The Math Behind Christ’s Care for Our Flourishing

I was curious about how Jesus allotted his time on earth—and what Christians could learn from it.

$An image of Jesus helping a woman, with a glitchy computer texture and binary code.$

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Unsplash, WikiMedia Commons

What is God’s heart? What does he value? What relative importance does he place on the different facets of our flourishing? He certainly cares for our spiritual lives, but what of our physical health, our social connectedness to our communities, our mental health, our economic welfare? The answers to these questions have powerful implications for how we should love our neighbors, both locally and globally.

As a development economist and as a Christian, I find these questions particularly important. A significant part of my research studies the overall effectiveness of international development organizations like World Vision and Compassion International. But to do this, one needs to do two things: (1) Carefully estimate impacts on different human outcomes and (2) assess the relative importance of those impacted areas within a sound framework of human flourishing.

The first of these is more technical in nature, the second more philosophical. It caused me to reflect as a Christian: What constitutes a positively impacted life? Spiritual growth? Higher income? Social harmony? Better physical or mental health? And since a central mission of most Christian development organizations is to follow Christ’s example in his engagement with the poor, it led me to an objective study of how Jesus engaged with human need, a study that in turn deepened my relationship with God.

What first prompted this was an impact evaluation project with Hope Walks, a Christian organization that funds clubfoot interventions for children in low-income countries. As a congenital disability, clubfoot is only vaguely familiar to most Americans. It is so easily and fully treatable in infancy that we rarely see a person living with this untreated abnormality. Indeed, some world-class American athletes like Mia Hamm and Troy Aikman were born with clubfoot.

But in low-income countries, clubfoot often goes untreated. Many people begging on the streets of poor countries were born with congenital abnormalities like clubfoot. Ever wonder who comprises the “least of these” on a global scale? Many of them are people born with congenital abnormalities to poor families in poor countries.

I was stunned at how devastating clubfoot is for various aspects of human flourishing. Our research team—Patrizio Piraino, Gianna Camacho, and I—found that compared to the life outcomes of their nearest-age siblings, the lives of children in Ethiopia who went untreated for clubfoot were shattered by this congenital abnormality. The statistics painted a disheartening picture of being relatively immobile, socially excluded, suffering poor mental health, and failing in school.

These children were also suffering spiritually, according to our interviews with family members and siblings, less likely to believe God cared for them and uninvolved in church and youth activities. Their physical disability bled profusely into their spiritual, social, academic, and emotional lives.

But we found that treating this congenital abnormality in infancy largely restored human flourishing in all of these areas. Because the consequences of untreated clubfoot are so grim in a low-income country like Ethiopia, and because the Ponseti treatment that Hope Walks employs (casting for one to 2 months and then bracing at night until age 5) is so ubiquitously effective, the impacts of this clubfoot intervention on human flourishing were greater than any poverty intervention I have studied.

I wanted people to understand how human flourishing changed so dramatically with clubfoot treatment, even compared to health and poverty alleviation programs offered by other excellent Christian nonprofits. And showing its overall impact on human flourishing led me to my challenge: How are we to assign relative importance to the various facets of our well-being in a way that reflects God’s priorities for his children?

A fascinating concept in economics is called “revealed preference”—the idea that we can infer a person’s values by observing how they allocate their money and time. It’s as if we can peer into a person’s soul by looking at their choices.

Might we also learn something of God’s heart by examining how Jesus devoted his time on earth across different aspects of human need? Jesus in his earthly ministry had to make choices about how to allocate his limited time, just as we do.

I decided to go through the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ interactions with people—conversations, teachings, and healings—and digitally categorize all 171 recorded interactions (as delineated by New International Version subchapter headings) based on which of the following five different facets of human need he was addressing: (1) purely spiritual, (2) physical needs, (3) social inclusion, (4) mental health, and (5) economic needs.

I allowed two categories maximum for each encounter. To ensure these categorizations reflected the consensus of a diverse group of Christian leaders, I assembled a theological team made up of a Presbyterian pastor (Al Tizon), a Catholic theologian (Mark Miller), a Protestant theologian (Kent Annan), and parachurch workers with InterVarsity (Jackie Tisthammer) and Cru (Lori Kepner), all experts in New Testament manuscript studies, to carry out the same exercise. Below are pie charts showing the team’s consensus categorizations of Jesus’ engagement with different human needs:

Published with permission, courtesy of Bruce Wydick.

In a quest for maximum objectivity, I brought in Richard Zhang, my friend with a PhD in computer science from Berkeley. Zhang works for Google DeepMind on its Gemini AI platform and leads the organization Christians for AI, a group of wonderfully nerdy believers. I asked Richard to create an optimal AI prompt for me to similarly categorize the 171 human interactions of Jesus into the five bins. He got to work and engineered a gargantuan prompt to carry out the task.

I fed the prompt into Perplexity AI, a large-language model that excels at categorization. Perplexity AI’s categorization of Jesus’ engagement across human needs showed even an even more holistic division of concern than the collective categorizations of the theologians. The result of these exercises is shown in the pie charts below:

Published with permission, courtesy of Bruce Wydick.

While Christians already know from Scripture and experience that God cares for all of the different facets of our well-being, this analysis provided some statistical insight outside of any possible denominational or ideological slant. It is simply what exists in the New Testament “data.”

It occurred to me during this exercise that, to prove he was God, all of Christ’s miracles could have simply been spiritual displays of power, miracles of the shock-and-awe variety, like calming storms or walking on water. But they weren’t. Instead, most of his miracles involve meeting various human needs: people’s physical ailments (restoring sight, mobility), their social inclusion (healing of lepers), their economic shortages (loaves and fishes), and maybe even their mental health—“Peace be with you,” (John 20:21). His miracles show how much the God of the universe cares about all these different facets of us that make us happy, healthy human beings.

From seeing Jesus’ priorities in action, we know he didn’t come to establish a strictly spiritual gospel, or a merely social gospel, or just an economic gospel, or just a psychologically comforting gospel. Want a one-dimensional religion? Well, it’s not Christianity. Jesus does prioritize more of his time in the Gospels to addressing our relationship to him and his Father than any other single facet of human flourishing. But it’s clear that he cares about all facets of our lives.

Perhaps most importantly to me as a development economist, obtaining some sense of Jesus’ relative concern across these areas of human flourishing is a helpful conceptual tool in assessing the impact of Christian organizations.

Take Hope Walks, for example. The negative impacts of clubfoot on a person’s life are shown in the diagram as the dark spaces between the colored segments and the outer edges of the chart, compared to data from their nearest-age sibling. The positive impact of Hope Walks’ intervention is then seen to the right in the lighter-colored areas; it reveals substantially restored flourishing to a child born with clubfoot. (The academic article detailing this research appeared in January in the journal Health Economics.)

Published with permission, courtsey of Bruce Wydick.

We compared the impacts of the Hope Walks intervention to other celebrated and more well-known development programs using our biblically based index of human flourishing, discovering that the impacts of the Hope Walks intervention were larger than any other Christian intervention for which we could find reliable impact data.

For a mere $500 intervention, its impact on these children born with clubfoot can be described as nothing short of totally transformative. Hope Walks truly packs a punch against poverty, social and spiritual exclusion, and multiple dimensions of human suffering.

Jesus loves all of us, not just every individual person, but all of us, deeply caring for every facet of our lives. He loves us and wants us to flourish completely. Supporting organizations whose work significantly and positively impacts every facet of human flourishing is a great way to show Christ’s love to others across the globe.

Bruce Wydick is professor of economics and international studies at the University of San Francisco, adjunct professor at the University of California at Davis, and distinguished research affiliate at the University of Notre Dame.

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Theology

Communion, Sex, and God’s Created Order

Kyle Wells

Our bundled partisanship misses Scripture’s focus on the body.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons, Unsplash

It’s disorienting to live in Christian community in the United States today. Those who agree on Jesus, read the same Scriptures, and confess the same creeds diverge sharply on the weightiest moral questions of our time, especially around sexuality, racial injustice, and care for the created world. The issue is not just that Christians arrive at different conclusions, but that we often seem to be navigating the world by different maps.

What is particularly disconcerting is the sense that often conversations around sexuality, racial injustice, and care for the created world betray one’s political affiliation more than one’s biblical and theological reasoning. For example, the Pew Research Center shows Christian attitudes about climate change align more closely with partisan identity than with confessional commitments. Over time, partisan identity (with its bundling of priorities) increasingly shapes not only individual judgments but also our sense of which moral conclusions naturally belong together.

