’s Cain; The Brothers Karamazov; Job; the 1991 movie The Rapture; Albert Camus’s The Rebel; René Girard; C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce; and more. Klavan concludes that “the legacy of Cain is murder. It is the attempt to kill the accusing image of God within us and re-create the world in the image of the desires we mistake for ourselves.” And while he rightly asserts that “Jesus is the door out of [this] history [and] into another kingdom altogether,” his digressive tour doesn’t really show how this is so.

The final three chapters are briefer and more personal. Klavan relates how he was brought to faith in part through reading the works of Marquis de Sade, “an atheist sexual psychopath so vicious we named sadism after him.” He realized that without God, no morality can restrain depraved human desires: “Everything else is a facade, oppressive delusions and constructs imposed on us by a society trying to preserve its order and hierarchies. Power is the only reality.” While the original sadist brought Klavan to love the God who gives his body for us, an atheist psychiatrist showed him the power of personal, genuine love to heal his sick and confused soul, and a virtual reality van Gogh exhibit sent him spinning through an imagined survey of Western art.

A persistent source of frustration in reading Klavan’s potted summaries of paintings, books, and films is his assumption that artists merely reflect their culture. If you find a work of art lacking or degenerate, he writes, “don’t blame the artist, blame the spirit of the age.” This is, of course, the villain Edmund’s defense in King Lear when he declares that “men / Are as the time is,” thus rationalizing his murderous deeds. Yet culture is never monolithic; Dostoevsky and Flannery O’Connor situate sin and evil in very different narratives than do Nietzsche or Woody Allen.

Even if a work of art brilliantly reveals “man’s soul in the age through which it is living,” that doesn’t necessarily make it worth our attention. Psycho may portray a “penitent sinner joyfully washing her sins away until she is murdered for the voyeur’s sadistic pleasure by a man dressed up as a woman.” But even if this is “a prophetic picture of the days to come,” I don’t see how that makes it “a work of art indeed” or how I would be edified by watching it.

And how much more dangerous might it be to create such dark narratives? Klavan describes being sucked into sadomasochist pornography while doing research for a character in one of his novels. When the novel was finished, he writes, his connection to this character “snapped,” and his porn addiction abruptly ended too. But he told his wife he was done writing novels: “I can’t keep going into every dark corner of my mind just to get a story out of it. It’s not a sane way to live.”

Of course, as a writer, Klavan can no more stop writing stories than an endurance runner can stop running, but he doesn’t seem to take seriously the dangers his dark narratives may pose to his own soul. The gory spectacles that unfolded in the Roman Colosseum certainly reflected the decadence of the late empire, but Augustine’s Confessions doesn’t condone Alypius’s disordered desire to drink in their violence.

So how might art hold evil within an act of love? Klavan concludes his final chapter with a lovely meditation on Michelangelo’s Pietà and its portrayal of divine love that suffers and dies to rescue straying humanity. He writes:

It is a marble image of the greatest suffering we know of, the saddest thing that can ever happen: a mother who has lost her child, a mother mourning her dead child. … It is God himself who lies there dead. … The world that began with the murder of Abel has evolved into the kingdom of murder, the kingdom of Cain.

Yet perhaps Michelangelo’s art can evoke the divine art for which we hope: “If out of this cosmic catastrophe of injustice, the hands of a mortal man can sculpt such perfect beauty, then what beauty can God not carve out of this sorrowful world in the liquid white marble of eternity?”

The critic George Steiner once claimed that art—and perhaps, in particular, art made by those who hope in Christ—is stamped by Holy Saturday. This is abundantly true of the Pietà. Non-Christians can attest to the horrible realities epitomized by God’s death on Good Friday. Injustice and suffering and meaninglessness mark all our lives. And non-Christians, as Steiner notes, also have analogies to the New Jerusalem: They place their hope in some vision, whether “therapeutic or political … social or messianic.”

But the long hours of Holy Saturday give shape to art that wraps the worst human sin in the form of love. As Steiner writes:

The apprehensions and figurations in the play of metaphysical imagining, in the poem and the music, which tell of pain and of hope, of the flesh which is said to taste of ash and of the spirit which is said to have the savour of fire, are always Sabbatarian. They have risen out of an immensity of waiting which is that of man. Without them, how could we be patient?

Such patience, the capacity to suffer well, is the gift that true art can make from even the worst atrocities. And so Klavan wisely concludes with Michelangelo’s life-giving creation, inviting readers to “linger just a little while and see what happens next.”

Jeffrey Bilbro is professor of English at Grove City College and editor in chief at the Front Porch Republic. His most recent book is Words for Conviviality: Media Technologies and Practices of Hope.

- More from Jeffrey Bilbro

Ideas

Cash Can’t Create Families

Chris Butler

Contributor

Government support helps. But the Black church shows good parenting requires the nourishment that flows from intentional congregations.

I was deeply engrossed in a book on missional church leadership when my wife, Aziza, went into labor with our first child. We had experienced weeks of false alarms, and suddenly, the moment we were anticipating had finally arrived.

The delivery was, in many ways, an ordeal. My wife wanted to stay at home during the early labor period. But everything I had learned to help her through the process fell flat. Unknowingly, we waited a little too long at home and rushed to the hospital in the dead of the night. As the hours went by, I listened to her agony in deep distress, knowing there was little I could do to help. There was blood, tears, and a bill that took us months to pay.

The experience was neither convenient nor efficient. And it was certainly not cheap. However, it was the best thing that had ever happened to us. It was so transformative, in fact, that we did it five more times.

As a father of six, I have watched with interest and growing concern as America’s policymakers and media personalities explain the nation’s declining birthrate in purely economic terms. For nearly two decades, the number of births per capita in the United States has dropped. Childlessness is on the rise. And as a result, the nation’s total fertility sits well below its “replacement rate,” the level of fertility needed for a population to replace itself.

In an effort to encourage Americans to have more kids, the Trump administration has been assessing several proposals, including a $5,000 “baby bonus” and a medal for mothers who have six or more children. While nothing like this has ever been done in the US, these ideas are not entirely new. They follow a global pattern seen in countries like France, Japan, and South Korea, all of which have poured billions of dollars into similar initiatives. However, they haven’t moved the needle, and the birthrates in these nations continue to fall.

The problem with these purely financial approaches is that they misunderstand the heart of family formation. While the burdens of housing, childcare, health care, and education certainly affect decisions about childbearing, parenting is not merely about finances. Even as economic pressures ease, raising kids will remain inherently demanding. It calls for sacrifice and commitment, and it’s often inconvenient and time-consuming.

Yet there are deep joys within it that come from the hand of God. As parents, the love we have toward our children offer us a vivid glimpse into the type of love God pours out on us. It’s a powerful expression of our humanity, made in the image of a benevolent creator.

The historic witness of the Black church illustrates the deep bond between families despite severe pressure. Throughout American history, Black families have been formed and sustained under the harshest of conditions. Family life was never easy in slave plantations or under segregation. Nor was it convenient in economically ravaged urban neighborhoods where many still find their home.

Nevertheless, the Black church continually affirmed the biblical truth that “children are a gift from the Lord” (Ps. 127:3, NLT), recognizing the sacredness of life regardless of social status or a family’s financial stability. The church did not merely protest racial injustice; it also created networks of support, cared for parents in practical ways, and nurtured intergenerational bonds. Among other things, Black congregations provided job training and educational programs and served as spaces of refuge while preaching God’s word forthrightly.

