Rapper nobigdyl. Wants Listeners to See Jesus in Their Enemies

Interview by Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

The Fan Favorite winner in NPR’s Tiny Desk contest speaks with CT about the message of “imago interlude” and the prophetic voice of Christian hip-hop.

Courtesy of nobigdyl.

When Dylan Phillips started working in the Christian hip-hop industry, he was too cautious to try to make it as a rapper. Phillips, who now performs as nobigdyl., started out as a road manager, supporting the careers of artists like Derek Minor. Minor eventually fired Phillips in 2014 in what was meant to be a friendly push into the spotlight.

That push put Phillips on a career trajectory that the pragmatic artist and entrepreneur had not set out to follow. Over the past ten years, he has become a successful solo artist and leader in the Christian hip-hop niche. Phillips has over 1 million monthly listeners on Spotify. His independent artist collective, indie tribe, hosts an annual festival in Nashville called Holy Smoke! His latest album, Seoul Brother, is a collaboration with Kato On The Track, an Atlanta-based Korean American artist.

In May 2025, Phillips won Fan Favorite in NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest for the second year in a row—and this year, the entry that won was a recording of the song “imago interlude.” The video begins with a close-up shot of the rapper’s T-shirt, printed with the words “you don’t know jesus til you see him in your enemy.” The first line of the song is a confrontation: “Christian music or music that Christians use / To get their fix just another hit of the clicks and views.”

In “imago interlude,” it’s clear Phillips isn’t afraid of making his listeners uncomfortable. He hypothesizes that some Christians consume faith-based music while neglecting to love their neighbors. He’s not shy about wading into divisive political territory, rapping about wars and humanitarian crises:

I look for Jesus and I didn’t see him on the news.
Saw him in Palestine; the power lines were out of juice,
He was a 9-year-old; her body had been battered, bruised.
Saw him in Zion too, a missile through a tattered roof,
A father clinging to his child, pleading out to you.
Saw him in Kyiv and Moscow.
The bleeding won’t stop now.

“Imago interlude” also showcases Phillips’s eclectic musical vocabulary, infusing jazz harmonies and funk-inflected instrumentation with complex rhythm and dense lyricism. Artistically formed by an array of genres and scenes, his music resists regional classification.

The 27-year-old rapper grew up moving frequently—his dad worked in logistics for Walmart, so by the time Phillips was 18, he had lived in seven states. The near-constant movement allowed him to absorb the musical traditions of the West Coast, Appalachia, and the South. He remembers going to jazz clubs in California to watch his uncle, Grammy-winning drummer Derrek Phillips, perform with bands and combos. Those venues also introduced him to spoken-word and slam poetry.

Although Phillips’s parents are not musicians themselves, Phillips described them as “music connoisseurs,” filling their home with the music of Elton John, James Taylor, Counting Crows, Third Eye Blind, and a rotation of Motown standards. As a student at Middle Tennessee State University, Phillips studied music business.

Now, in a performing career he never expected to have, Phillips is reflecting on the shape of the Christian music industry and trying to carve out a new, sustainable space for hip-hop artists. He spoke with CT about how the world of Christian hip-hop is changing and what he thinks artists offer the American church in tumultuous times.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

The opening line of “imago interlude” is striking, confronting listeners with the idea that Christian music is being used for “clicks and views.” What were you thinking about when you wrote those opening lines?

Initially I was thinking about how Christian music shouldn’t just be for us. We shouldn’t be circling the wagons and making sanitized music to throw on for our tribe, something for Christian consumers to use as an alternative to other music when they want something for the kids. Christian music shouldn’t be something that we as artists use just to get a bigger and bigger platform or go viral.

It should have something to say for the culture and to the culture.

If we’re creating and if we think that God has crafted us and fine-tuned us to make this specific art that we are making, then there are people that need to hear the specific messages that God is sending through us.

So those lines were a critique of the individualistic, me-centered, capitalist idea that “Oh, I’m just making this music to go up the ladder.”

The shape of the industry has changed so much in the past 15 years. These days, going viral is potentially a career-making moment for artists. How do you balance the desire to find your audience and listeners with the conviction that virality and views shouldn’t be the primary driver of what you create?

I think it’s about continually recalibrating toward my belief that God is the greatest creator. I believe that he used art, conversation, and people to reach me in his kindness and love and mercy. He’s doing that for the world.

So whatever I’m doing creatively, I want it to reflect his excellence and the gift that he has given me. My job is to say yes to him and honor him in that, and platform and virality may come with that.

Platform is not the enemy, you know? I mean, in broad terms, there’s nothing more viral than the Bible. The Psalms are the most popular songs ever.

I always think, Can I make something that’s part of the soundtrack of a life walking with God?

And not every song is going to be as deep as “imago interlude.” Sometimes it’s a song that inspires joy in people, something they can go grocery shopping to.

The point is, am I chasing that platform, or am I seeing that platform as an opportunity to help people walk with God?

You spent so much of your childhood moving across the country, and the different musical influences you’ve encountered show up in your music. You’ve also experienced lots of different church music traditions. How have those varied practices and sounds influenced your art and faith?

I spent most of my life in the COGIC church [Church of God in Christ], which is a Pentecostal Holiness denomination. In COGIC churches, the choir culture, the vocal and instrumental training, and the coaching in general, it’s incredible. The musicianship is actually crazy.