I want to propose a different map, one that recovers an ancient, biblical understanding of the body and its relation to the world. Scripture consistently speaks of bodies as participatory—both formed by what they share in and shaped by the powers they yield to. Bodies are how people are bound to one another, to the world they inhabit, and to whichever lord they serve. Seen this way, the body provides a unifying framework for Christian moral reasoning.

Much of our moral confusion begins with a way of understanding the body that feels obvious to us but sits uneasily with how Scripture speaks about embodied life. We tend to treat bodies as private and self-contained. Bodies are something we have, rather than something that situates us within relations we did not choose and cannot escape.

This way of imagining the body is not natural or inevitable. Modern Western life trains us to see ourselves as autonomous individuals, sealed off from one another and from the world we inhabit. Our instincts about freedom, responsibility, and harm are shaped by this inheritance, so that bodily life appears fundamentally private.

Paul assumes something very different. Repeatedly he describes human existence as participatory—lived in Christ or in Adam, within the old creation or the new (1 Cor. 15:35–50). Bodies are how people are joined to one another, embedded in the created world, and drawn under competing forms of rule.

In the ancient world, bodies scaled outward. A person could be a body, but so could a household, a city, a people, even a planet—each a living whole ordered within a larger created reality. Paul assumes that human bodies are caught up in these larger networks of relationships—these “bodies.” Human bodies are porous and connected, shaped by shared practices, social bonds, and spiritual powers. To belong to a body is not a metaphor for association; it is an acceptance of how combinatorial life is and a description of how life actually functions.

So Paul speaks about ordinary practices—like eating, worshiping, and gathering—in ways that reject modern assumptions. When he writes, “We, who are many, are one body, for we all share the one loaf,” he assumes that bodies gathered around a table become one body through what they share (1 Cor. 10:17). Christians cannot “have a part in both the Lord’s table and the table of demons,” because to give oneself bodily to a practice is to be bound to and shaped by the power that stands behind it (v. 21). Bodies, then, are not only sites of connection but also the places where loyalty is formed and enacted.

Given these ancient assumptions, Paul’s frequent talk of “bodies” no longer sounds like loose metaphor but like a coherent way of seeing the world. He can speak of a “body of Christ,” a “body of sin,” or a “body of death” because bodies are where lives are bound together under a shared rule—Christ, or sin and death (Rom. 6:6, 7:24 ESV).

This is the world presupposed by Paul’s stark declaration that “you are not your own” (1 Cor. 6:19). The phrase is often heard as a moral restriction. In fact, it names a prior Scriptural reality: Bodies always already belong somewhere and to someone. The only question is not whether our bodies are claimed, but by whom. Neutral bodies do not exist.

The resurrection of Jesus gives Paul’s vision of the body its full ethical weight. God has raised Jesus bodily from the dead and united believers’ bodies to his glorified body, establishing a new lordship that reaches into embodied life now (Rom. 6:1–14). What happens in and through the body now bears witness to which power truly rules, and where the world itself is headed.

This vision gives Christian ethics its map. The question is no longer simply “What should I do?” Instead, it is “What am I being joined to? What kind of life is shaping me? And what story is my body being trained to tell?”

If the biblical vision of the body can feel abstract, sexual practice makes it concrete. Paul applies the same participatory logic to sex that he applies to eating, worship, and communal life. Addressing the practice of visiting temple prostitutes, he reminds believers that their “bodies are members of Christ himself” (1 Cor. 6:15). To join one’s body to another is to become “one flesh” (v. 16), binding what belongs to Christ to a rival allegiance. Similarly, the only reason a believing spouse may remain sexually united to an unbelieving spouse is that the unbelieving spouse has been sanctified through the marriage (7:14). Sexual union is never merely physical or private.

Contemporary Christian debates about sexual behavior often miss this starting point. In some settings—especially those shaped by abstinence movements—sexual practice becomes a visible marker of personal holiness. In others, it is treated as a private matter of identity or desire, best addressed through affirmation and personal discretion. Despite their differences, both approaches tend to assume that sex is about the individual—how desire is ordered, expressed, or affirmed.

Paul begins elsewhere. When he addresses sexual behavior, he does not start with desire, identity, or social boundaries. He begins with what bodies are and whose they are. Sexual acts are not self-contained choices but forms of participation that shape the life of the community.

This is why Paul responds so sharply to the man sleeping with his father’s wife (1 Cor. 5). What concerns him is not scandal management but communal formation: “A little leaven leavens the whole lump” (v. 6, ESV). What one body participates in does not remain private; it works its way through the whole.

The question, then, is not whether an act feels right, but whether it yields the church more fully to Christ or leaves it exposed to powers that traffic in sin and death. In Paul’s vision, sexual ethics are not about managing desire or signaling virtue. They concern how bodies participate in shared life—and which powers that participation serves.

Once bodies are understood as participatory realities, the implications cannot be confined to sexual ethics alone. They extend outward to the world that bodies inhabit and depend upon. To speak of embodied life is to speak of creation.

Paul’s language makes this connection unavoidable. The bodies that now belong to Christ—our mortal bodies—are still formed from the dust of the earth (1 Cor. 15:47), subject to decay and sustained by the same material conditions. This is why Paul can speak of creation itself as groaning alongside human bodies, awaiting liberation together (Rom. 8:22–23). The fate of embodied human life and the fate of the world are bound together because, for now, they share the same condition of corruption and hope.

If bodies are participatory realities embedded within God’s creation, then care for the created world is not an abstract cause. It is a question of how embodied life is sustained and shared. What happens to the land, the air, and the water inevitably shapes the bodies that depend upon them—especially the bodies of the poor, the vulnerable, and those with the least power to shield themselves from environmental harm.

Seen this way, disregard for the created world is not merely a failure of stewardship. It is a contradiction of Christian confession. To affirm the resurrection of the body while treating the material world as expendable is to live as though decay, not Christ, has the final claim on embodied life.

Creation care, then, is not a matter of moral signaling or political alignment. It is a matter of allegiance and witness. It asks whether our embodied practices yield the world we inhabit to the life-giving rule of Christ or leave it captive to patterns of extraction and neglect that belong to the old creation. The question is not whether Christians should “care about the environment” but whether our bodily life bears witness to the lordship of the risen Christ over the world that sustains us all.

The implications for race are immediate. Racism is not first an idea but is a practice that manipulates, controls, and violates bodies. Ta-Nehisi Coates makes this plain when he frames life as a Black man in America as a struggle over how one should live within a Black body. He returns to the body as the site of vulnerability and threat in his writing. Racism, he insists, is not merely social or symbolic. It is visceral. It “dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones.” However we name it—justice, privilege, relations—the reality lands, with force, on the body.

Coates exposes something that resonates deeply with how Paul speaks about sin and salvation. Paul does not treat captivity as an abstraction. He locates it in embodied life. Sin reigns in bodies. Death works through members. And redemption, when it comes, takes root in the same place bondage was endured.

This is why Paul speaks so urgently about division within the church. When communities fracture along lines of status, ethnicity, or power, the problem is not merely social or political. In Christ, Jew and Gentile have been made one body, their hostility put to death through the cross (Eph. 2:14–16). This unity is a public affront to the powers that thrive on domination and exclusion. To tolerate embodied division is not simply to fail at justice; it is to deny the lordship of Christ over his body.

Paul’s claim does not stop at the church’s boundary. Christ’s reign extends to every human body. How bodies are treated—protected or exposed, welcomed or constrained—bears witness to who truly rules. To dishonor a body is, in practice, to deny Christ’s claim upon it.

Christians are not simply caught between political left and right or struggling to locate a sensible middle. More often, we are navigating by the wrong map altogether. Paul does not ask us to refine our positions within the present order. He announces that a new world has already been revealed in Christ and that our bodies are being claimed by it now.

When that vision comes back into view, questions of sexuality, race, and creation no longer appear as disconnected debates. They come into focus as intertwined expressions of a single, embodied life. What we do with our bodies—how we join them, protect them, and situate them within the world—bears witness to who we believe truly reigns.

The work of Christian ethics, then, is about learning to live, together, as bodies gathered under the lordship of the risen Christ—bearing witness, in the most ordinary and physical ways, to the life of the world that is already breaking in.

Kyle Wells is lead pastor at Christ Presbyterian Church in Santa Barbara, California. He writes on biblical theology and Christian ethics for both the church and the academy.

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Books

Review

The Forgotten Founding Father

Thomas S. Kidd

Three history books to read this month.

Illustration by Christianity Today

This piece was adapted from CT’s books newsletter. Subscribe here.

**Jack Kelly, Tom Paine’s War: The Words That Rallied a Nation and the Founder for Our Time (St. Martin’s Press, 2026)**

Many excellent books on the American Revolution will help us mark this 250th year of the country’s birth. Founders such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson will get the most coverage this anniversary year. But our understanding of America’s independence is incomplete without considering Thomas Paine, a then-recent immigrant from England and the author of Common Sense, the most influential pamphlet arguing for American independence.