Of course, the Black church’s witness is not without its struggles. Black families have faced internal challenges, such as high rates of out-of-wedlock births, marriage disintegration, and patterns of fatherlessness. But even amid these difficult realities, the church has consistently cast a vision of family rooted in love, community, and faith. It has displayed how strong values can hold up a vision of the family even when conditions are far from ideal. And it can offer vital lessons for other communities increasingly facing the same challenges.

In my experience, most churches have long understood that families cannot thrive on subsidies alone. Parenting is a moral and spiritual journey that demands a kind of internal power that can’t be cultivated by government policy. Cash and incentives alone won’t inspire lifelong commitments, but love—for God and his image bearers—can.

Taking inspiration from the Black church, the broader church can advance a richer vision of parenthood, one that’s based not on convenience but on covenant. Churches must become communities of intergenerational belonging, modeling how to bear one another’s burdens in both practical and spiritual ways. Our role is not merely to lobby the US or any other government for family-friendly policies (though advocacy matters) but to cultivate within our congregations an authentic culture of care.

So what does this look like in practice? As pastors and church leaders, we must teach and embody a vision of family life that rejects the idea that relationships should only be pursued when they are convenient, pleasurable, and cost-effective. We must honor mothers and fathers, not only on special occasions but also by building support systems like childcare cooperatives, mentorship programs, marriage counseling, and family discipleship initiatives. Most importantly, we should build a habit of praying for every family in our congregation and encourage our flocks to do so as well.

All of this reinforces the biblical vision that every family—and person—matters to God and to the health of our communities. This vision does not ignore economic realities. Instead, it integrates financial support with a deeper level of mutual care that can sustain families even when times are tough.

Policymakers also have a unique opportunity. Instead of replicating flawed pronatalist policies, they can offer financial support while championing broader values of interdependence, mutual sacrifice, and respect for life. If they do, I believe any aid our country provides can become far more effective and meaningful.

As for Aziza and me, we will spend well over $5,000 raising our six children. My wife doesn’t need a presidential medal, but she does deserve unending expressions of gratitude for the sacrifices she’s made as a mother. With six kids running around the house, I may never recover my old reading schedule. But the love we’re building in our family—and with our church community—is well worth it.

Chris Butler is the director of Christian civic formation at the Center for Christianity & Public Life.

- More from Chris Butler

News

Christians Call for a Pro-Family Tax Code

Harvest Prude

Evangelical groups want Republicans to include more for families in Trump’s tax cuts.

Children at daycare

Ryan Collerd /AFP via Getty Images

Carlos Duran and his wife, Libia, two years ago arrived at a motel in Amarillo, Texas, booked on Expedia. Their room featured browning bathroom tiles and a television with no signal. They went downstairs to get a refund and find another hotel. Behind the woman working the front desk, something—a lap dog?—made soft noises from a pile of blankets on the floor behind the counter.

“Is that a dog?” Duran asked. The young woman told him no. It was her baby. Less than a month old.

That scrambled their plans. Instead of hightailing it to nicer accommodations, the Durans spent the next hour at Target buying a bassinet, a crib, and other baby supplies.

Duran is president of the National Hispanic Pastors Alliance, which represents thousands of churches and families. Some pastors or congregants warn him against wading into policy and politics: “They say, ‘Why is this Hispanic group involved with all these conversations and trying to push for tax reforms or policy that don’t have nothing to do with faith?’”

Duran had wrestled with those questions himself. That night, he made up his mind. He saw at ground level how some extra dollars in the pockets of families make a huge difference to parents like that woman—maybe the difference that means a new mother gets to stay home longer with her newborn or decides against an abortion.

The next day he flew to Washington, DC. “I’m representing her,” he told Christianity Today. “We might not get it right all the time, but we need to be sitting at the table.”

As Republican lawmakers weigh what to include in the promised tax-cuts package President Donald Trump campaigned on, Duran and other Christian groups hope for an inflation-cost-easing opportunity that will make it onto the floor of the House, not the cutting room. Several Republicans have put forth proposals to extend the child tax credit (CTC), usually $2,000 per child, and make it more beneficial for families. Christian groups are urging Congress to follow through.

Brian Walsh, executive director of Faith and Giving, which represents over 50 faith-based social services, educational, and humanitarian relief organizations, said their partners have seen firsthand what the CTC has meant for homeless mothers now able to send their children to school with school supplies and shoes that fit.

Currently, around 40 million taxpayers claim the CTC every year. When then-president Bill Clinton signed the CTC into law in 1997, it was for only $500 and was not refundable, so if the credit exceeded the amount taxpayers owed, they would not receive a reimbursement. The George W. Bush administration increased the CTC to $1,000.

The last time Trump was in office, Republicans increased the CTC from $1,000 to $2,000, made earners with up to $200,000 income (if single) or $400,000 income (if married) eligible, and made part of the credit refundable. A parent who pays less than the size of the credit can still receive a refund.

When the COVID-19 pandemic raged, Democrats and former president Joe Biden under the American Rescue Plan Act temporarily bumped the CTC to $3,600 per child under the age of six and $3,000 for other children under the age of 18. It also allowed lower-income families to receive more of the funds by making the credit fully refundable.

The US Census Bureau calculated that, in part due to the CTC, the child poverty rate fell to its lowest recorded levels. The Bureau estimated that child poverty, measured by the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), declined by almost half, from 9.7 percent in 2020 to 5.2 percent in 2021. The SPM measures poverty based on both pretax income and other benefits available to low-income families, such as food and housing subsidies, as well as tax credits. The official poverty measure, which does not track those additions, only slightly declined during the same time span.

A study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found in 2021 that 91 percent of families earning less than $35,000 used the child tax credit payments on basic household expenses, primarily food, clothing, shelter, and utilities. The Biden administration sent checks out monthly rather than annually.

Rev. Heather Taylor, managing director of the Christian advocacy organization Bread for the World, said expanding the tax credit could be a “critical tool” in combating food insecurity for families with children: “Ending child hunger and poverty is a goal that transcends party lines.”

The Biden-era provisions expired in at the end of 2021, dipping back to the levels Republicans set. Doing nothing on the credit this year would be tantamount to a tax hike: The CTC is set to automatically halve at the end of this year when some provisions expire in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

The CTC has also not kept pace with inflation. Since 2018, its value has fallen by 22 percent. Several proposals by both Democrats and Republicans call for the CTC to be adjusted to compensate for inflation, while others want to bump up the total amount. Missouri senator Josh Hawley says $5,000. A group of Senate Democrats released a framework to boost the credit up to $6,360 for newborns, with the number decreasing as children age.

Senate Finance Committee chairman Mike Crapo, a Republican from Idaho, told the Washington Examiner that the CTC “is a priority for the administration, it’s a priority for [Vice President] JD Vance, it’s a priority for the Senate and for many of my colleagues.” Vance spoke favorably of expanding the CTC. Trump has said he wants to continue the broader Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (that included the CTC), but he hasn’t weighed in on specifics around the CTC. Instead, he’s talked generally about wanting a “baby boom.”

Brent Leatherwood, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said the proposal is a “pro-family, pro-life policy that wraps around vulnerable families in need. …[It’s] not only sound economic policy, but it also aligns with biblical values of justice and care for the least of these.”

Herbie Newell, president of the evangelical adoption agency Lifeline Children’s Services, said the CTC debate gives pro-life, pro-family groups practical ways to help families: “We need to speak up on the things that we’re for as much as for the things that we’re against,” Newell said.