As a kid, I remember watching these 15- and 16-year-olds on the drums and keys. They seemed like adults to me at the time. And to this day I can remember the runs and rhythms they were playing. Stuff I didn’t even know was possible. And they were self-taught, mentored by other people in the church.

But while we were attending COGIC churches, my mom wanted us to try Awana. It’s not a COGIC thing, so she would take us to the Southern Baptist church across town on Wednesdays. Eventually I started going to the youth group there, and that’s where I first heard music by David Crowder, Switchfoot, and Lifehouse—CCM [contemporary Christian music]. I had never heard that stuff before.

It’s easy to dunk on CCM, but in my opinion, there’s a lot of really inspiring melody there. I learned a lot from it.

What’s it like to be a Christian hip-hop artist based in Nashville? Nashville is this musical power center, but country music and CCM are the dominant musical forces, and historically, hip-hop’s power centers have been in Los Angeles, Atlanta, New Orleans, or New York. How has your location in Nashville influenced your work?

Yeah, Nashville hasn’t always been a power center for hip-hop. But, you know, the elements of excellent hip-hop music have actually always been in Nashville; it’s just that country music and Christian music get the front-page treatment.

The music history in Nashville is way more eclectic than most people realize. Nashville’s called Music City because of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Gospel music, blues, jazz, rock-and-roll, rockabilly, R & B, all of that is in the DNA in Nashville, and those are all predecessors to hip-hop, which is essentially a remix of those genres.

And there’s always been a rich Black cultural heritage in Nashville as well. There are multiple HBCUs [historically Black colleges and universities], some of which are 150 years old at this point. The Civil Rights Movement came through Nashville. A lot of the training for peaceful protests happened at Fisk University.

There is a hip-hop community here, and there actually is a distinct style. It’s very musical, a lot of melody, a lot of jazz, and that makes sense because of the history of Nashville.

You write lyrics about Christian music being “used,” sometimes hypocritically. And CCM does have a reputation for being positive, upbeat background music. Do you think Christian hip-hop is able to offer something that CCM generally doesn’t? Are there messages or ideas that hip-hop artists are willing to engage that tend to be watered down in other popular Christian music?

Yeah, I think there’s a very independent spirit in Christian hip-hop. On the whole, most of us are not signed to major labels, so we’re not part of this system that can lend itself to sanitization and being safe. Christian hip-hop can provide a less censored, less biased, prophetic voice.

I think about artists like Propaganda; he’s gonna say what he believes is beautiful and true regardless of what he loses or gains. He’s proven that over and over again. Jackie Hill Perry, she’s gonna do the same thing.

Lecrae is much more of a household name and accepted by the mainstream, but he’s obviously proven that too. He was No. 1 overall on Billboard at one point, and then he started speaking out about police brutality and lost some of that platform he had within CCM.

Christian hip-hop has this unique tradition and history. We’ve shown that we’re gonna say what’s beautiful and true, regardless of the consequences.

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

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World Vision CEO: Foreign Aid Cuts Can’t Be Replaced Overnight

Interview by Andy Olsen

On a recent visit to Ethiopia, aid recipients applauded Edgar Sandoval. “They probably didn’t know that the program was coming to an end,” he said.

Edgar Sandoval in Ethiopia

Jon Warren / World Vision

Founded 75 years ago, World Vision has grown into the largest evangelical humanitarian organization in the world. World Vision’s US office, the largest of its many global affiliates, is also one of the top recipients of US foreign aid grants.

This year, the Trump administration froze or canceled most projects overseen by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the now-shuttered humanitarian arm of the federal government. In March, as Christian humanitarian groups met with State Department officials to try to save some programs, leaders from World Vision said the charity might need to lay off as many as 3,000 employees due to the funding cuts.

While other faith-based aid groups have spoken out publicly, World Vision has remained mostly quiet. The foreign aid shutdown came just after World Vision launched an ambitious new goal of reaching 300 million people worldwide through its sponsorship, water, health, and food programs.

In early July, CEO Edgar Sandoval spoke with Andy Olsen, CT’s senior features writer, about World Vision’s staffing cuts and the role of government funding in faith-based aid. The conversation is below, edited for length and clarity.

We are talking a few days after the official closure of USAID. Over the last few years, World Vision has received more than $400 million a year in foreign aid grants—including cash and noncash items like food commodities. That’s roughly a third of your annual revenue. How have government funding cuts and pauses affected your budget?

Even before the USAID cuts, there was already a significant gap in funding. There were more humanitarian needs than available funding. And now with these cuts, depending on what happens next year, it only makes a challenging situation even more challenging.

We have a very diversified portfolio of funding, as you know, and the vast majority is private donations. But the US government is an important part of our portfolio. In 2025 we’re looking at losing about $170 million, which amounts to about 10 percent of our total budget.

Before we heard about the stop-work orders, we had already heard about a desire to review foreign aid. I welcome that wholeheartedly. We should always be looking at getting more efficient and better at what we do. I spent 25 years of my life, before coming to this Christian ministry, in corporate America. We were constantly looking at inefficiencies and getting rid of them. Any well-functioning body has some level of inefficiency.

Now, a lot of this funding is truly lifesaving funding for people who live in the most unimaginably challenging environments and conditions. There are no local markets. There are no infrastructures. These people need a safety net to help them build a life and a livelihood. So when we received stop-work orders, we immediately got to work looking for waivers for some of our programs that were lifesaving. Even though it was challenging and a bit confusing at times, we were able to restore many of the grants that were stopped temporarily.