Jack Kelly’s Tom Paine’s War is a lively introduction to Paine’s critical role in the Revolution. Kelly, a novelist and history writer, doesn’t break much new ground regarding Paine, but he crafts a dramatic narrative that makes Tom Paine’s War a good introductory read.

Kelly notes that Paine is a somewhat forgotten Founding Father, though most American History courses mention Paine’s Common Sense and The American Crisis, best known for its stirring line “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Paine’s lesser status among the Founders is partly explained by his unorthodox religious beliefs. Paine had a family background in Anglicanism and Quakerism and may even have served briefly as a Methodist preacher in England. (Kelly unequivocally says he did, but the fact is not confirmed.)

During Paine’s tenure in France during the French Revolution, however, he embraced radical anti-Christian and anti-clerical ideas. This resulted in his inflammatory The Age of Reason (1794), in which he denounced the Bible and Christianity and declared that “my own mind is my own church.” Traditional Founders saw Paine as a dangerous incendiary and did not wish to associate him with America’s Revolution.

**Richard Bell, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World (Riverhead Books, 2025)**

A highly illuminating treatment of the Revolution’s international implications is Richard Bell’s The American Revolution and the Fate of the World. The global dimensions of the Revolution were everywhere, from the East India Company’s Chinese tea that rioters dumped into Boston Harbor in 1773 to the treaty signing in Paris that ended the war in 1783. But Americans have understandably downplayed these dimensions because of the symbolic importance the nation attaches to American “exceptionalism.”

Bell’s impressive and readable book won’t let us be satisfied, however, with the Revolution’s usual battle scenes from Bunker Hill, Massachusetts, and Yorktown, Virginia. With each chapter connected to a global-facing vignette, Bell reminds us that in the world perspective, the Revolution was really a series of interlocking gears that turned events in lands as distant as India and Australia.

Bell posits there were at least four simultaneous wars happening during the 1770s and ’80s. These began with many American colonists fighting against British imperial rule. But there was also a French gambit to weaken Britain and reconfigure the European balance of power, a similar Spanish effort to regain and protect imperial domains in the Western Hemisphere, and the undeclared but urgent efforts by Native Americans and Africans in America and the Caribbean to secure their autonomy and freedom.

**Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left (Basic Books, 2014)**

A deeper examination of Paine’s role in the “Age of Revolutions” is Yuval Levin’s brilliant The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left. Levin focuses on Burke and Paine’s clashing perspectives on the French Revolution. In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the Anglo-Irish parliamentarian Burke attacked the French upheaval as precipitous and foolish. Burke’s book arguably marked the beginning of the modern conservative tradition. Paine’s response to Burke, The Rights of Man (1791), expressed great confidence in man’s ability to re-create society based on the ideals of liberty and equality.

Paine argued that progressive societies should continually pursue a return to man’s (supposed) natural state, in a society composed of individuals free from arbitrary rules and hierarchy. Virtually all churches and nations, to Paine, erect traditions designed to benefit the few and oppress the many. The people must constantly press against state and church for their natural rights. When necessary, the people should “begin the world over again” (as stated in Common Sense) by initiating revolution.

Paine was sure that when people applied reason to politics and religion, they would jettison traditional structures such as monarchy, established churches, and the historic fallacies propping up these institutions. Like Thomas Jefferson, Paine was certain that reason would eventually demolish Christian doctrinal claims such as the Trinity or the divinity of Christ.

Burke, of course, placed greater confidence in the stabilizing force of political institutions and Christian tradition. Although Burke was a British monarchist, his worries about idealistic and revolutionary social change matched those of conservative American founders, including George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton.

Thomas S. Kidd is research professor of church history at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

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History

Considering Both Sides of Church Divisions

Daniel Silliman

CT hosted debates about the charismatic movement and women’s ordination.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, CT Archives

In 1975, CT tried to understand the charismatic movement. Was it evangelical? Was it biblical? Was it good for the church? The magazine published a charismatic theologian making the case for the movement in February.

As one involved in the movement for the past decade, I should like to set forth a brief profile of it. … Persons in the charismatic movement ordinarily stress first the recovery of a liveliness and freshness in their Christian faith. This may be expressed in a number of ways. For example, the reality of God has broken in with fresh meaning and power. God, who may have seemed little more than a token figure before, has now become vividly real and personal to them. Jesus Christ, largely a figure of the past before, has now become the living Lord. The Holy Spirit, who previously had meant almost nothing to them, has become an immanent, pervasive presence.

The Bible, which may have been thought of before as mostly an external norm of Christian faith, or largely as a historical witness to God’s mighty deeds, has become also a testimony to God’s contemporary activity. It is as if a door had been opened, and walking through the door they found spread out before them the extraordinary biblical world, with dimensions of angelic heights and demonic depths, of Holy Spirit and unclean spirits, of miracles and wonders—a world in which now they sense their own participation. …

All of Christian faith has been enhanced by the sense of inward conviction. Formerly there was a kind of hoping against hope; this has been transformed into a buoyant “full assurance of hope” (Heb. 6:11).

Even evangelicals who were sympathetic to ecstatic charismatic practices, like speaking in tongues, often found themselves clashing with the charismatic Christians, though. One pastor wrote of the hard conclusions he had reached.

I have tried my best to make a climate of Christian fellowship and worship that will accommodate both those who speak in tongues and those who do not. My intention was to open the doors of Christian sharing to everyone who loves the Lord Jesus as Saviour.

Having had about a dozen persons in the congregation who speak in tongues, I have come to some hard conclusions after a year of effort. These conclusions have been heart-breaking to me. …

They carried their Bibles and became a part of the congregation’s program and fellowship. However, after some months it was obvious that they had a spiritual superiority complex, and it became obnoxious. Professing to be filled with the Spirit of humility and holiness, these persons expressed the opposite. The subtle but real spiritual conceit became more and more apparent until the words “Spirit-filled” came to have a regrettable taint. …

These persons are insensitive to the concept of Christian discipline.

The magazine also looked at two sides of another debate dividing Christians of the time: the role of women in church. CT reported on a landmark meeting of evangelical feminists and the growing numbers of women going to seminary. Should they be preparing for ministry? Elisabeth Elliot, then a regular CT columnist, presented a case against women’s ordination.

Changes made by the Church merely to accommodate changes taking place in the world have resulted in a loss of power. This week’s “relevance” is next week’s irrelevance.

The question of the ordination of women has been raised inevitably because of the women’s liberation movement. The confusion wrought by this question in the Church is one of many symptoms of a general malaise. As Christians we ought always to be testing our assumptions and priorities against the Word of God, for we are daily subjected to undermining by the secular presuppositions of our age. …

The exclusion of women from ordination is based on the order established in creation. The first chapter of Genesis gives an account of the creation of the world and its creatures. The creation of man and woman in the image of God himself was the culminating act. This act is more specifically described in the second chapter, in which it becomes clear that the man Adam was created first. When God brought to Adam all the beasts of the field and the birds of the air he named them, but among all the creatures “there was not found a helper fit for him.” It was then that God made the woman, fashioning her from Adam’s own flesh and bone. …

The principles of obedience, submission, and authority are clearly set forth in both the Old and New Testaments. Every creature of God has his appointed place, from cherubim, seraphim, archangels, and angels down to the lowliest beast. Man himself is “made a little lower than the angels,” and was commanded to have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves.

A Fuller Theological Seminary professor made the case in favor of ordaining women.

The creation account … need not be thought to subordinate one sex to the other. Rather, mankind in the divine image is created a partnership of male and female. By the same token the new mankind “foreordained to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Rom. 8:29, ASV) is likewise a partnership of the sexes. Translated into the language of ecclesiology, this is to say: The Church is a universal priesthood of all believers in Christ, female as well as male. …

I conclude that women have full title to the order of Christian ministry as God shall call them. Let those who scruple consider what it has cost the Church not to use the talents of the woman. Let anyone consult the hymnbook and see what women poets—Fanny Crosby, Charlotte Elliott, Frances Havergal, Christina Rossetti, Anne Steel—have taught the people of God to sing and then ask what it would mean if such women were allowed to move beyond the relative anonymity of the hymnal to full visibility in the Church as evangelists, preachers, and teachers.

And let all who would help them attain such visibility remember that sharing the ministry with women does not mean requiring them to think, speak, and act like men. This would be to misunderstand the meaning of our sexual complementarity. Because God made Man male and female, in the natural realm men are fathers and brothers, while women are mothers and sisters. So it must be in the spiritual realm. And when it is, then, and only then, will the Church be truly the family of God.