Republicans are considering other tax breaks that also cost money, like cutting taxes on tips (another Trump campaign promise) or ending taxes on Social Security. The likeliest place for extending the credit is in the Republicans’ budget reconciliation package. That allows them to get around a filibuster (and the need for Democratic votes) so as to pass a package with only the GOP majority in the Senate.

Republicans have to decide whether to put pro-family policies they’ve stumped on last year into practice or to have other campaign promises and fiscal concerns overshadow the credit. “On the merits itself, the child tax credit is a pretty easy sell,” Galen Carey, vice president of government relations at the National Association for Evangelicals, said: “The fly in the ointment is that it costs money. Is pro-family [policy] something that they just give lip service to, or is it something that they really put at the top of their agenda?”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified a proposal to increase the Child and Dependent Care Credit as a Child Tax Credit proposal.

- More from Harvest Prude

Pastors

Taking Evangelism Beyond Strategy to Second Nature

Seth Troutt

Pastors don’t need hype to lead their churches in mission. These four rhythms can shift a church from evangelistic intention to evangelistic instinct.

SGN / Unsplash

“There will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents” (Luke 15:7).

Not only is there joy in heaven, but there’s joy on earth when someone comes to saving faith in Jesus. That moment energizes me more than a 37-degree cold plunge followed by the world’s best cup of coffee. Who wouldn’t want a church on fire that joins Jesus in his mission to seek and save the lost?

Yet many pastors I know wish for, long for, and pray for their church to become more instinctively evangelistic, but they feel stuck on how to actually develop that culture. They are reluctant to turn worship services into attractive hype-fests. They don’t have the margin to lead door-to-door campaigns. If we’re being honest, some are insecure about their own evangelistic fruitfulness. How can a pastor call his church to something he struggles with himself? Still, the pastoral burden to lead the church on mission with Jesus remains.

What does it look like to help our people want to help others meet Jesus? Consider four simple ways we can stir up the church toward evangelism: (1) desacralize it, (2) celebrate it, (3) model it, and (4) formalize it.

1. Desacralize the work of evangelism.

“Let me tell you about my new favorite show on Apple TV+!” This declaration represents something fundamental about human nature—we’re wired to be sharers of good news. Whether it’s the latest series to stream, the new burrito shop in town, or hearing that your friend just got engaged, we naturally want to spread the word about the things we delight in most.

Yet somehow, evangelism—literally “good news announcing”—has become unnecessarily coded as an exclusively religious activity. In reality, it isn’t an inherently religious word at all. The Greek word we get it from (euangelizō) is actually a journalistic word: announcing something good has happened, and we want to tell others about it!

By reframing evangelism more accurately for our congregations, we can help our people see evangelism as less of a “religious duty” or a “good Christian check box” and more as a natural overflow of our joy, which is something we already do in a variety of ways in our daily lives. The truth is, all humans are evangelists by nature. So the real question is not whether we evangelize, but what we’re evangelizing about.

2. Celebrate what you want to see replicated.

Enthusiasm is contagious. Think about it: Why is going to a concert or an NBA game in person so much more electrifying than watching it on TV? It’s because we are social creatures, and our loves are thus shaped in community. When we’re surrounded by others who are excited about something, that excitement spreads.

Pastors should celebrate things all the time—meeting budget goals, launching new sermon series, and having to add extra services on Easter. These are all things that warrant applause. But here’s the crucial question: Are we bringing that same thoughtful celebration to the work of evangelism? Are we intentionally highlighting and honoring those in our congregations who are faithfully sharing their faith?

Just as “positive reinforcement” is a basic mechanism of education and formation, it can also transform a church’s posture toward evangelism. Through baptism testimonies, sermon illustrations, pastoral prayers, announcements, and our weekly newsletters, we already have the platforms we need to give thanks for and ascribe honor where honor is due when people in our churches are taking steps of faith toward their friends and family. In doing so, we’re showing, not just telling, a vision that says, “This is who we are as a church. This is what we value and care about.”

3. Model it by addressing non-Christians in your sermons.

While preaching primarily aims to sharpen, disciple, and encourage the body of believers, that is not its whole purpose. Culture is caught far more than it is taught, and this includes how we communicate about our faith. Many Christians either exist in a serious bubble of only Christians or struggle to bridge the gap between the sacred and secular worlds they live in. The result? Christians know how to speak of Christ when around Christians but become clunky and awkward when discussing Jesus with those who don’t follow him.

The solution? As pastors, we need to model better communication. By intentionally addressing non-Christians in our preaching, we model for our congregations how to speak naturally about their faith. This doesn’t need to happen every week, but it does need to happen regularly. This practice does three vital things for your church:

It teaches them to speak in such a way that assumes non-Christians are listening, because we do.
It makes people think, Oh, I could invite my non-Christian friend here and the teacher is prepared for that.
It helps non-Christians who are present feel welcome and more likely to return.

Consider the following example of what that could sound like: “So we’ve been talking about Jesus walking on water. If you don’t call yourself a Christian, this probably sounds insane, and reasonably so. The laws of physics are laws, after all. However, part of why you’re here is because you’re asking the question, Is there something more? Consider this: If you assume for a minute that God does exist and that he is involved in the world he made, then wouldn’t it make sense that he could work beyond natural laws? For the maker of the laws of nature to be over and above those laws of nature is entirely plausible. Even the original witnesses of Jesus’ miracles struggled to believe what their very eyes were seeing, so your skepticism puts you in good company.”

4. Formalize it with a dedicated evangelism environment.

I once believed evangelism should be purely organic, not organized. But just as my wife and I now schedule date nights instead of relying on spontaneous romantic outings like we did when we were newlyweds, what matters most must now find its way into our budgets and calendars. At Ironwood Church, where I serve as teaching pastor, we’ve successfully launched a structured evangelism environment, and the fruits have been wildly encouraging. Here’s our four-step approach:

Step 1: Build your team. We identified people within the congregation who already had a passion for evangelism and invited them to join the core team that would launch the new program. We also offered a “How to Share Your Faith” class, which helped us identify additional volunteers eager to grow in their ability to bring others to faith. Once the class concluded, we invited them to help with the start-up.

Step 2: Choose your curriculum. After considering creating our own original material, we opted for the 321 Course from Glen Scrivener. After all, it was both better than what I’d come up with on my own and scalable and transferable because of its digital format. The course features eight short and engaging videos that guide participants on a hospitable journey toward making a decision for Christ. We structured it as a four-week class, allowing time for solid amounts of discussion and a Q&A time after each session.

Step 3: Launch and promote. We called it “Exploring Christianity” and announced it to the church a few times, asking them to do three things: (1) pray for the class, (2) invite their friends who were “open-but-cautious” toward Christianity, and (3) Participate themselves if they’ve been attending for a while but weren’t yet “all in.”

We also encouraged people to take the class with their friends using simple language such as: “My church is offering a four-week class exploring Christianity. I know you’ve had some questions about church and Jesus. Would you want to take the class with me?”

Step 4: Execute with excellence. We arranged participants in groups of four to six, each led by a trained “host” from the volunteer team. These hosts focused on facilitating discussion and showing hospitality. Rather than pressuring decisions on the spot, they followed up with participants through casual meetings over coffee or lunch.

The results: In our first run, 7 out of the 30 who enrolled were baptized. More importantly, we created an environment where seekers can get acquainted with the Christian faith and members can contribute to a meaningful culture of evangelism in our church.