Can you help me understand how World Vision’s programs break down between privately funded work and government-funded work? Are those funding streams and the programs they support entirely separate? Or are they intertwined in such a way that the impacts of cuts are felt across the organization?

Yes and yes. Our flagship program is our child-sponsorship program. And that is very strong and continues to get stronger over recent years. We also layer other private funding in the communities where we’re doing child sponsorship, to accelerate the impact. What we do with US grants is extend our reach at a massive scale. In some instances, the grants are in the communities where we work with sponsorship, but in many instances they’re not—particularly for humanitarian crises and natural disasters.

What makes these cuts very challenging is that we’re not talking about, call it, one-off programs, like installing a water well or a clinic. We’re talking about massive programs at scale. We’re talking about lifesaving food assistance to 500,000 people, vaccinations to 400,000 people, every month monitoring entire regions for diseases and disease prevention. Replacing that funding doesn’t happen overnight. The vast majority of our funding is donor designated, meaning it was donated for a particular purpose in a particular place for a particular time period. And we honor donor promises. We can’t just unplug and do something else to cover the gap.

Are there programs that World Vision has outright had to cut? Are there communities in the world that last year were receiving support from a World Vision program and now are not?

Yes, absolutely. I’ll give you an example. I was in Ethiopia a week and a half ago. What I saw was both encouraging and devastating. I visited one of our warehouses where we store food. This is food that’s been sourced from American farmers—sorghum, peas, et cetera. We were doing one of the last food distributions for that area. It’s an area that’s been going through a very challenging drought. I saw the crops dying because there’s no rain, and this is supposed to be the rainy season. People are working hard, but the rain doesn’t come, and they can’t feed their children.

When I walked into the community for our food distribution, the community just broke out in a big applause. What struck me at the time is, first, they probably didn’t know that the program was coming to an end. But second, they were clapping for America. They know this is from America. They told me, We’re so grateful for America. America has a good heart. Americans are generous. Please tell Americans how much we appreciate them and that they are helping us save our children’s lives.

There is a chance that we may restart in January if we get a reinstatement on the grant. But as of right now, we’re planning to shut it down.

Speaking of food aid, I was reading a statement that Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued on July 1, officially announcing the closure of USAID. He wrote, “Where there was once a rainbow of unidentifiable logos on lifesaving aid, there will now be one recognizable symbol: the American flag. Recipients deserve to know the assistance provided to them is not a handout from an unknown NGO, but an investment from the American people.”

Anyone who’s worked in foreign aid is accustomed to seeing bags of rice or whatnot that are stamped with the American flag and the motto “from the American people.” Do you see evidence to support the critique that aid recipients somehow don’t understand where the aid’s coming from?

The flag is there on every bag. And “from the American people.” I feel proud to represent America when I go out there and see the help that the US government is bringing to these families.

We just want to help people thrive. We think foreign aid—when properly administered like we do through World Vision and many other organizations—it saves lives. It saves lives here in America. It saves lives across the world. It creates resilient communities. It eradicates disease completely, and it creates goodwill. And all of that I think leads to a safer, stronger, more prosperous USA. Whether I put World Vision’s logo or not is not the key priority for us.

Jon Warren / World Vision

World Vision food distribution in Harbo, Ethiopia

The administration has said that foreign aid needs to advance the nation’s interests, that a key objective of foreign aid is to encourage global political and ideological alignment with the current administration. I don’t think that’s an entirely new way for American presidents to approach aid. I’m curious how a Christian organization like World Vision navigates those kinds of expectations while also managing the more straightforward humanitarian and faith objectives of its programs.

We are a Christian ministry motivated by our faith, following what we believe are God’s wishes for every follower of Jesus Christ, which is to help the poor and the oppressed. We appeal to many different sources of funding. The vast majority are Christian private donors. But we believe God has blessed World Vision with the capabilities to do things at a scale that not many organizations can, Christian or secular. If we can be viewed as a partner of choice to the US government to accomplish that work, to help people lift themselves out of extreme poverty, to live through food emergencies, to have vaccinations so that the children don’t die, we’ll do that.

Once the administration and Congress decide what they’re going to fund, we are just focused on maintaining our status as a partner of choice to implement and to implement with excellence. For instance, World Vision is the number one nonprofit provider of clean water in the world. We’re the number one distributor of the World Food Program. In fact, we distribute more American farming commodities around the world than anybody else. And so that’s what we’re focused on. As part of the knowledge that we’ve gained over the years, we’re advocating for ‘Hey, keep some key programs that the government funds.’

An important point here that I’d like to make is this: Foreign aid is less than 1 percent of the federal budget. The American people know that foreign aid is good. In fact, the vast majority overwhelmingly support keeping the 1 percent. The issue is that most Americans believe that the foreign aid budget is somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the total budget. But when you actually explain and they understand that it’s 1 percent or less, they overwhelmingly support it.

But to be clear, World Vision staff are not submitting reports to the government outlining how your programs are serving US interests. This is not a thing?

I’m not aware of submitting any reports of that nature. We agree with the government on objectives, on the type of outcomes that we’d like to see, and then we measure those, and we measure those with a lot of discipline and with a lot of work. That’s the only way we’ve been able to earn and maintain our preferred status, not only with the government but with most of our private donors. We do reports for them all the time to make sure that their investment is achieving what we said it would.