Carl F. H. Henry, the emeritus editor in chief, weighed in as well in several columns over several issues on the “battle of the sexes.”

The Bible nowhere teaches male superiority and supremacy and female inferiority and servility. What the Bible pattern establishes instead is the indispensability under God of man and woman to each other in the context not only of society but also of the home as its basic unit. God’s superiority is the fundamental emphasis (cf. 1 Cor. 11:11, 12, “God is the source of all”). Paul expounds this divinely intended order in a Corinthian milieu where, contrary to the practice in Christian churches, a strong effort was under way to introduce a confused equality.

Equality in Christ, Paul insists, destroys neither apostolic authority in the Christian community as a determination of the crucified and risen Lord, nor the order that God intends.

Not every change in church life was contentious in 1975. CT looked at the explosion in sermon cassette tapes.

Tape recorders and players have been around for a long time, but the bulkiness of the equipment and the vulnerability of the tapes limit their creative use by most pastors. …

Cassette-makers are sprouting up everywhere. Christians with gnostic tendencies who gather in “underground” cells glory in circulating cassettes. They have about them the aura of the clandestine samizdat without the risk of discovery. Cassettes can be made by anyone who has a little imagination and relatively simple and inexpensive equipment. They are a boon to every ism in the land. …

Christian schools are involved in producing and distributing cassettes: Bethany Fellowship, Columbia Bible College, Luther Theological Seminary, Moody Bible Institute, and Regent College. Christian Bookseller Magazine periodically reviews the latest offerings of the major religion-market companies.

There are a growing number of cassette clubs, operating in the familiar pattern of book clubs. The Episcopalians have the Catacomb Cassette Club, and, from another part of the spectrum, Pillsbury Baptist Bible College in Minnesota will enroll you in its fiery evangelist-of-the-month.

The most pressing political question was America’s responsibilities in Southeast Asia, after the military’s withdrawal from the war in Vietnam. CT reported on the dire situation missionaries faced.

Seven missionaries and a child, however, were presumed to be in the hands of the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese invaders. They are:

Mr. and Mrs. Norman Johnson, both 39, of Hamilton, Ontario (Christian and Missionary Alliance); Richard and Lillian Phillips, 45 and 43, of Bloomington, Minnesota (CMA); Mrs. Archie Mitchell, 54, of Bly, Oregon (CMA); and John and Carolyn Miller and their five-year-old daughter, of Allentown, Pennsylvania (Wycliffe Bible Translators).

All were at Ban Me Thuot in the central highlands, where the CMA operates a leprosarium and hospital. The Johnsons fled into the jungle at the outset of the attack on the town early last month and still had not been heard from as of March 26. The others, along with one or two other foreign civilians, had reportedly sought shelter in the compound of the International Commission for Control and Supervision as fierce fighting raged through the area. Radio contact with the group was lost on March 14.

President Gerald Ford urged Congress to send aid to Cambodia, another Southeast Asian country wracked by civil war. CT reported that, “politics aside,” the support would help Christians in need.

The crisis comes at a time of responsiveness to the Gospel on a scale unprecedented in the Buddhist country’s history. Last year the Khmer Evangelical Church, associated with the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) and embracing nearly all the Protestant congregations in the land, experienced a 300 per cent increase in growth, according to CMA spokesmen. In the event of a Communist takeover, growth will be curtailed and Christian activities severely restricted, if the Communists follow their pattern elsewhere.

“I fully expect to be behind bars one day because of my love for Jesus Christ,” commented one young Cambodian believer.

The US government decided to accept refugees from Southeast Asia—the “biggest all-at-once influx of refugees” in American history—and asked church groups to help. CT explained the resettlement program and urged evangelicals to volunteer.

When Christ saw the crowds, “he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless” (Matt. 9:36). But many of his followers never quite see things that way. …

The refugees must have official sponsors before they can leave the rustic conditions of the camps and make their debut in North American society. Life in these temporary quarters is by no means luxurious: the refugees are cramped into tents and old barracks. Food is adequate, however, and recreation opportunities are provided, so that conditions are bearable. But the sooner sponsors are found the better. … All they need is some help in the transitional period. …

Even if refugees eventually cause some problems, the compassionate Christian should not turn away from helping. These people are God’s creation as much as native North Americans are, and he will do the rewarding. The Samaritan spirit calls for making room not only in our homes but in our hearts. Whatever one thinks about the Viet Nam war, the refugees should be extended a genuine welcome as fellow human beings.

Americans ultimately helped resettle approximately 130,000 refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Evangelical groups including the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Assemblies of God, Food for the Hungry, and World Vision played an active role.

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Ideas

Ministering to Women Includes Physical Health

Caitlin Estes

Counseling women through infertility and other medical issues may feel awkward. Church leaders have an obligation to do it anyway.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Unsplash

Callie Trombley remembers the first time she considered the spiritual significance of her body. Her mom brought it up. As a chaplain in the Air Force, her mom was used to having conversations about birth control, cramps, and family planning with young airmen seeking pastoral care. So when Callie was deciding whether to take birth control for painful periods as a young adult, her mom wanted her to recognize that it was not only a medical decision but a whole-person one.

Years later, when she stumbled upon the topic of contraception while reading a book about the imago Dei, the conversation with her mom rushed back to her. “It felt like a pricking of my spirit, and I knew I needed to dig deeper,” she shared with me. So Callie and her husband, Josiah, did what many Christians would—they scheduled a meeting with their pastor.

It’s not hard to imagine how uncertain a pastor or church leader may feel about discussing women’s health issues. Envision going to pray for a congregant who is about to have surgery and finding out the surgery is for the woman’s health condition, endometriosis. Should you mention the endometriosis? Stick with generic prayers for a quick recovery?

Addressing women’s health issues as a spiritual leader can be uncomfortable—especially if you’re not female yourself. You want to minister to women, but reproductive health comes with so many mysteries and gray areas that it feels easier to ignore or brush it aside for as long as you can. Every time this happens, though, you’ve missed out on an ideal moment to reveal the love of God.

Unfortunately, many women are used to having their concerns ignored. For a woman with endometriosis, it takes an average of seven to ten years after the first symptoms just to receive the diagnosis. Her primary symptom during those years is pain—sometimes excruciating and debilitating pain that’s overlooked and disregarded by gym coaches, medical professionals, employers, and more. The response of her faith leaders ought to be strikingly different, just as Jesus reacted in a countercultural way toward women and their health problems.

The ancient philosopher Celsus described Christianity as a religion attractive to “slaves, women and little children.” It’s true that Christianity drew women and other marginalized people in large numbers—and for good reason. Here was a faith that said men and women were both image bearers of God (Gen. 1:27) and all equally united in Christ (Gal. 3:28; Rom. 10:12–13), a Savior who welcomed women into his ministry (Luke 8:3), supported and defended them (Matt. 26:10–13; Luke 13:10–17), and healed reproductive issues specific to the female body (Luke 8:43–48).Our God does not overlook women or their health issues. So why should the local church?

Katie McMahon, cofounder of Shiloh IVF Ministry, an organization that provides spiritual support to men and women who have gone through in vitro fertilization (IVF), emphasized to me that the local church is the perfect avenue for showing Christ to women in their need.

“I think there’s a huge nonmedical component in the pastoral support of men and women and couples [with reproductive health questions],” she told me. “People aren’t necessarily looking for treatment options. They’re looking for a space to be and an acknowledgement that they exist and they’re good and they can be fruitful.”

This is what McMahon wanted for herself and her husband as they walked through years of infertility. She wanted to know that her faith could handle her questions and strengthen them as a couple, regardless of how their fertility journey ended. Instead, what she got was a printout of teachings on IVF and embryo adoption. “We really felt like our pastor wasn’t equipped to accompany us,” she said. “It was disappointing.”

Now, as she serves other women through Shiloh, she’s discovered they haven’t felt spiritually ministered to during their reproductive struggles either.

The local church has a monumental opportunity. Through my own work as a certified FertilityCare practitioner, I see firsthand that women’s health is a much-needed area of ministry not only for those facing infertility or considering IVF but for every woman.

At the end of college, I worked alongside others as a chaplain-in-training at an underserved hospital. The primary chaplain, a man mature in both faith and age, taught his mentees the value of exploring the sacred beneath the secular.

When a woman works with me to learn an effective fertility awareness method, she does so because she’s eager to make more informed decisions about birth control or fertility treatments or health diagnoses. But it’s not long before other questions bubble up from a deep well of long-held fears: Am I good enough? Am I capable? Am I broken? Am I alone?