From strategy to second nature

Seth Godin’s definition of culture is helpful here: “People like us do things like this.” Inculcating evangelism through desacralizing, celebrating, modeling, and formalizing all contribute to establishing norms among a community. With intentional planning and strategic work, pastors, even busy and insecure ones, can move the needle on the evangelistic culture of the churches they lead. You almost certainly won’t be able to pull off all four of these immediately, but even doing one or two of them will begin to shift your church’s instincts when it comes to the lost.

True transformation will take time. But as these practices shape your church’s culture, watch what emerges: Your congregation will grow in evangelistic zeal. As the Spirit works, you may soon find that stories of life change become a regular rhythm. Congregants will excitedly share about the gospel conversations they’re having with neighbors and coworkers. The once hesitant, “Should I share my faith?” transforms into an eager “How can I share it better?” When the church actively and prayerfully joins Jesus on his mission, our Lord is pleased and our own faith is set on fire afresh. Let’s give heaven a reason to rejoice!

Seth Troutt is the teaching pastor at Ironwood Church in Arizona. His doctoral studies focused on Gen Z, digitization, and bodily self-concept. He writes about emotions, gender, parenting, and the intersection of theology and culture. Seth and his wife, Taylor, have two young children.

- More from Seth Troutt

Pastors

The Fire We Carry

Brad Edwards

Pastors may feel pressure to deliver mountaintop moments, but lasting formation is kindled in the steady fire of ordinary faithfulness.

Maciej Chwirot / Unsplash

We all long for the mountaintop experience—transcendent moments of peace that deliver a concentrated dose of significance and meaning. The “meaning crisis” in our culture is evidence that secular culture is not able to provide lasting significance. But it’s also an incredible kingdom opportunity—especially for pastors—if we can help people, both Christian and neighbor alike, rediscover the beautiful ordinariness of the local church.

Of course, that’s a lot easier said than done. As a church planter and pastor, it feels as though I spend 90 percent of my time persuading people to forgo conquering mountains, pursuing experiences, and achieving goals long enough to even taste—never mind savor—the sacred goodness and beauty of abiding in the body of Christ. It’s not unlike persuading someone to trade a mountaintop experience for the “glory” of car camping.

I know, I know. How are a few fleeting moments beneath the beauty of ponderosa pines and purple mountains majesty worth the risk of peace-shattering toddler tantrums and marital spats? That sounds like a mountaintop-adjacent experience at best. Compared to the thrill of conquering rockslides, unexpected weather shifts, partial oxygen deprivation, and all the extraordinary challenges in climbing a mountain, car camping feels like settling for a cheap imitation of glory. No one has ever “made a name for themselves” by mastering the perfect s’more. It’s all too familiar. Too unimpressive. Too … well, ordinary to have lasting significance.

Humanity is endlessly driven and inventive in our attempts to grasp and hold onto extraordinary significance however we can: through conquest, exploration, higher learning, romance, social progress, vocational success, or scientific advancement—just to name a few. In Genesis 11, the builders of the Tower of Babel weren’t simply proud or arrogant; they were driven by the need to “make a name for (them)selves”—to create for themselves the significance every image-bearer is designed to receive from God and refract into the world.

The more post-Christian our culture has become, the less church is seen as a plausible source of meaning and significance—not only to our neighbors, but sometimes even to those sitting in our pews.

In The Reason for Church, I unpack how radical individualism has transformed the modern self into a new Tower of Babel—built brick by brick out of five “Church Defeaters.” Trusting a church to mediate ultimate significance isn’t easy for anyone because we’re all steeping in cultural narratives that insist the only path toward a meaningful life is to “make a name for (your)self.”

But modern Babel is ultimately doomed, and the cracks may finally be starting to show. Across the country, growing disenchantment with everything from politics to technology is catalyzing a refreshing openness to God. Grace sounds amazing; and who doesn’t need at least some forgiveness? But that same disenchantment is leaving many even more closed to the idea that institutions—including the church—have anything to offer in our search for meaning. Compared to the intense experience and achievement of climbing a mountain, church sounds distressingly ordinary.

It is this existential discontent that drives thousands of tourists to flock to Colorado every year to hike or climb one more of our state’s over 50 “14ers”—mountain peaks that rise at least 14,000 feet above sea level. There’s nothing quite like seeing the world, and our place in it, from so near to the heavens. It is a unique perspective—birthed from the combination of extraordinary achievement and spectacular beauty—that makes you feel at once small and significant at the same time.

Personal goals may vary, but every climber, whether consciously aware of it or not, is searching for an experience of truth, goodness, and beauty—something big enough to ignite a life-giving fire within. As C.S. Lewis wrote in his famous sermon The Weight of Glory, we “do not want merely to see beauty … We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.” Whether we use the language of beauty, significance, or meaning, it is glory that sets us building towers and climbing mountains.

Most get a glimpse of that beauty looking at the world from 2½ miles high—but only for a moment. Some tourists even relocate here, hoping proximity will make glory more accessible and emptiness more resistible. But true glory is made more ephemeral and elusive the more we try to recreate it. Too often, our search for significance in the “mountaintop experience” feels like chasing after the wind. Our souls inevitably become restless again because no mountaintop experience is potent enough to continue burning once ordinary life resumes at sea level.

For glory that is both satisfying and sustainable, we need what no 14er can ever hope to compete with: the humble fire pit.

Admittedly, nobody plans a family camping trip specifically to experience the “glory” of a steel-ringed fire pit—if they even think about it at all before arriving. But it is around the ordinary fire pit that extraordinary meaning and significance are kindled.

Like any local church, fire pits are the opposite of sexy. They’re often encrusted with (what you hope is) someone else’s burned breakfast. They’re heavy and clunky. Adjusting the wrought iron grate can produce one of the worst sounds ever heard by the human ear. But fire pits are not, themselves, the point. They are vehicles that contain, shelter, and nourish something much more beautiful and organic.

Campfires are a lot like relationships. They are fickle, living things. Without regular tending, they can quickly fizzle out or even die. Even if you cheat and use the lighter fluid you packed “just in case” to get it started, there are no shortcuts in keeping them going. They still need nurture and care and space to breathe. Too much fuel can leave you burned. Too little, and everyone’s left in the cold.

There is no better way to appreciate a fire pit than trying to build a fire without one. They hold everything together. The same metal walls that protect vulnerable embers from being snuffed out by a stiff wind also maximize fuel and prevent energy leaks by reflecting heat back toward the heart. It still takes work to get a fire started, but fire pits are shelters where life-giving fire is most reliably kindled and sustained.

Therein lies the unexpected goodness and beauty of the humble fire pit.

Fire pits don’t exist for their own sake. We take them for granted because they are so reliable. Each one will bless hundreds of families every year, and yet each goes completely unnoticed, uncelebrated, and maybe even disdained.

Everything that comes after pulling your overpacked car into the parking space—from setting up your tent and unloading the food to arranging your fold-out chairs and tying the dog’s leash to a tree close enough to be with the family but far enough away that they can’t reach the brats sizzling over the flames—everything is dictated by the location of the fire pit. Or at least, it should be. Everyone flourishes to the degree that camp life orbits around it. Failing to do so will make everything that follows more unpredictable, tenuous, and stressful.

And if you’ve ever lingered by the fire long enough, you know: It’s not just about warmth or cooking food. Something deeper happens there in the wake of all the mundane work it took to get situated.