That said, I would be very quick to say that all of these things, again, they do help America. For instance, let’s just take the emergency food that I mentioned. That infrastructure supports an estimated 60,000 jobs right here in the US, when you consider the entire supply chain, from the farmers to the trucks that transport farm commodities to the ports.

Can we talk a little bit about layoffs? What the impact has been?

The decision to let go of staff is one of the hardest decisions a leader can make. We don’t make those lightly. It was challenging to have to say goodbye to about 11 percent of our staff here in the US, which is proportional to the 10 percent cuts that we saw. It’s particularly challenging in a ministry like ours where people have been called to do this work.

On the field-staff side, because it’s directly funded by grants, there have been stops and starts as we have reinstated grants. Initially we thought there would be maybe 2,000 or so people that we would have to let go. The actual number has turned out be a lot less. I don’t think we’ve let go even 900 so far, because many other programs were reinstated. But if they go away completely, then we may have to do some more things, particularly on the field side.

I’d like to talk about public perception. As you are well aware, Elon Musk called USAID “a criminal organization” and “one of the biggest sources of fraud in the world.” Secretary Rubio said executives at aid organizations “enjoyed five-star lifestyles funded by American taxpayers, while those they purported to help fell further behind.” The leaders that he’s talking about are people like you. How do you wrestle with that?

Well, I’m not sure they’re talking about me. I can only comment about what I’ve seen in all of my travels to all of the countries. I have seen fully committed Americans who’ve given their entire professional lives to serve their country. They are doing really good work.

Both the statistics and the stories bear that out. Let’s look at what’s happened with foreign aid and with America’s leadership in foreign aid over the years, over the decades. We’ve had 26 million people who are alive today because of PEPFAR, the signature American program against HIV and AIDS. We have 7.8 million children who were born HIV free as a result of that program. The world has eradicated smallpox. We’ve had, I think, more than a 95 percent reduction in polio. Malaria in Africa has been cut by 50 percent. Child mortality has been cut by out whopping 59 percent.

I just came back from Ethiopia, as I mentioned. I spoke to a community leader. This strong man, he broke down and started to tear up as he played back to me the possibility that the food would stop coming to his community. He was very grateful to Americans. He said, “If and when the food leaves, death will come into my community.”

Are we in a moment when World Vision has to sell itself or resell itself to Christians who have grown skeptical of faith-based aid in recent years?

We’re always telling our story and telling the story of what God is doing through World Vision. I don’t know that that’s necessarily “selling” World Vision or “selling” aid to the most vulnerable. I think Americans have incredibly generous hearts. They are very generous. We’re just all bombarded with so many priorities and with so many things, and it is our role to remind people of what God expects of every Christ follower. There are over 2,000 scriptural references to helping the poor and the oppressed. I mean, it couldn’t be more clear.

Have you met recently with members of the administration or senior leaders at the State Department?

We have a lot of engagement with the Hill, with our administrators. I was there back when the cuts began, and I travel regularly also to meet with them. What I would say is that there’s still a level of uncertainty, but I remain hopeful. I believe that our leaders want to do the right thing. They understand lifesaving aid is important, and it is my hope that they will see organizations like World Vision as one of those that they can count on to deliver on their objectives.

How often do you get to the field?

Three times a year or so.

Do you have a favorite place?

Every time I visit a country, it becomes my favorite. I’m just so inspired by the work that our staff does. They’re so committed. They put themselves in the hardest places. They serve their communities. Eighty percent of our staff live in the communities where we serve, and many of them do so at a great personal cost. They leave their families in other cities for months at a time. And when I ask them, “Why do you do this?” it doesn’t matter whether I’m in Africa, Latin America, Asia. Wherever I am, the answer is the same: “Our calling from God to serve our people.”

- More from Andy Olsen

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Kenyans Struggle to Find Good Shepherds Online

Harriet Chimea

Internet ministries bring new opportunities and theological challenges for Christians.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Google

Cameras switch on and monitors come alive as pastor James Mwita steps behind the pulpit and into the camera’s view at St. Peter’s Methodist Church. It’s Sunday morning in a quiet neighborhood in Langata Constituency, Nairobi, Kenya. The hum of a laptop signifies two congregations—one sitting in the pews, the other present behind pixels.

Mwita’s sermons now reach thousands across Kenya and the globe, and other pastors have similar goals. With nearly 72 million mobile devices and over 56 million active mobile data subscriptions for a population of 57 million, Kenya is among the ten most digitally connected countries in Africa. TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram have become fertile ground for Christian content.

But this digital revival comes with its own challenges. As the gospel goes viral, questions have arisen about the depth of community and accuracy of doctrine presented on social media.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, churches like Christ Is The Answer Ministries (CITAM)—an English-speaking church in Nairobi—restructured entire ministries to thrive online. The church offers YouTube devotionals and virtual forums attracting Kenya’s youth demographic: 18-to-35-year-olds. In its research the church found that over 20 million youth barely attend church, creating an opportunity to reach young Kenyans digitally.

Meanwhile, TikTok-famous pastors like Victor Kanyari have stirred controversy for earning thousands via livestreams with gimmicks and “indecent content.” Kanyari has earned over 400,000 Kenyan shillings (about $3,090 USD) on TikTok.

Kanyari is a preacher based in Nairobi and the founder of the Salvation Healing Ministry. His ministry operates independently of any denomination, and he has not yet disclosed any formal ordination credentials.