These are not medical questions, but spiritual questions stirred by medical issues. I encounter them week after week: a woman with irregular cycles and heavy periods who has slowly come to distrust and despise her female body; a woman in her late 40s who is approaching menopause and is grieved over the transition; the married couple who is struggling with physical intimacy because of their fear of getting pregnant before they’re ready. Rarely, if ever, do they consider their faith as a resource while they struggle with their bodies, health, or reproductive design. But where else would be a better place to start?

In our increasingly virtual world, the connection between body and soul—the physical and spiritual—can get so buried that we forget the bond between them is unbreakable. In women’s health, it’s easy to focus so exclusively on the medical that we forget there’s something else significant to consider: God designed menstruation and ovulation and everything in between to proclaim his glory.

The local church may be the only place a woman ever hears that God designed all of her—even this part of her—to bear the image of God. It’s critical, then, that we say it—intentionally, frequently, and wholeheartedly.

For male leaders, though, this can feel like dangerous territory. Shouldn’t men defer to women in regard to women’s issues? Certainly. But this doesn’t relieve male leaders of significant responsibility either.

For a woman, her body and potential to conceive are not rare considerations but daily realities. For half the world’s population—for half the people sitting in your church’s pews—these realities affect how they see the world and how it sees them.

In a time when artificial intelligence strips women of their clothing and those with power traffic women like possessions, the local church has the opportunity to proclaim women’s inherent dignity as image bearers of God—dignity that’s not only for married women wondering about contraception or struggling to grow their families but for all women. Going out of our way as Christians to declare this dignity is a powerful witness to the world that women and their health issues matter.

Ministry leaders don’t need to pretend to be experts on women’s issues in order to do this. As for Callie and Josiah’s pastor, he committed to meet with them regularly to discuss, pray, and provide educational resources about family planning.

Because their pastor believed there was a sacramental nature to the human design for reproduction, he had previously wrestled with similar questions and gathered theological resources. When Callie and Josiah met with him, he could share from his own experience and empathy, which was validating for Callie: “We realized this is just as much a part of our family, our marriage, as going out on a date,” Callie said. “It’s a God-given gift. The [reproductive] cycle is actually a beautiful thing.”

At the same time, it’s bigger than that. Callie shared, “As Christians, we can see the connection between our physical bodies and our spiritual nature. And when we’re resurrected someday, we’ll be resurrected with a physical body. So it matters. It’s all connected. Reproductive issues are in fact a discipleship issue.”

Discipleship around the body doesn’t have to be complicated. Normalizing human reproductive design as a gift from God is an excellent first step. Acknowledging the care and respect women’s health issues deserve is another. Some local churches offer support groups, prayer time, or readily available resources related to family planning, chronic illness, or infertility.

Churches can lead the way by celebrating the connection between body and soul, prayerfully exploring reproductive questions and concerns, offering pastoral counseling about matters of the body, or simply risking an honest prayer over a female church member’s endometriosis surgery.

Each act is a reminder that our bodies and their concerns matter to God—and God’s people—and they won’t go unnoticed.

Caitlin Estes is a certified FertilityCare practitioner and owner of Woven Natural Fertility Care. Her book, Woven Well: A Christian Woman’s Guide to Reproductive Health, Fertility, and Wholeness, comes out in July.

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Books

Excerpt

Joy Is in the Waiting

Grace P. Pouch

An excerpt from Savoring Childhood: Practical Wisdom for Slowing Down.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, IVP

“How long till we get to the beach, Mommy?” We were about seven minutes from our driveway the first time Henry asked. He was four years old, and the two of us were headed from our home in the foothills of South Carolina down to the coast, where the rest of the family would join us at the end of the school week.

Expecting him to be disappointed that so much of the trip lay ahead of us, I framed my answer as an apology. “Sorry, buddy, but we still have more than three hours to go.”

Hours and minutes were somewhat abstract to Henry’s young mind, but he understood that three hours was a lot of time. Still, his little spirit was so full of excitement that he squealed with joy, “Hooray, hooray! Only three more hours till we get to the beach!”

His response lifted my spirits, so a short time later when he asked again, “How much longer till we get to the beach?” I cheerily reported, “Only two hours and 45 minutes to go!”

“Yes!” he shouted. “We are getting closer!”

He was right. We were getting closer with every second and minute that passed. And rather than focusing on the fact that we weren’t there yet, he was focused on our movement in a good direction—and he was actually savoring the journey. He chattered away in his car seat about things he was hoping to do when we arrived. He asked me to name every cousin, aunt, and uncle who would be there. He was looking forward to building a sandcastle and was excited about what we might have for supper. As we drove, Henry was making plans in glad anticipation of his desires rather than fretting over the not yet of it all.

For the rest of the ride, he continued to ask for the countdown to arrival. Instead of feeling exasperated by his repetitive questions, I got more and more tickled by his enthusiasm.

Whenever we make the trek to the ocean, our family brings up this story. I suppose it reminds us that the journey can be part of the fun, even though it involves waiting. The memory holds out a glimmer of possibility: Children can learn to wait . . . even to wait with joy.

So much effort and innovation these days goes into speeding up the journey, whether it’s a literal journey to a physical destination or the journey from I want it to I have it. This pattern of instant fulfillment has a diluting effect on joy.

On a folded sheet of yellowing paper that my mom discovered among some family documents, there is an unpublished essay by my great-aunt Eugenia Pearson called “The Magic of Expectancy.” Eugenia writes,

The youthness of youth is due largely to fervent and undiluted expectancies. People begin to be old, regardless of birthdays, when they limit and tame down their expectancies. Of course they try to feel that this taming down and limitation are respectable by calling them “settling down.” They seem to ignore the fact that in a living, changing, and growing world there can be no settling down at any stage of life. Expectancy keeps us in the creative livingness of life, where all desires are energized.

Eugenia was from an era of waiting stoically and not getting one’s hopes up. She was a teenager during the Great Depression. To her contemporaries, she brings the message that it is good to dream big and lean into longings. It’s a beautiful reminder not to give up on expecting God to do something wonderful, even when times are tough.

We are from a different era. Today, expectancy isn’t dulled by having our hopes dashed constantly by hardship, but rather by having them fulfilled instantly, always. Like the character Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, who sings, “I want the world. . . I want it now!” children who habitually get what they want without delay are tyrannical when they have to wait. You see, entitlement is not expectancy. Impatience is not expectancy. Instant gratification has an unholy power to warp how our children think and feel. It muddies the clear, delicious water of expectancy and turns it into exasperation—a sour drink that makes waiting sheer misery.

Like a little devil on our shoulder, impatience whispers angry, fitful complaints in our ear that make us focus on what we don’t have. But there is another way to wait. A way of waiting that focuses on what we will have with confidence and enthusiasm.

As tempting as it is to try to spare our kids the pain of waiting, the best way to ease their anguish is to help them discover that waiting is not so bad. My favorite strategy for shifting a child’s perspective from exasperation to expectancy is to use countdowns. A countdown breaks up a long process into a series of small celebrations. This is not a trick to anesthetize or speed up delayed gratification. In fact, countdowns highlight rather than hide the reality of how far away you are from a desired destination or outcome. But by marking progress and celebrating milestones, countdowns make the journey feel endurable, even enjoyable. Children benefit from the way countdowns place something attainable in the foreground while giving them freedom to talk about their hopes and imagine the future.

Even if a desired outcome is very far away and progress is slow and gradual, stepping out the journey helps young people look forward with delight rather than despair. The journey itself is a fertile space for practicing patience and cultivating gratitude. Not everything a child wishes to attain is worth pursuing, but healthy desires deserve the space to gain momentum, even to reach the intensity of what we might call longing. Delayed gratification makes that crescendo possible and makes attainment all the more sweet when it finally comes. The natural byproduct is heartfelt appreciation.

If an instant lifestyle is getting in the way of your child’s ability to practice patience and savor longer processes, here are some tips for reclaiming the sweet parts of waiting.

Don’t avoid telling kids about good things that are far off. The further out you tell them, the longer the on-ramp for their mental preparation so that they can engage deeply and savor the experience. Start with brief countdowns for toddlers (a few hours, or one day before a big occasion). And build up to extended countdowns with big kids, for whom even a year or more should not be too long to sustain expectancy for something wonderful.

Loop kids in on preparations. Even if a child’s help actually makes life harder for you—and it will!—it forms something important in children to see themselves as contributors, and preparing can set their minds on the good that is to come with fresh energy and enthusiasm. Eventually kids who have taken part in preparations become truly helpful and enjoy it. We have finally reached that stage, and it is so rewarding!
Talk about hopes in family prayers. When you pray aloud together, thank God for opportunities that you are looking forward to. Share your own excitement, voice your frustration when waiting is hard, and encourage kids to voice their feelings honestly. “How long, O Lord?” is a biblical plea (see Psalm 13, for example). Including God in our looking forward helps kids learn that our heavenly Father cares about all the intimate details of his children’s lives. All good experiences worth waiting for are his gifts to us.