Once you’ve gotten everyone fed and the kids in bed, you realize this isn’t settling at all. That is, unless we’re referring to the sacred stillness that settles on you while watching embers pulse with light. That “settling” settles your soul. It may be one of the only times you truly rest. Time slows to a crawl, and you happily submit to its pace and stop trying to bend it to your will. You revel in the absence of light pollution, your attention too captured by starlight to be distracted by screens. Conversation normally crowded with banal small talk suddenly and naturally overflows with the deeper things you never have time or space to contemplate. At some point while digging the melted marshmallow out from under your fingernails, you remember what it’s like simply to breathe for a moment. To be created without the pressure to self-create.

Each settling moment is a sacred shift in perspective, one even more transcendent than any gain in elevation. Getting to that place requires time. Intention. Stillness. But it makes all the inglorious car packing and did-we-remember-everything angst you went through just hours earlier meaningful and … well, worth it. Significance backfills into our ordinary.

There’s a place for the mountaintop experience. We should aspire to achieve extraordinary things. But neither can be the source of dignity, value, and worth that individualism promises them to be. They simply can’t hold a candle to basking in the relational and creational glory that’s so naturally given and received around an unsexy, wrought iron, well-worn, and stale-food-encrusted fire pit.

Whether climbing a mountain or building a tower, “making a name for ourselves” will always be more attractive to modern people than receiving our identities from God. But we now live in an age where individualism has so saturated our souls with an unholy restlessness that sacred stillness feels impossible anywhere. We wouldn’t recognize holy fire if it singed our eyebrows. So it isn’t surprising that church might feel too much like car-camping, like settling for a lesser version of whatever we’ve staked our worth in being able to find or climb or achieve on our own.

But that’s why the “fire pit” is such an apt (if imperfect) analogy: It’s not about the fire pit any more than it’s about the church. The local church is simply where God’s extraordinary love and grace is ordinarily found. The more the lives of your people orbit the holy fire contained therein, the more your church will become a space where warmth, belonging, presence, perspective, and sacred stillness are ordinarily experienced. Meaning is rekindled every Sunday and carried into every Monday through Saturday. It is not in climbing a mountain but in gathering as God’s people that weary souls are invited to come, sit, breathe, and be made new. In Christ’s name, there is no need to make one for ourselves.

Just like we take the humble fire pit for granted, pastors know how easily we overlook the local church when our lives are most shaped by it. That’s because the body is only good and the bride only beautiful because of Christ. While church may not match the euphoria of a mountain summit, it kindles a far more profound and lasting fire within—one that actually lasts and can be carried into everyday life.

When you gather your people around the ordinary means of Word and table, when they experience Christ’s presence in community, you draw their gaze to the true source of meaning, significance, and purpose. The local church doesn’t promise escape into the extraordinary; instead, it brings our lives into orbit around a holy fire—the living God who meets us in our ordinary moments and imbues them with the very meaning we’ve been searching for all along.

Brad Edwards is the lead pastor of The Table (PCA) in Lafayette, Colorado and author of The Reason for Church.

- More from Brad Edwards

Ideas

Neither Pity nor Pedestal

Kate Lucky

Staff Editor

Even if a pronatalist proposal to honor mothers in the halls of power is well-intended, it’s missing the point.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

This spring, the Trump administration is reportedly entertaining a “chorus of ideas … for persuading Americans to get married and have more children.”

Some of the proposals are straightforward: cash payments for new moms and a more generous child tax credit. Others are slantwise: earmarked Fulbright scholarships, menstrual cycle education, endometriosis research, and loosened car seat laws.

And then there’s the National Medal of Motherhood, to be bestowed upon women with more than six children.

That idea came via a draft executive order from Simone and Malcolm Collins, two of the most provocative figures in an informal pronatalist coalition of conservative, religious, family-values types and catastrophist techno-utopians. Members of the latter group, the Collinses believe that declining birth rates will prove apocalyptic and that having children is a civilization-saving imperative.

Simone, now gearing up for her fifth birth, isn’t yet eligible for her proposed medal. But she hopes to have at least three more children, ideally as many as ten. She hones her body for IVF-facilitated pregnancies staggered an even nine months apart, walking on a standing-desk treadmill and eating no-sugar yogurt. Her repeated C-sections are medically risky. But she would be “happy to die in labor,” she says, for the cause of more kids.

Not just any kids, though. The Collinses select embryos optimized for high IQ scores and future health, consenting to have only the children they believe will be genetically superior. Embryos with high risk factors for cancer or schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s or depression or anxiety will not be chosen. This isn’t eugenics, they insist, but polygenics—not ableist engineering but innocuous parental choice.

It’s good that the Collinses, given the size of their platform, are explicitly antieugenics. But, to put it mildly, “polygenics” also gives me the ick. Even assuming good intentions, selecting for eye color or math skills or a sense of humor is a slippery slope at best, a sheer cliff at worst. It would be easy to fall off the edge, to crash away from the Christian conception of human dignity—bestowed merely by dint of being made in God’s image, which very much includes people with low IQs and cancer diagnoses.

The National Medal of Motherhood gives me the ick for related reasons. It’s true that present-day plunging birthrates are a legitimately novel situation in human history. My toddler son may live to see the global population peak and begin a steep downhill slide.

But though guilt by similarity is unfair, I can’t help but notice that such honorifics have been awarded before, by the Nazis and the Soviets and other authoritarian regimes. The medal idea isn’t a novel solution to our novel problem. The undertone (really, the overtone) has been Do your civic duty, ladies, and birth the right kind of citizens.

Historical precedent aside, I’ll again assume good intentions (more difficult given some of the white nationalist bedfellows who attend gatherings like NatCon—but I digress). What’s so bad about honoring mothers? I can imagine medal proponents protesting. It’s Mother’s Day! What’s wrong with breakfast in bed, a bouquet of flowers, a nice gold medal for the woman who raised you—especially seven of you?

In a word: nothing. I have only one kid, but I hope he scribbles a card and gives it to me this Sunday. A medal, though? From the government? It strikes me as an exercise in missing the point.

I’ve been following the pronatalists with interest in the months since I became a mother; these days, I’m feeling very pro-child, mine and everyone else’s. The pronatalist label has baggage (see the aforementioned ick, the Elon Musk “breeding spree,” and goofy ideas like parents getting more votes in elections). But I’m entirely on board with the “pretty unobjectionable” premise, as Elizabeth Bruenig puts it, that “having children is good and ought to be supported by society.”

Reasonable promotion might include cash subsidies or new car seat laws or more infertility research. But at the very least it requires a shift in how we talk and think about mothers: not as martyrs “in hell” but also not as national heroes bedecked with ribbons.

It seems as if these two cultural caricatures are diametrically opposed. One side has “childless cat ladies” and vacationing DINKs. It has the harried moms of hell themselves, bedraggled and lonely and depleted. On the other: the tradwives, churning butter while wearing lipstick, benevolent and beloved queens of their homes. Also Simone Collins, doing her duty at risk of death.

But really, these caricatures aren’t as different as they seem. They share the same idea of motherhood as not just sacrifice but self-abnegation, not just difficult but so horrific as to deserve either condescending pity or simpering praise. One side sees moms as less than human, in danger of “losing themselves.” Another sees moms as more than human, heroes to be put on a pedestal. Both are, well, dehumanizing.

For me—and, I think, for most mothers—neither pity nor pedestals do motherhood justice.

Cringe as it may be to admit, being a mom is a blessing. Often, taking care of my toddler makes me happy. We blow bubbles and eat sandwiches. This week, he learned the word star. But when caregiving is not happy, when I am cradling and rocking and administering medicine, well, there’s joy there, in the rocking chairs and emergency rooms. Calling tantrums and teething “joy” can sound like public relations for parenting. What can I say? I have found motherhood a liberation even in its limitations. In losing myself, I’ve found myself. This is not a pitiable condition.