Jeffter Wekesa—another online pastor without public ordination records—runs a fully virtual church from his Nairobi home. He preaches exclusively over YouTube and TikTok. His social media ministry earns between 100,000 and 300,000 Kenyan shillings (about $770–2,320 USD) per month. His teachings from his living room focus on hope amid crisis and revolve around Kenya’s socioeconomic struggles—unemployment and youth unrest.

Mwita said sometimes people online worship in pajamas and forget service times. “They think, ‘I’ll watch it later,’” he explained. “But they rarely do.” He warned that a consumer approach to online church can create a culture of “passive consumption rather than active participation.”

Some online-only ministries have minimal oversight or theological scrutiny. Without accountability from elders and deacons, online preachers risk spreading incomplete or unbalanced theology. Church leaders in Kenya say members must be equipped with doctrine to withstand false teaching.

The 2023 Shakahola Forest incident in Kilifi County, Kenya, exposed how unregulated teachings can lead to catastrophic outcomes. Pastor Paul Nthenge Mackenzie of Good News International Ministries—an apocalyptic, online, fringe church—persuaded followers to retreat into the forest to starve to “meet Jesus.” Over 400 believers, including children, died from starvation, suffocation, and strangulation.

Government investigators confirmed Mackenzie used twisted interpretations of Scripture—preaching against education, medicine, and even national identity systems—as part of a doomsday narrative that encouraged isolation and blind obedience. A forensic psychologist testified that many followers exhibited “empathy delusion,” even assisting in the deaths of their loved ones as an act of faith. 

Other online ministries struggle with distance in emotional matters, especially during moments of grief or counseling sessions. Mwita has used virtual discipleship to keep a British teenager engaged with church and help an American woman through personal crisis, but he recognizes the limitations of online ministry.

“Pastoral care through a screen is not always enough,” Mwita admitted. “You can’t read tears over a livestream.” Many rural members who come to depend on livestreams face unstable internet connections or lack digital devices altogether, further isolating them from church.

Mwita, hoping to build relationships, trains pastoral leaders to follow up with digital attendees, offers personal spiritual support, and guides new Christians through discipleship materials. St. Peter’s also holds Zoom and WhatsApp Bible studies, virtual Q and A forums, and small group prayer meetings.

“We send weekly SMS reminders, devotional PDFs, and WhatsApp videos. We treat our online audience like members, not spectators,” he added. But Mwita warned of spiritual shallowness: “It’s easy to become a consumer rather than a disciple—to scroll instead of seek.”

Mwita’s antidotes: teach about spiritual disciplines, encourage digital detoxes and screen-time balance, and blend online and in-person worship. “Online ministry can transform lives,” he said, “but only if we lead with intention, care, and community. Otherwise, we risk having churches with screens but no souls.”

- More from Harriet Chimea

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War Interrupts Biblical Archaeology

Gordon Govier

Israel-Iran conflict stalled excavation efforts, forcing international teams to flee.

Meahem Kahana/AFP via Getty Images

James R. Strange, professor of New Testament at Samford University, was hoping to excavate a lot of ancient pottery from Jesus’ time at Tel Shikhin, a small village in the Galilee region.

Missiles interrupted his plans.

“We had essentially one week,” Strange told CT. “When Israel launched its offensive into Iran and Iran responded, … that made staying untenable.”

Conflict in the Middle East has once again had the unintended effect of stalling efforts to excavate biblical history. Across Israel, digs were canceled when war broke out in mid-June. Though the war between Israel and Iran lasted only 12 days, it came in the middle of the dig season, when weather conditions and schedules align for archaeological work.

Scholars and volunteers who had hoped to contribute to our understanding of the world of the Bible found themselves instead ducking into bomb shelters and tracking reports of airport closures.

Strange was convinced it was time to leave when he had to take cover in a bomb shelter across the street from their Nazareth hotel four times in one night. But then Ben Gurion Airport—the main international airport in Israel—closed. Strange and his team ended up making their way to Jordan and flying home from Amman three days later.

The Associates for Biblical Research team that was excavating Tel Shiloh had an even more circuitous path out of the country. Dig director Scott Stripling called it a “reverse Exodus.”

The group woke up in a Jerusalem hotel on June 13. News of war and warnings about imminent attacks were consuming the whole country. Stripling decided they should continue with the last day of their archaeological dig anyway.

“The best thing for us to do was to go to work,” he told CT. “I thought, for the spiritual and mental health of our team in the time of crisis, the best thing they can do is to stay in the routine.”

When it was time to leave, though, things got a bit complicated. Stripling said the team took a bus to Eilat in the south of Israel, crossed the border to Egypt, took another bus across the Sinai Peninsula to Cairo, and then flew back to the United States.

Americans excavating Caesarea Maritima, one of Israel’s most-visited archaeological sites, also went home after just one week of digging.

Some archaeologists did not make it to Israel this year because of the military conflict. Wheaton College professor Daniel Master was planning an excavation at Tel Shimron in the Galilee. Lipscomb University archaeologist Steven Ortiz was going to direct a dig at Khirbet Ether. Both men’s flights were canceled. They hope to return to the field in 2026.

The excavation at Abel Beth Maacah, a site near the Lebanese border, was put on hold last year because of the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. Dig codirector Robert Mullins from Azusa Pacific University and archaeologist Cynthia Shafer-Elliott from Baylor University could not go this year either.

“My university is currently not allowing travel to Israel,” Shafer-Elliott said.

However, codirector Nava Panitz-Cohen, from the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, will have some of the team back in the field at Abel Beth Maacah later in the summer.