Enduring a child’s many questions and emotions is a test of endurance for grownups. If we’re honest, we could use the practice. Becoming patient is a lifelong process. So keep answering those questions, patiently and enthusiastically. Building up our own endurance helps prepare us for the long journey of shepherding young people into the childhood experiences that will help them to grow in wisdom, character, and love for God. This is the goal ahead of us, the great destination we are expectantly, or perhaps anxiously, awaiting.

“My little children,” Paul wrote to the Galatians, “I am again in the pain of childbirth until Christ is formed in you” (4:19, NRSVue throughout). Long journeys, even spiritual ones, can at times be excruciating. But with every yes we give to God, with every step we take to cooperate with his grace, even with every chapter we read and every suggestion we put into practice, we are getting closer. (You are closer now than you were before you read this sentence!)

So hold on to joyful expectancy. And “may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 15:13).

Grace P. Pouch is content manager for Renovaré, where she curates and produces resources for spiritual renewal. She previously served as a seminary professor. She is the author of Savoring Childhood. Adapted from Savoring Childhood by Grace P. Pouch. Copyright (c) 2026 by Grace Pate Pouch. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com

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News

Q&A: Some Israelis See Esther’s Story in the Attacks on Iran

The Bulletin with Yossi Klein Halevi

Journalist Yossi Klein Halevi speaks to CT about Jewish reflections on the US and Israel-led war.

Illustration by Rick Szuecs / Source Images: Envato / US Navy / Nur Photo /Getty

Early this week, as the joint US-Israel attack on Iran began, Jews around the world celebrated Purim, the ancient feast commemorating Esther’s rescue of the Jews from Haman of Persia. The Bulletin host Mike Cosper sat down with Yossi Klein Halevi, a journalist and senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, to learn more about the Jewish response to these attacks and how the biblical story Israel celebrates this week informs Jews’ understanding of Middle East conflict. Here are edited excerpts from their conversation in episode 258.

How is the mood in Israel, even as people are running to bomb shelters and getting alerts from time to time as well?

On one hand, Israel is resolved—there’s no question. People are ready to make lots of sacrifices to bring this regime down. On the other hand, there’s deep disorientation and fatigue and still a society that’s quietly grieving. We’ve lost several thousand people since October 7 [2023] and thousands wounded in a country that’s completely traumatized. Now we’re back in the trauma.

This is a very strong country, and there’s virtual unanimity among Israelis, certainly in the political system. There’s no opposition at this moment. Everyone understands this is an existential need for Israel and for the future of the Middle East. It doesn’t make it easier on the home front.

Last night, we had our first-ever missile falling in Jerusalem. The conventional wisdom during all of Israel’s wars, whether against Hezbollah or Hamas or Iran, was that no one would dare fire missiles into Jerusalem because they wouldn’t want to risk destroying Al-Aqsa mosque or the Dome of the Rock, the two main Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem. Last night, Iran changed the ground rules and fired a missile into East Jerusalem.

Israel has been through this since Saddam Hussein and the first Gulf War in 1991, when Iraq fired 39 Scuds into Israeli cities. We’ve been in and out of shelters for 35 years. I raised my kids going in and out of shelters. There were certain ground rules, even to the nonconventional war, and there aren’t anymore. The regime is fighting for its life, and it’s desperate.

You’ve sought energetically in a number of your works to understand your neighbors, both Christian and Muslim. Twenty years ago, you said we can’t let this regime just sit there and build nuclear weapons. How has your understanding developed over the decades?

Being an advocate for reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, between Muslims and Jews, looks and works differently in the Middle East than it does, say, at Columbia University. When you’re sitting here in ground zero of radical Islamism, you very quickly understand that there can be no peace without confronting the enemies of peace. The prerequisite for reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, for example, is confronting and containing radical Islamism.

Now, I’m also a fierce opponent of my own government, but there are many differences between my government and Hamas. This is a democratically elected government, and I have the option come October, which is when the next Israeli elections are scheduled for, to do everything I can to bring this terrible government down. But when I call this a terrible government, I’m still going to draw a very firm red line between Hamas and even this government. There are elements in this government that are uncomfortably Jewish echoes of radical Islamism. But that’s not true for most of this government. I loathe this government. I have spent much of my last three years actively opposing this government in the streets, sometimes every week, every other day. That, for me, is also part of my commitment to reconciliation.

But when you’re facing radical Islamism, there’s no recourse but to go to war. That’s something a lot of people in the West have forgotten. The West, at least America, once understood that, and I understand that the cumulative impact of the forever wars have undermined the resolve of Americans. However, not to stand up to the Iranian regime when it’s at its weakest point in the last decades would be to compound the mistake of going to war when you shouldn’t have. Not to go to war when you should is not a way of compensating for having gone to war when you shouldn’t have.

What do you think comes next for Iran, especially as the bombs keep dropping, as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is defanged?

I don’t think this is going to be easy or straightforward. Probably 15 to 20 percent of the public supports the regime. That’s a recipe for regime collapse. I believe the regime will collapse, but it still has enough of its hardcore support to put up a very credible fight. This regime has, for half a century, entrenched itself in all parts of the Iranian infrastructure and suppressed opposition from the very beginning.

Even more importantly, elements within the regime are imbued with an apocalyptic fervor that believes this is the last battle before the return of the Mahdi, the Shiite messiah. The secular West tends to downplay the significance of the theological strain in the regime calculations because the secular West doesn’t understand religion.

In Israel and the Middle East, the lines between religiosity and the national experience are never clear-cut. For example, tonight [March 2] is Purim. The holiday of Purim is about the victory of the ancient Jews of Persia over Haman, who wanted to destroy them. Every Israeli understands the resonance of a war against modern Persia—modern-day Iran—led by a modern Haman. That’s the given language of discourse here. The politicians, the army, the chief of staff speak about it. When the commander of the Israel Defense Forces, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, addressed the nation Sunday, he spoke about the story of Purim.

Here we are 2,500 years after the Purim story. It’s like Groundhog Day except with much more lethal consequences. But there’s also something very powerful about these recurring themes in Jewish history, and sometimes not just themes but literal reenactments. For me as a religious Jew, what we’re experiencing these days gives me pause. I don’t presume to know God’s will, and I’m not sitting looking at the newspaper as if it’s the Word of God and I can interpret what’s happening. I think that there’s a real problem when religious people do that. At the same time, as a religious person, I notice certain patterns that happen in the Israeli story. And I wonder, What is this all about? What’s the message here?

There seems to be something else at work here in this very strange Jewish story. It gives Israelis generally a sense of purpose and, more than that, a framework of meaning to the story. It’s not just about survival. There’s this sense in Israel today as we’re entering Purim: Here we are back with the Persians again.

That’s the Book of Esther itself. It never mentions the name of God once in the entire book. It’s all about the hiddenness of God in providence.

There’s a rabbinic wordplay of the name Esther, which also means in Hebrew “hiddenness,” hester. The Hebrew phrase for God’s hiddenness is hester panim, “God’s face is hidden.” The divine is literally hidden in the Book of Esther. God’s name is never mentioned, yet one can discern in the Book of Esther this uncanny series of coincidences that leads to a redemptive trajectory.

The Book of Esther really works on multiple layers. On the one hand, Mordecai warns Esther that God is going to do this whether you’re part of it or not. And yes, who knows what your fate will be if you opt out? In that sense, he’s not giving her a choice, but he also says something very touching to her. He says a phrase which has become one of the best-known aphorisms in Jewish discourse. It’s been absorbed into modern Israeli discourse: Who knows if you didn’t rise to your status for a time like this? That is that sense of destiny.

In a way, you can sum up Jewish history with everything that Mordecai has told Esther. On the one hand, it’s going to be really bad for you. On the other hand, what a wonderful opportunity. Mordecai is hitting Esther with a combination of fate and destiny. Fate is what’s imposed on you, and destiny is what you choose for yourself. Those are recurring themes both in the story of Purim and in Jewish history. What we’re experiencing now is this convergence of these themes at this moment.

If you had polled Israelis, the decision to go to war would have won by a landslide. Even though we, along with the Iranian people, are the ones who are the most endangered by that decision, we just take it for granted that we must do this for survival. That’s fate. But we also need to do this to stand against evil, and that’s destiny. There is this convergence of fate and destiny at this moment in Israel’s history.

If the regime does fall, what might that mean for religious minorities across the Middle East, not just Jews living in Israel?