I shouldn’t be so surprised. We must lose our lives for Christ to keep them (Matt. 16:24–25). It’s more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35). Being “poured out” is not at odds with being filled up (Phil. 2:17–18).

But having a baby does not a saint make. Motherhood can create the conditions for sanctification, yet it is certainly not sufficient. I’m in some ways more inclined to sin as a parent: I’m newly insular (safety for my baby!) and greedy (money for my baby!). Contrary to what horror stories from pews and airplanes suggest, being a mom still comes with status, praise from old folks in the grocery store and doting aunties at church. That attention makes me prideful and self-satisfied. Imagine if there were a medal thrown in.

Respectability, it turns out, is not a Christian virtue. The prize we’re running for is not civic duty or familial bliss, though we may get those thrown in. It’s the “upward call of God in Christ Jesus,” accessible to all (Phil. 3:14, ESV).

Might that simple truth take some pressure off our conversations about parenthood? Might it even be pronatalist in its realism and faithfulness, understanding children and the women who birth them as neither tools nor burdens? Motherhood needn’t subsume a woman—for better or for worse. Children are a “heritage from the Lord,” not a project to be optimized or imposed (Ps. 127:3).

Christians are called to care for the vulnerable—which looks more like meal trains for new moms than public accolades. This Mother’s Day, my church won’t do much to mark the holiday, and I think that’s for the best. I know of fellow congregants whose mothers have died, whose mothers abused them, who want children but don’t have them. If caring for them, as they’ve cared for me, means forgoing my from-the-pulpit kudos and flowers, that seems like a small price to pay.

I don’t need commendation from the church or the state. From my child? That’s another story. See the fifth commandment. See Proverbs. To my son—to my husband—take note. I wouldn’t mind breakfast in bed.

Kate Lucky is the senior editor of culture and engagement at Christianity Today.

- More from Kate Lucky

Ideas

Japanese Evangelicalism Was Once Nationalistic

Kazusa Okaya

Contributor

Making Christianity great again by means of political control is tempting. That didn’t work in my country.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Pexels

In the past, I never had any issues with describing myself as an evangelical while living in Japan. But after the first election of Donald Trump as US president in 2016, I struggled to identify with the term, as it became a politically charged label among the Japanese.

My discomfort with calling myself evangelical has only increased since Trump’s second term began. I felt distressed when a Japanese non-Christian friend asked me, “So are you the same kind of evangelical Christian who supports Trump?”

I am not the only Japanese believer who feels alienated from this identity.

Last November, a new Christian wrote a letter to the hosts of a Japanese evangelical YouTube talk show saying she had recently started going to an evangelical church. “But the news tells me that evangelicals are all radical Trump supporters,” she wrote. “Do I also have to support Trump if I become a Christian? I feel scared.”

Less than 1 percent of the Japanese population identifies as Christian, and evangelicals like myself constitute roughly a quarter of that demographic. But when some American evangelicals portray their country as a Christian nation, zealously support a president devoid of Christian piety, venerate their army, and embrace gun ownership, I wonder whether we are speaking of the same group.

The word evangelical now has an uneasy association with American nationalism, an association that has been brewing since Trump’s first term in 2017. This has led to a profound disconnect between Japanese evangelical identity and the perceived political and cultural direction of American evangelicalism.

As much as we Japanese evangelicals have our American counterparts to thank for spreading the gospel to our country, many of us are increasingly frustrated with aspects of American Christianity. We emphatically reject the commingling of the faith with nationalism and strongly advocate pacifism because of our own compromises leading up to and during World War II.

Japanese evangelicalism flourished under the influence of American missionary movements in the 20th century. The 1967 Billy Graham crusade in Tokyo, where around 15,000 people registered commitments to Christ, marked a turning point for Japanese evangelicals. It was the first major interdenominational event that brought evangelical churches together and later catalyzed the establishment of the Japan Evangelical Association (JEA).

But scores of other American missionaries were ministering in Japan for decades before Graham did. Following World War II, two US-based missionary organizations—Send International and The Evangelical Alliance Mission (TEAM)—planted numerous churches across Japan. Many of these congregations later formed the foundation of Japan Alliance Christ Church, the country’s largest evangelical denomination (255 churches), and the Japan Evangelical Church Association (194 churches).

TEAM missionaries founded Japanese Christian publisher Word of Life Press in 1950, and InterVarsity missionary Irene Webster Smith purchased a house that would later become the Ochanomizu Christian Center, a central office for evangelical denominations and parachurch organizations. Smith also helped Japanese university students form InterVarsity Japan, which is known as Kirisutosha Gakusei Kai (KGK, Fellowship of Christian Students) today.

American evangelicals didn’t just plant churches and institutions in Japan, though. They also shaped and formed the Japanese evangelical mind.

Much of this work took place on American shores as emerging Japanese leaders headed to the States in pursuit of theological education. Later, they returned to Japan to seed and grow Christian scholarship on home soil. Notable evangelicals include Akira Hatori, a Fuller Theological Seminary graduate who cofounded Japan Bible Seminary in 1958, and Susumu Uda, a Westminster Theological Seminary graduate who was one of the founding members of the Japan Evangelical Theological Society in 1970.

American Christian literature also served as a crucial resource for Japanese believers. Many of my Christian friends read Joshua Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye when they were teenagers and devoured Tim Keller’s Meaning of Marriage after graduating from college. The Japanese translation of Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology, first introduced in 2000, is still among the most widely used seminary textbooks today.

Unsurprisingly, Japanese evangelicals have historically adopted many doctrines from American evangelicalism. One of the most important developments was the Statement on Biblical Authority in 1987. This document arose from the inerrancy debate in America, which spilled over to Japan in the 1980s as many Japanese leaders were studying in US seminaries. Deeply influenced by the Chicago statement of inerrancy, Japanese evangelicals likewise declared that every word of Scripture is God-given.

Not everyone appreciated how profoundly American evangelical thought influenced Japanese evangelical Christianity. For instance, in a 2019 article, pastor-theologian Mitsuru Fujimoto criticized American theological imposition and questioned whether Japanese evangelicals were merely “inheriting the problems and challenges of fundamentalism.”

Yet two key divergences between American and Japanese evangelicalism existed. Japan’s evangelicals repudiated nationalism and embraced pacifism, expressing core values formally articulated in JEA’s 2015 statement, which marked the 70th anniversary of World War II:

In post–World War II Japan, there were two pillars on which we evangelical Christian churches, churches believing the Bible to be the infallible Word of God, rallied. The first was the confrontation with liberal theology, which neglected the normative nature and the authority of Scripture. Second was confrontation with Japanese nationalism, which advocated the imperial system and the state Shinto religion, which suppressed and subjugated confessions of faith in Christ being the only Lord during wartime.

The statement’s focus on biblical authority and antinationalism came out of the twin failures of the Japanese church before and during World War II. In that period, theological liberalism had intertwined with nationalism to create a distinctive “Japanese Christianity,” which interpreted imperial conquest as a means of building God’s kingdom.

Prominent 20th-century theologian Danjo Ebina, for instance, viewed the Japanese colonization of Korea as a means of Christianization. In a speech to Korean Christian youth in 1910, right before Japan annexed Korea, Ebina proclaimed that God was building his kingdom by uniting Koreans and Japanese together in the advancement of the gospel.