Panitz-Cohen said the dig will proceed with archaeology students from Israeli universities and the international students who stayed in the country through the conflict.

Excavations at Hippos, on eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, and Hazor, nine miles north of the Sea of Galilee, are expected to continue with majority-Israeli teams.

Some archaeology work in Jordan kept going too. The dig at Khirbet Safra, a site overlooking the Dead Sea, its biblical name is unknown, continued uninterrupted. Excavation director Paul Z. Gregor, a professor from Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan, said the archaeologists “were able to complete our season of excavation as planned” before going home at the end of June.

An excavation planned at Abila, the site of a New Testament city located in northern Jordan, just two miles from the Syrian border, was not as lucky. David Vila, professor at John Brown University, was wrapping up a tour of Jordan with his students and preparing to begin three weeks of excavation of June 16.

He saw the Jordanian air force scramble jets to shoot down missiles. Then President Donald Trump started talking about the possibility of US involvement in the war, and it seemed like a good time to return to the US.

“The US bombed Iran, it turns out, about one hour after our flight took off,” Vila said.

An unexpected hiatus from excavation isn’t all bad news for archaeology, though. Digging in the dirt is the hard-but-fun part. It’s also just the start of the process. Scholars must study what the excavations have turned up, write about their discoveries, and publish the results in peer-reviewed journals.

Not getting into the field gives them additional, much-needed time to do the slow work of scholarship.

James Fraser, director of the W. F. Albright Institute for Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, noted the COVID-19 pandemic, too, forced digging to stop, and that turned out to be a productive time for many archaeologists.

“We’re harvesting the fruit of that now,” he said. “We’ve launched several books here at the Albright over the last several months, all of which would not have come to fruition, I think, without that enforced period.”

Fraser said if archaeologists in Israel are not able to go to their excavations, they are always welcome to come to the Albright, where he has been director since a few days after Hamas launched an attack on Israeli civilians.

“All researchers, regardless of background, can come and sit in the library,” he said, “discuss their findings, and join in shared pursuit of research excellence.”

Gordon Govier writes about biblical archaeology for Christianity Today, hosts the archaeology radio program The Book and The Spade, and is the editor of Artifax.

Correction: A previous version of this article said Strange and his wife took cover in a bomb shelter; she was not in Israel at the time of the attack.

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News

Congress Restores PEPFAR Funds in Last Minute Reprieve

Emily Belz

The White House tried to the cut the HIV/AIDS relief program by $400 million, but Republicans pushed back.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins opposed cuts to PEPFAR in the Republican rescissions package that passed Thursday night.

Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images

The White House wanted cuts to the global HIV/AIDS program PEPFAR, and in a rare pushback, congressional Republicans said no.

After months of advocacy from faith and global-health communities, Congress decided in last minute negotiations this week to restore $400 million in funding to the program.

PEPFAR was the only foreign aid program to win a reprieve in a package Republican lawmakers designed to pull back previously authorized funding to federal programs, also called rescissions.

The White House had pushed the PEPFAR cuts, with the rescissions package formalizing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)’s targeting of foreign aid earlier this year; about $8 billion of the $9 billion in cuts that Congress passed late Thursday night came from USAID (US Agency for International Development) funding.

Advocates saw PEPFAR’s reprieve as a symbolic win that the program has bipartisan support going forward.

“It was a great shot in the arm that the outreach done by the faith community, the advocate community, is really working,” said Catherine Connor, the vice president of public policy at the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, in an interview with CT. The organization is a major implementer of PEPFAR.

PEPFAR, or the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, is a roughly $6.5 billion program that contracts with some Christian clinics and relief groups and supports about 20 million people on life-saving antiretroviral drugs. It launched in 2003 with bipartisan support and has saved more than 26 million lives around the world.

The biggest slice of PEPFAR’s budget goes to buying antiretroviral drugs and other medical supplies, and organizations implementing PEPFAR on the ground have reported to CT that drug supply disruption has been one of their major issues this year.

Those fighting HIV/AIDS have had a goal of ending the disease as a public health threat by 2030, but the administration’s drastic cuts brought the likelihood of achieving that into question. The Trump administration largely shuttered USAID, which oversees half of PEPFAR’s funding, and the State Department absorbed the agency’s remaining staff and programs.

After the Trump administration proposed the $400 million in cuts to the program, some Republican senators, led by Maine’s Susan Collins, pushed back.

The White House relented.

“PEPFAR will not be impacted by the rescissions,” said White House budget director Russell Vought, who has overseen the slashing of federal agencies, in the Capitol on Wednesday.

Shortly before the White House reversed its position on PEPFAR cuts, Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins published an op-ed supporting the $400 million cuts and pushing the administration to cut further. Perkins wrote that the program had been “co-opted to promote abortion access and LGBT ideology abroad” and that it was funding “pastry cooking for male prostitutes.”

Under the Biden administration, some conservative evangelical groups attacked the program as a “slush fund for abortion,” and national pro-life groups said they would consider votes in favor of PEPFAR’s five-year reauthorization as not pro-life.

PEPFAR did find violations of US law against abortion funding in one place: Mozambique, where four nurses had performed 21 abortions. It was the first time any abortions in the program had been found in 20 years. The US froze funding to the providers when it discovered the violation.

A recent study published in The Lancet estimated that the overall drastic cuts to USAID, including PEPFAR, would result in 14 million deaths of adults and children in the next five years.