This has been a very bad period for religious minorities around the Middle East. It’s hard to say whether this is really going to turn things around in other countries. Think of the countries where the Iranian regime has had such a strong hold—in Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon. In Yemen, a 2,500-year-old Jewish community was destroyed, and no one is left. The Iraqi Jewry goes back to Babylon, literally 2,500 years, and that community has been completely erased. Baghdad in the 1930s was one-third Jewish. It was the New York of the Arab world.

The longest-lasting Jewish communities in the world, which were in the Middle East, have experienced a massive uprooting. They were destroyed in a single generation, sometimes within a year.

There’s such rage against Shiism in Iran. During the popular uprising in January, there were something like 350 mosques that were burned by outraged mobs. They see Shiism as the reason for their oppression. If the regime falls, religiously, Iran is going to go through major convulsions.

Within Iran, whether they rename themselves literally or reinvent themselves culturally and religiously, Persia is reemerging. I also sense there’s going to be a very strong resurgence of Zoroastrianism and the Baha’i faith, these two indigenous Persian faiths.

I think Christianity is going to have a tremendous flowering in Iran as well. To leave Islam and convert to another faith carries with it a death sentence, so you’re looking at a heroic nucleus of a Christian resurgence there. I think there’s going to be a resurgence of the Jewish community. There’s a large Persian community in Israel, in the US. I suspect there’ll be a reawakening and people will go back, certainly on pilgrimages. I think we’re going to see a tremendous flowering of other religions.

- More from The Bulletin

Church Life

Helping the Church Think Clearly

Nicole Massie Martin

President & CEO

A note from CT’s President in our March/April issue.

Illustration by Rick Szuecs / Source images: Envato

Around two o’clock in the morning in 1953, Billy Graham awoke with an idea. The idea grew from years of conversations with Harold Ockenga, Carl Henry, and Charles Fuller. They were eager to use their gifts, networks, and insights to influence the next generation of Christian ministers and leaders. Burdened with the weight of a God-sized dream, Graham penned the document for Christianity Today:

My idea that night was for a magazine, aimed primarily at ministers, that would restore intellectual respectability and spiritual impact to evangelical Christianity. It would reaffirm the power of the Word of God to redeem and transform men and women.

After more than 70 years, we bear witness to this God-sized vision that is still vibrantly alive. From the beginning, Christianity Today has carried a singular, unshakable mission: to elevate the name of Jesus Christ. There is no greater calling.

Long before our first issue was printed, Billy Graham envisioned a magazine to help the church think clearly, live faithfully, and bear witness to the one who holds all things together. His conviction, and the conviction of those who came after him, was that Jesus is not merely the subject of our stories. He is also the center of our hope, the heartbeat of our work, and the Lord whom we joyfully serve.

Christ is the one who brings life where death reigns. He breaks down walls, reconciles enemies, forgives sinners, and welcomes the prodigals home. He brings light where darkness gathers and hope where despair threatens. It is him alone CT seeks to magnify across continents, generations, and dividing lines.

As we look back through the pages of CT’s history, we draw from a deep well of evangelical teaching and tradition that prioritizes the authority of Scripture, the necessity of new birth, and the beauty of Christ’s redeeming work. Our times are not unique. The gospel has always faced opposition, the church has always navigated division, and seasons of cultural upheaval are nothing new for God’s people. Through every era, Christ remains faithful. His kingdom has not faltered. His Spirit has not diminished. His people still prevail.

Our task is to glorify Jesus, the one who still saves, forgives, reconciles, and redeems. While the world may say this isn’t possible and Christ’s power is insufficient for our crises, they are wrong. The same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead and ignited the early church is at work now—awakening hearts, renewing minds, and calling believers to bold discipleship (Rom. 8:11).

As I step into my role as CT’s president, I honor CT’s legacy and move forward with expectant hope. CT will continue to lift Christ high, make his beauty visible, and speak gospel truth with conviction and compassion. We will continue to hold fast to the gospel that invites us not to a shallow unity but to the deep, reconciling bond forged only by the crucified and risen Lord.

This is the perfect time to lean into the mission of Christianity Today. Let us journey together with our faith forged by the past and our hearts filled with joy as we steward this sacred calling until Christ comes for us again!

Nicole Massie Martin is president & CEO of Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the March/April 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "CT's Unshakeable Mission".

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News

Churches Haven’t Forgotten Portland

Kate Lucky

Churches partner with business and city leaders in Portland’s downtown core.

A person lies on the street in the Old Town Chinatown neighborhood on January 25, 2024, following the decriminalization of drugs in Portland, Oregon.

Getty

On the descent, Portland looks like it did more than a decade ago, when I first started flying home from college for visits. The little city glimmers in light reflected between the river and the overcast sky. There’s the tallest building, iridescent pink, where my dad used to work. Still pink. There are the ubiquitous trees. Still green. There are the warehouses and houseboats and a series of bridges spaced across the Willamette River like a line of shoelaces strung through eyelets.

My feeling of relief as the plane touches down has stayed the same as time has passed. I’m home. But in the years I’ve lived away from Oregon, Portland has reeled. A broken-glass summer of 2020 protests preceded a failed attempt to decriminalize drugs in 2021 and a record-breaking number of homicides in 2022. (The Old Town Chinatown neighborhood suffered in particular, earning the nickname “the Skid Row of Portland.”) In September 2025, riffing on a round of demonstrations outside the city’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, President Donald Trump declared that living in Portland was like “living in hell” and said he was considering sending in National Guard troops.

Later reporting revealed that the troubling footage the president had seen on Fox News was actually from Portland’s summer of 2020—not 2025. The network had mislabeled the clips and otherwise mischaracterized the most recent unrest. Yes, police had fired tear gas in those encounters, ProPublica said, but it found “no evidence of what could be termed a coordinated assault [by protestors],” and “on most of the days or nights when officers and protesters clashed, local police and federal prosecutors ended up announcing no criminal arrests or charges.”

Hell doesn’t describe the city’s tentative upward trend lines. Since “record-breaking violence” in 2021 and 2022, reports The Oregonian, homicides and shootings have decreased precipitously in Portland. So have, to a lesser extent, aggravated assaults and robberies. In 2024, legislators rolled back the drug-decriminalization legislation. By the end of 2025, under the leadership of the city’s new mayor, Keith Wilson, Portland had opened more than 1,500 shelter beds and enforced a ban on camping in public places. Last summer, downtown foot traffic was the highest it’s been post-pandemic.

But Target, REI, and other big-box stores that left the downtown core haven’t come back. From January to August 2025, Portland office-worker presence was at only 50 percent of 2019 levels. (The national average was around 73 percent.) The city’s economy is down: Last fall, an industry report ranked Portland “80th of 81 markets for the second year running for overall real estate prospects across property types,” beating out only Hartford, Connecticut.

The owner of the popular Mother’s Bistro & Bar, which serves cornflake-encrusted French toast, said her dining room is noticeably emptier: “Without weekday traffic, our city looks abandoned. It is abandoned.” (When I ate brunch at Mother’s last spring after running a popular St. Patrick’s Day 5K, I was shocked to be seated immediately.)

Pastor Tyler Michel grew up in Portland. He left in 2011, a time when the popular comedy series Portlandia shaped public perception. Bustling breweries, a thriving art scene: Portland was the place to be. Now Michel is back to pastor the 48-year-old Greater Portland Bible Church (GPBC). He says, “The level of optimism has completely changed.” Now, graffiti urges, “Don’t give up on Portland.”

While pastoring, Michel is also working on a doctorate at Wheaton College focusing on how churches can partner with civic and business organizations—and Portland is a living laboratory. He wants his congregants to skip the outrage about the state of their neighborhoods and focus on practical, local interventions. GPBC runs a food pantry that serves 150 guests every weekend, and the church is hoping to host a tool library in its space.

The church is also thinking through plans to use its property—a former dairy farm sprawling over 14 acres—as a community gathering hub. Recently, it sold two acres to Habitat for Humanity to build affordable housing. GPBC tries to support local businesses by ordering in food from nearby Thai and Mexican restaurants. Michel dreams of helping would-be entrepreneurs start their own shops and micromanufacturing outfits.

“Devastation leads to desperation that leads to transformation,” Michel said. “Sometimes churches choose either gospel proclamation or community development.” He wants to do both: “maintain a commitment to the gospel, which is the ultimate way people can thrive personally” and also “step into areas of common grace.” Michel wants churches like his to “take a seat at the table” with business and civic leaders while recognizing that, especially in a secular city, the table doesn’t belong to them.

Tim Osborn takes the same approach. He’s pastored on both the east and west sides of Portland for almost 20 years, planting five churches along the way. He’s seen the city shift as job security—especially at big employers like Intel and Nike—has risen and fallen and housing costs soared past income levels.