This desire to marry church and state also seeped into Japanese sanctuaries. In 1941, the government forcefully merged several Japanese Protestant denominations to form the United Church of Christ in Japan. During services, Christians bowed to the imperial palace and sang the country’s national anthem, which was included in church hymnals. These practices stopped only after World War II ended in 1945.

Such nationalistic inclinations emerged due to the “minority complex” that many Japanese Christians held, according to historian Yoichi Yamaguchi. Because Christianity had faced persecution in Japan for 250 years, Japanese Christians at the time felt that they had to play a more active role in contributing to the state to gain a positive reputation.

Things changed after World War II. Japanese evangelicals started pushing back against a militant nationalism that controlled various expressions of the faith in Japan. They adopted an alternative ideology: pacifism. They vowed to serve no master but Christ and to be ambassadors of peace.

After years—or in some cases, decades—of reflection, numerous Japanese denominations began issuing public statements of repentance for practicing nationalistic syncretism and for supporting the war. “Above all, we repent before God the sin committed by our church, of idolatrous worship at Shinto shrines and of devotion to the Emperor,” one public confession, issued by the Japan Holiness Church in 1997, read. “Therefore, we apologize to the other Asian nations and their churches that our mission to these nations cooperated with the war effort, following the path [of] the Japanese war of aggression.”

This postwar pacifist stance has endured to the present day. For most Japanese believers, seeking peace and opposing nationalism are reflections of our commitment to Scripture. There is no greater authority than Christ (Col. 1:16). Christians are called to be peacemakers (Matt. 5:9) and ambassadors of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:20) in this broken world. Most Japanese evangelicals do not believe that Christianity can be married to nationalism or that warfare and the tools of violence can be objects of fascination rather than lament.

But on the other side of the Pacific, an unholy alliance seems to be emerging between militant nationalism and evangelicalism—a dangerous trajectory that Japanese evangelicals know well.

To be sure, some American evangelicals have been sounding the alarm on how Christianity and nationalism are incompatible. “Christian nationalism takes the name of Christ for a worldly political agenda, proclaiming that its program is the political program for every true believer,” Paul D. Miller wrote for CT. “That is wrong in principle, no matter what the agenda is, because only the church is authorized to proclaim the name of Jesus and carry his standard into the world.”

I understand and empathize with many American evangelicals who feel that their nation is facing a critical moment in which Christianity is no longer the moral majority. Making Christianity great again by means of political control is an easy temptation, especially when the country’s founding included various Christian elements.

Yet as the Japanese historian Yamaguchi has pointed out, holding on to a minority complex and a desire for political influence was the driving force behind Japanese Christians’ failure in adhering to a nationalistic Christianity before and during World War II.

Hear and heed these warning bells that reverberate from Japanese evangelicals’ painful history—one that seems to be repeating and refashioning itself in American dress.

Kazusa Okaya is a PhD candidate at Durham University and a steering committee member of Lausanne Younger Leaders Generation Japan.

- More from Kazusa Okaya

Culture

Israel Houghton Is Praising God—in Spanish

Interview by Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

An exuberant album by the veteran recording artist and his wife seeks to steward the centuries-old tradition of coritos.

Courtesy of Israel Houghton

When Israel Houghton and his band, Israel & New Breed, released the album Feels Like Home, Vol. 1 in 2021, one track had fans asking for more: “Coritos Medley.” The eight-minute song, featuring a series of linked praise choruses, captured Spanish-speaking listeners, who immediately recognized a style and practice their faith communities have long treasured.

The enthusiastic response to “Coritos Medley” prompted Houghton and his wife, Adrienne Houghton, to consider producing a full album of coritos—short, easy-to-learn praise choruses. Israel is a seven-time Grammy winner and veteran Christian recording artist; his music fuses gospel, jazz, and Latin American influences. Adrienne Houghton (née Bailon) is a recording artist and entertainer who started her career as a member of the pop group 3LW and a lead cast member of the Disney film The Cheetah Girls.

Both Houghtons sang coritos as children—Adrienne in her Hispanic Pentecostal congregation and Israel in his multiethnic church in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Both of them want to see more Spanish-speaking churches embrace the musical tradition today.

Coritos are ecumenical and transnational, sung by both Catholic and Protestant congregations and appearing across the Spanish-speaking diaspora. The history of the corito is complicated, obscured by the fact that the music predates modern copyright systems. Passed down through marginalized communities, the genre has often been carried to new places by displaced groups and immigrants.

“Coritos are simple tunes with repetitive words that people sing by heart,” said Rosa Cándida Ramírez, associate pastor of spiritual formation at La Fuente Ministries in Pasadena, California. “For Latina Christians, coritos are the footprints of faith of our spiritual foremothers and forefathers. They are the songs of the diaspora.”

The coritos tradition is generally vernacular; most worshipers learn the songs aurally, without musical notation or written lyrics. (Recently, though, a hymnal from GIA publishing produced notated versions of some widely known coritos.) In practice, the songs are often arranged in medleys called cadenas, or chains. Musicians and congregations create novel blends of choruses, linked together by musical transitions and sometimes connected by theological themes.

Coritos have generally fallen out of fashion with Latino Protestants, who increasingly use contemporary worship music produced in the US, the UK, and Australia. But Ramírez said this isn’t the first time in recent memory that an artist has sought to breathe new life into them; Marcos Witt recorded and helped repopularize some coritos in the 1990s. More recently, the popular Guatemalan group Miel San Marcos included a medley of coritos on their 2023 album, Evangelio.

Israel and Adrienne Houghton spoke with CT about Coritos, Vol. 1, their personal experiences with coritos, and their hopes for the music they are contributing to the repertoire of the global church. Their responses have been edited for clarity and length.

There might not be a simple definition of this varied, widely used genre, but can you give us a little explainer? What is a corito?

Israel Houghton: A corito is no different than a well-known chorus, in evangelical speak. Think about “Amazing Grace.” These are little one- or two-section songs—maybe a verse and a chorus. They carry so much meaning; they have so much nostalgia and memory attached to them.

As we’ve recorded these coritos, we’re finding out in real time how connective they are, even for people who don’t speak Spanish. They hear a corito and say, “I don’t know what you’re saying, but I want to be a part of it. I want to sing it. I want to dance to it.”

Adrienne Houghton: Growing up in the Hispanic Pentecostal church, we put these songs into medleys so that each one would connect to the next.

Israel: It’s musical Jenga.

Adrienne: Exactly. That sort of medley creating is a really special aspect of these coritos. Like Israel said, they are nostalgic. People have told us, “My grandmother used to sing this song to me before I went to bed.” During the process of putting the album together, we made a list of songs my family and other church members knew. Someone would sing me a voice note and send it over, like, “Oh, remember this one?”

Is Coritos, Vol. 1 primarily recordings of these older coritos, or did you also write some originals?

Israel: There are four original songs. The rest of them are so old that they’re in the public domain now.

Adrienne: They’re so old that we don’t know who wrote them. They were written by a congregation, then passed around. And the odd thing about them is that although a lot of the songs I grew up singing were brought from Puerto Rico to New York, they were also sung in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia. How did these songs even get there? We don’t know.

Israel: It really has felt like we are stewards of this tradition. We didn’t want to create something that felt tossed together. You know the difference between walking into a restaurant and tasting something that was microwaved in the back versus somebody’s mama making it.

Among Spanish-speaking Christians both in the US and in Latin America, have coritos been continuously included in worship? Or have they fallen out of use in recent decades? Praise choruses were popular in American churches in the ’80s and ’90s, but they went out of style in the mid-2000s as contemporary worship music evolved. Is there a similar story here?