Even with the restoration of PEPFAR funds, “The global health apparatus and the general development platform is being hit hard,” said Connor.

USAID programs that treated tuberculosis, malaria, and malnutrition have been slashed. This week, Republican lawmakers added language to the rescissions package to try to protect some of that care. They circulated an outline, reviewed by CT, about the amended rescissions package promising that it would protect “lifesaving HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, Malaria, Maternal and Child Health and Nutrition (including polio)” as well as “U.S. commodity-based food aid.” Food for international malnutrition programs comes from US farmers.

But it’s unclear how those programs are protected, since the $400 million for PEPFAR was the only program specifically saved from the rescissions.

“We’re thankful for the many Christians who have used their voices to advocate for PEPFAR in recent days, making telephone calls and sending emails to their congressional offices,” said Matthew Soerens, vice president of advocacy and policy at World Relief, in a statement. “It’s clear that many Senators’ offices were listening to these constituents’ perspectives, and I’m especially grateful for the leadership of Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Susan Collins.”

On the ground, cuts have already done damage. But those working on PEPFAR weren’t expecting a win.

Patricia Kamara, the head of the Christian Health Association of Liberia, had gone to congressional offices to lobby for PEPFAR and other global health funding last month. CT spoke to her in Washington at the time, and she was discouraged. Essential drugs have been difficult to obtain in Liberia since the cuts, she said.

The sudden cuts felt like “stabbing in the back,” she said, but Christian facilities would find a way to stay open and serve their patients.

Kamara and others will continue looking for funding wherever they can find it. President Donald Trump’s budget for fiscal year 2026 has proposed deep cuts to PEPFAR and global health, in addition to the rescissions.

“It takes a lot of effort to keep pushing back against the political headwinds,” said Connor. “The good news here is Congress has sent a strong signal this week that they value PEPFAR’s work and they want to continue to support life-saving work.”

- More from Emily Belz

News

Who Won in the Supreme Court’s ‘Paxton’ Decision? Kids.

Harvest Prude

The decision gives states the green light to require adult websites to verify the ages of their users.

Maskot / Getty Images

Child looks at smartphone

When Ben Williams turned ten, his parents bought him an iPod touch. That’s how his porn addiction began.

Ten was when he started to really notice girls, one of many changes that his family never discussed. Sex, puberty, or crushes didn’t come up in conversation at home or at his church, where both his parents volunteered. He had plenty of questions but no answers, so one night alone in his room, he turned to Google.

After a few weeks of searching images of the human body, he landed in what should have been adults-only spaces.

At first, Williams “didn’t know what I was looking at and didn’t really understand what it was.” He didn’t even know the word pornography the first time he watched it. He felt disgusted and confused but also excited, aroused, and curious to see more.

By the time his parents upgraded him to an iPhone two years later, Williams was viewing pornography compulsively every week, sometimes every night. This secret struggle followed him into adulthood and caused issues in dating, relationships, and his faith.

Williams’s story is hardly unique. The average age of exposure is 12, with more than half of kids reporting the encounter was accidental. Experts expect that the age will trend even younger with more access to devices.

Parents eager to protect their children from pornography have some reinforcements on the way: Last month, the Supreme Court sided with states that require pornography websites to verify users are at least 18. Christians and child welfare advocates celebrated the decision, saying it paves the way for states to implement laws to safeguard children from accessing adult material online.

It’s gotten harder for parents to keep their children from exposure to online pornography as more technology puts kids just a click or a command away from inappropriate content.

“I can make decisions in my household to keep them off smartphones or social media or put filters on our, you know, home device. But if they can still go to school and a child can still pull up Pornhub on their smartphone, that’s a collective problem,” said Clare Morell, who directs the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Technology and Human Flourishing Project.

In her book The Tech Exit, Morell encourages parents to keep kids and teens off smartphones—an increasingly countercultural position.

In the era of Google, TikTok, and Snapchat, porn-addiction ministries see ages of exposure tick younger, with kids watching clips pulled up on friends’ phones in the lunchroom or on the playground. Williams—now the director of a Christian recovery organization called 423 Next—said many people they work with were first exposed between 6 and 12 years old.

“‘Hey, guys, look what I found,’” Williams said. “You know, a group of six boys just all around the phone watching pornography, that tends to be the most common.”

423 Next uses a model of faith-based community and accountability for those struggling with addiction. Those same factors helped Williams recover from his own addiction in college when he was 20.

“The way I like to think about it is social media—and just broader media at large—had been grooming me my whole life to be prepared for pornography, to have my sexuality weaponized against myself, to view something that is an obvious distortion from God’s design and what is right,” Williams said.

Childhood encounters can lead to a lifelong struggle; his ministry also works with men in their 50s, 60s, or 70s who seek help after someone has discovered their covert porn addictions.

Unprotected from Porn, a report from Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute and the Institute for Family Studies found that “underage pornography use is now the norm, rather than the exception”—a particularly concerning trend as online videos depict increasingly “violent … and deviant” sexual content.

This is not the first time the judicial system has wrestled with restrictions on porn access, but it is the first time the justices favored the state’s compelling interest in protecting children from obscene online content.