Osborn said the church has to help with those common-grace concerns. Young married couples need coaching on how to make budgets. A friend in the restaurant industry needs support as he crafts drinks for a brand-new eatery, working late-night shifts. A Christian can “revitalize the city” by “being a good manager … being faithful in whatever vocation you’re in.”

Mayor Keith Wilson recently gathered pastors into a room to share his shelter-bed vision. Osborn found the outreach encouraging, that “12, 13, 14 years, they said, was the last time a mayor actually opened up and said, ‘Yeah, I want to hear from and … partner with pastors and churches.’”

Osborn also teaches at Western Seminary and sees “a new wave of leaders coming … young men and women [who still have] a vision for church planting … caring about the inner core of the city.” And that seat at the table? Yes, take it!

Perhaps literally. Last fall, a prayer room called Garden Space PDX set up a long table along Burnside Street in beleaguered Old Town—bedecked with donated flowers and laden with salmon and chocolate mousse. The group sold some tickets in advance but also left chairs for unpaid guests and anyone who walked by, including those in vulnerable situations. Hungry people who didn’t want to take a seat simply filled their plates and hung out around the block.

The Garden Space prayer team recalled “Scripture that talks about Go out to the highways and the byways” (Matt. 22:8–10), said Renee Boucher, a member of the Garden Space lead team who’s done ministry in Portland for nearly 40 years. Old Town is “still so dark,” she acknowledged. “It’s a place people are afraid to go.” But for three years now, the ministry has led prayer walks around the district. And they’re getting results.

“I see the same language that we’re using in our prayers coming out of our mayor or business owners. … There’s a desire to see Old Town revitalized in a way that actually allows for the flourishing of all people,” Boucher said.

In the midst of more plans for 2026—prayer campaigns against human trafficking, workspace for artists in the “urban abbey” (as Garden Space is known), more dinners—she’s relying on a “phrase that seems to be a tagline for many of us now: Hope blooms in the City of Roses.”

“We’re believing that for downtown,” she declared. “We’re believing that for the city.”

Kate Lucky is a senior features editor at Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the March/April 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "Portland’s Rebirth?".

- More from Kate Lucky

Theology

This Easter, Let’s Lose Our Hope

Russell Moore

Columnist

We need more than reassurance, punditry, or prediction.

Illustration by Ben Hickey

Once, I had to help someone lose her faith. Kind of.

She was coming out of a prosperity gospel background in which people used the admonition “Have faith” to manipulate her into giving more money to the ministry. It was her lack of faith, they told her, that was to blame for her sickness and poverty. At one point, after listening to this woman lament her lack of faith, I said, “Why don’t we forget faith for a little while and just trust Jesus?”

Trusting Jesus is, of course, what the Bible calls faith. And in the fullness of time, I told her that. But before she could understand the reality by which she could live, she had to let go of the illusion by which she was swindled. As soon as she stopped worrying about how much faith she had and looked to Christ, she was, in fact, exercising faith. Lately I’ve wondered if the same is true for most of us in regard to another good word that has lost its meaning: hope.

My fellow evangelical Christians love the word hope almost as much as a pastor exposed as an adulterer loves the word grace. In almost every setting in which I speak, one of the first questions people ask is “What gives you hope?” or “Where do you see signs of hope?” When pressed to define what they mean, they ultimately describe what they’re seeking as measurable reassurance—the calming word from an authority that everything will turn out okay.

If I were braver, I would simply respond, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah,” (Matt. 12:39, ESV throughout). But I am made of squishier stuff than Jesus, so I usually give some signposts of good things to come. When I do that, though, I am giving them punditry or prediction, not hope.

By definition, whatever statistics I could give about Bible sales or church attendance would not be hope, even if these numbers were much better than they are. “Now hope that is seen is not hope,” the apostle Paul told us. “For who hopes for what he sees?” (Rom. 8:24).

Still, we want that visible, quantifiable reassurance, don’t we? I suppose everyone does, but perhaps evangelical Christians want it more than most. Even those of us who reject a prosperity gospel easily fall into a kind of “prosperity providence,” if not with our own lives then with the church itself. When the church is growing and successful, we seem to think this proves the gospel is worth believing. Somehow, even those who believe that the call to Christ is the call to come and die still think claiming health and wealth is okay, as long as it is for the mission and not just for us.

The problem, though, is that this kind of hope disappoints. When visible institutions and articulable ideas fall apart—and they will—those who thought hope meant upward progress feel duped and disillusioned. But if this cheap sort of hope appeals so much to our human frailty, then how can we move beyond it? Perhaps the season of Easter is a good time to remind ourselves that our Lord has already shown us the way out of the false hope and the way into the real.

The resurrection accounts of the apostles give us hope in the context of what seems to be utter despair. Perhaps no one described this more pointedly than Luke, in his account of the travelers on the road to Emmaus. They encountered a stranger whom we know (but they did not) to be the resurrected Jesus. Luke wrote that Jesus “drew near and went with them,” inviting them to express their dashed hope (24:15). Describing the Crucifixion, the pilgrim Cleopas said, “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things happened” (v. 21).

At this moment, a Jesus who was more like me would have levitated in a burst of glory, saying, “How do you like me now?” But that Jesus would have already done that in Pilate’s courtroom or Caesar’s palace. Thanks be to God, that is not the Jesus we have. Instead, Jesus went back to where he always did: the promises found in the Word of God. And “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (v. 27). He then made himself known—as he does to us—in the breaking of bread.

And then he was gone. “And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him. And he vanished from their sight” (v. 31).

Faith, hope, and love abide after everything else has collapsed, the apostle Paul wrote (1 Cor. 13:13). Faith itself, the Bible tells us, is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). It’s the “not seen” part that troubles us—especially in a machine age in which we expect to control everything. The Resurrection, though, doesn’t “evolve” like a machine to be better and stronger. Jesus truly joined us in death. Hope seemed to be gone, except for God’s word in Christ that he would keep his covenant promises.

Christ is raised—physically, bodily, really. On the basis of the testimony we have received from witnesses, by the Spirit, we believe. For now, though, we see death everywhere. As I write this, children in Africa are gasping in agony as AIDS ravages their bodies. Between the time I type this and the time you read it, chances are that some horrible tragedy will be in the news—a tsunami, an earthquake, civil unrest, an epidemic. We believe the church will prevail against the gates of hell, but that’s because Jesus told us so, not because the scorecard of wins demonstrates it to us.

My impulse is to rush to the kind of hope that takes shortcuts around the suffering, endurance, and character by which real hope is produced (Rom. 5:1–5).

But genuine hope does not disappoint us, Paul wrote, “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (v. 5). The same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead is the Spirit who prompts us to groan inwardly as we wait (8:23). And in that groaning, sometimes too deep for words, the Spirit creates a different kind of longing, so that “if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (v. 25).

That’s not what I naturally want. I want the hope that comes with observable signs. But that kind of hope is not focused on the resurrected Christ at the right hand of the Father. That kind of hope cannot survive the hearse ride from the funeral home to the cemetery. And that means that if I am really to have hope, I need to stop asking for signs and remember the sign of Jonah. But that one sign is enough. A tomb in Jerusalem is still empty. He is risen, just as he said. That’s real hope—the kind that, just like our lives, we must lose before we can find.

Somebody will probably ask me this week, “So where is the hope?” And I will try to give the person reasons not to despair. I will point to the younger generation, to what’s happening in the global church, to all kinds of statistics and anecdotes and optimistic predictions. But maybe what I need is for someone to take me aside afterward and tell me that’s all prosperity gospel bluster. Maybe I need that person to point out that even if nothing optimistic is happening, Jesus is still raised from the dead. Maybe that person can remind me of what I’ve sung since I was a toddler but keep forgetting: My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness. All other ground is sinking sand.

Maybe that person could even say it this way: “Why don’t we forget hope for a little while and just wait for Jesus?”

Russell Moore is editor at-large and columnist at Christianity Today as well as host of the weekly podcast The Russell Moore Show from CT Media.

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**Richard Bell, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World (Riverhead Books, 2025)**

**Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left (Basic Books, 2014)**

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Jack Kelly, Tom Paine’s War: The Words That Rallied a Nation and the Founder for Our Time (St. Martin’s Press, 2026)

Richard Bell, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World (Riverhead Books, 2025)

Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left (Basic Books, 2014)

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**Jack Kelly, Tom Paine’s War: The Words That Rallied a Nation and the Founder for Our Time (St. Martin’s Press, 2026)**

**Richard Bell, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World (Riverhead Books, 2025)**

**Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left (Basic Books, 2014)**