Adrienne: This project is absolutely helping to revive the coritos tradition. It had kind of disappeared. People weren’t singing them anymore; they would have been considered passé.

Israel: It’s like Extreme Home Makeover in the best way. We’re taking these antiques and going, “Oh my gosh, I haven’t seen one of these in years! Imagine if we polished it up and got the greatest musicians in the world and honored these songs.”

The energy of these coritos is so celebratory and exuberant. One of the complaints I often hear from worship leaders is that they have a hard time finding energetic, upbeat, joyful songs. It’s not really the dominant vibe right now when it comes to popular contemporary worship music. What do you think we lose when we don’t have songs like this in regular rotation?

Israel: I can’t wait to answer this question. I think we have enough heaviness and bad news in the world—minor keys, so to speak. I need these infusions of joy and simplicity. The more I walk with God, the more I require simplicity.

We’re four and a half years removed from a global pandemic, and now we’re wondering, “Can we get our legs back? Can we have some lighthearted moments?”

Adrienne: God deserves celebratory praise. He deserves a whole fiesta of worship, and that’s what we were able to do with this project.

On our first clip of the song “Coritos de Fuego,” the main comment was, “I wanna be in that room.” I want to be in a room like that, where people are worshiping God with their whole hearts and dancing and singing.

Adrienne, you mentioned growing up singing these songs, and it sounds as if coritos are part of a vernacular, word-of-mouth tradition. That strikes me as an inclusive approach to worship for children. Could you talk more about the formative power of these songs in childhood?

Adrienne: I joke with my mom that I know the Bible melodically, because of songs. I’ve been in services where a preacher is about to read the Word of God and I can finish the Scripture because I know a song with that verse in it. When we sing these songs, we are literally singing the Word of God. When children are memorizing these songs, they are learning the Word of God.

We have a two-year-old son who can sing almost all of “Coritos de Fuego” [a song from the album], and I now have a son who will forever know those verses. Those things stay with you. I sometimes deal with a fear of flying. I’ve been on airplanes, and songs will come back to me in scary moments.

It’s such an honor and privilege to give these songs to the next generation because I know the impact they have had on my life. When you plant those seeds in your children, they never depart from them.

Many primarily English-speaking Christians do not sing translated worship songs; they’re used to having their own music translated for other people. Do you think you’re going to translate some of these songs into English?

Israel: I went into this project knowing I wanted to write a song or two that, when we translate it into English, it’s just as effective. Then when someone asks, “Where did this song come from?” we can say, “It’s a song from Latin America.” We have some attempts at that on the record, like the song “Digno.”

That would be the ultimate bridge right there—to be connecting people across languages and generations.

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

News

Boko Haram Ripped Apart Her Life. A Decade Later, It’s Still Torn.

Emmanuel Nwachukwu

A Christian widow stranded in a displacement camp works and prays for a better future.

A group of civilians sits on the ground at Durumi Internally Displaced Persons camp in Nigeria.

Anadolu / Getty

Each morning, Jennifer Abraham wakes up before dawn, her breath visible in the chill morning breeze. She picks up her worn wooden broomstick and dustpan to tidy three 15-by-20-foot classrooms, where 500 children ages 6 to 12 will cram in for the day’s lessons. They are in Durumi camp, one of the 18 makeshift shelters set up for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Abuja, Nigeria. Forty-year-old Abraham stoops as she sweeps plastic bags, crumbs, and dried mud from under old desks and wobbly chairs. “This is how I survive and feed my family,” she said.

In the sprawling Durumi camp, residents face harsh living conditions. Half-roofed, poorly maintained apartments leave the camp’s 2,900 residents exposed to heat and rain—the aftermath of a partial demolition of Durumi in late 2022. The children are thin, their skin pale and fragile from malnutrition. Safe water can come at a cost, and residents scrape by with meager resources.

“There is not enough to go around,” Abraham said.

The lack of toilets forces residents to defecate in the open, putting them at risk for health hazards like cholera and diarrhea. With more than 3.3 million IDPs reported to live in Nigeria, camps like Durumi struggle to meet residents’ basic needs.

Survival in the camps may become even harder for IDPs like Abraham as United Nations aid organizations begin to pull out of Nigeria due to slashed budgets and as US foreign aid cuts create uncertainty among nonprofits. Funding from Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency has also dried up.

Under-Secretary-General Tom Fletcher of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warned in a letter of “a wave of brutal cuts” driven by a nearly $60 million funding shortfall for 2025. Meanwhile, Nigeria’s government is attempting to make up for a drop in health aid from the United States by approving $200 million in health-related spending. In 2023, the US provided more than $600 million in health aid.

Local foundations in Nigeria, such as Buni Yadi and Betharbel, can’t keep up with growing needs. The continued influx of people fleeing Boko Haram attacks—as well as giving birth within the camps—puts extra pressure on already-stretched resources.

Abraham remembers life before Durumi—when funding shortfalls didn’t threaten survival. She grew up in Nigeria’s northeastern state of Adamawa surrounded by vibrant traditional celebrations and bustling markets. She married Abraham Musa, an Ascot Petroleum Company employee, and built a family with four children—Susan, Margaret, Favour, and Miracle (now 21, 19, 17, and 13, respectively)—in Gwoza, a town in the neighboring state of Borno.

Their lives took a sudden turn when Boko Haram insurgents attacked Gwoza and its surrounding towns in 2014. The insurgents abducted women and children, burned houses, shot and killed hundreds of civilians, and pursued escapees into the bush.

“We left everything behind,” Jennifer Abraham recalled. “Women ran with their babies on their backs. Families were scattered, and some were never united again. For days we hid under trees in the bush, sometimes sneaking into nearby houses to quickly prepare a meal.”

Abraham and her family spent weeks on the run, fleeing hundreds of kilometers away to Durumi. She thought they would rebuild their lives there, but tragedy struck in August 2015 when a group of unidentified men ambushed her husband near the camp. He died in National Hospital Abuja five days later.

“Fleeing Gwoza was painful. But losing my husband was worse. He was my strength in this camp,” she told Christianity Today.

Since then, Abraham has frequently changed jobs—doing everything from trading to cooking to cleaning—to provide for her children and pay for their education. Two of her daughters have graduated from high school and are waiting for college.

“Whenever I feel like giving up, I remember my children,” she said. “My life is more meaningful because of them.” After her husband died, her children became her source of strength. But sometimes even that strength is threatened.

Health care has always been minimal. Nurses and doctors from nonprofits paid periodic visits to the camps with drugs and immunizations for babies. Now their visits have almost disappeared.

In early April, Favour fell ill with malaria, a life-threatening disease common in the camp’s mosquito-infested environment. The hospital turned her away after learning Abraham couldn’t pay the fees.

“I couldn’t afford the drugs this time,” Abraham said. She watched her sick daughter at home, praying for her recovery.

Like many others in the camp, Abraham worries about the loss of resources and how to rise above life in the camp. She doesn’t expect to return home to Gwoza since Boko Haram insurgents continue to attack communities in northern Nigeria. But Abraham said she is determined to leave the camp someday and build a happy home her husband would be proud of.

“I don’t know when,” she said, “but soon, God help me. Soon.”

- More from Emmanuel Nwachukwu

Give Today

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

related

related

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

1. Desacralize the work of evangelism.

2. Celebrate what you want to see replicated.

3. Model it by addressing non-Christians in your sermons.

4. Formalize it with a dedicated evangelism environment.

From strategy to second nature

Share

Share

Share

Share

related

related

related

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related