In 2003, the Supreme Court’s Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union struck down a federal bill, the Child Online Protection Act. The court held that the law was unconstitutional for not being narrowly tailored in its attempts to criminalize certain online content. The law imposed a steep fine and 6 months in prison to anyone who, for commercial reasons, posted content online that would be harmful to children, unless they tried to bar their content from minors by requiring a credit card or other “measures that are feasible under available technology.” An earlier decision in 1997, Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, also sided with adult websites in striking down a section of The Telecommunications Act of 1996 that made it a crime to display “patently offensive” adult material to minors. The justification was that the clause was overbroad and restricted free speech.

“It’s been a fight for as long as there has been a deployed commercial internet,” Wesley Hodges, who directs the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Technology and the Human Person. said. “Access for children to porn [has] simply reached a critical level that would not have been conceived at the time of Reno and Ashcroft, those early decisions, on pornography and obscene material.”

This time, the Supreme Court agreed with a federal appeals court that Texas attorney general Ken Paxton was right to enforce a state law requiring pornography websites to verify visitors’ ages before allowing access. The 6–3 decision, Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, fell along ideological lines.

Texas’ law, House Bill 1181, passed in 2023, requires websites to use age-verification technology if more than a third of the content on their platforms is “sexual material harmful to minors.” It was initially blocked by a district judge, then allowed to go into effect (with one part of the law struck down), causing some adult websites, like Pornhub, to suspend services in the state.

In last month’s ruling, Justice Clarence Thomas said that adults “have no First Amendment right to avoid age verification, and the statute can readily be understood as an effort to restrict minors’ access. Any burden experienced by adults is therefore only incidental to the statute’s regulation of activity that is not protected by the First Amendment.”

Thomas described a “compelling” state interest to protect children from sexual material.

Morell said the ruling “really serves to back parents up.” It also brings the digital marketplace more in line with brick-and-mortar stores, which are required to confirm the age of those buying adult magazines or other adult content.

Currently, 24 states have passed laws requiring some kind of age verification to access pornography online. Many of them are modeled similarly to Texas’ law, though the mechanics on how verification works differ.

“The court’s historic decision will shield other state laws protecting kids online from legal challenges and embolden more states to follow suit,” said Brad Wilcox, one of the authors of the Unprotected from Porn report.

Hodges said the decision rightly recognizes that the technology has changed. Age verification can be done in a cost-effective and privacy-preserving way, he argued.

“Twenty years ago, the users accessing obscene sites, gambling, you name it, would be right to worry that they are susceptible to data breaches,” he said. “Today, that is simply not an inevitability.”

Hodges cautioned that parents shouldn’t see age verification as a fail-safe—“There’s always going to be some way to circumvent [them]”—but it’s a long-overdue step in the right direction.

“More than 20 years in the making and, you know, it’s a decision that parents and pastors have been dreaming about.”

Chris McKenna, founder of the kids tech-safety organization Protect Young Eyes, cautioned that parents in states with age verification should still be vigilant about doing what they can to safeguard their children’s devices and delay giving kids social media and smartphones.

McKenna, a former youth pastor, worked on the Texas bill in 2023 with its original sponsor Angela Paxton, a state senator (who recently filed for divorce from the attorney general Ken Paxton).

McKenna wants Christians to reach out to policymakers at the state and federal level to advocate for similar state laws. “We have our first ruling in two decades from any branch of government,” he said. “We should celebrate that … and we need to keep the gas on.”

- More from Harvest Prude

Books

Review

Churches, Don’t ‘Accommodate’ Disability. Plan for It.

Sunita Kapahi Theiss

Including people with mental and physical challenges should be an expectation, not an “extra.”

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Unsplash, Pexels

I didn’t grow up in church. But even as an undiagnosed autistic child raised Hindu in the South, I was aware of church culture. I even knew a few popular hymns. Yet I found the idea of church far more confusing than my own family’s religious practices. At the very least, I was certain it would require a level of decoding I couldn’t yet master.

I became a Christian in my early 20s, but even from the inside, the church still confused me. Now, as a parent to autistic children, I find myself helping my children decode some of the same rules I still struggle with. And while we’ve found welcome and community, we’ve also encountered plenty of unintentional barriers: sensory overload, unspoken behavioral expectations, well-meaning volunteers who didn’t quite know what to do with us.

I’ve combed through ministry resource after resource looking for something that will help me better advocate for and meet the needs of a family like mine. While many outline logistical, practical, and safety-related steps, few embody the love of Christ as tenderly as Sandra Peoples’s Accessible Church: A Gospel-Centered Vision for Including People with Disabilities and Their Families.

Peoples, a disability-ministry consultant who grew up with a sister with Down syndrome, is also a parent to an autistic child. Her book is a timely and deeply needed resource for churches seeking more than a manual for ministry logistics. It offers a holistic framework—both theological and practical—for making the church a place where people with disabilities and their families are truly seen, welcomed, and valued. As Peoples demonstrates, the rationale for pursuing accessibility and inclusion lies not in sentiment or social obligation but in the very nature of the gospel.

Accessible Church has a clear foundational premise: Including people with disabilities is not an “extra.” It’s intrinsic to the mission of the church.

Drawing from the doctrine of the imago Dei, Peoples asserts that every person—regardless of ability—is created in God’s image and called to participate in the life of Christ’s body. This foundational truth bestows dignity, value, and purpose on every individual. It teaches us to treat disabilities not as unfortunate deviations but as sovereignly ordained realities, capable of reflecting God’s glory in unique and powerful ways.

Peoples’s writing reflects this conviction—she doesn’t treat disabilities as problems to be solved or obstacles to be managed. Her theological approach is pastoral, not clinical; biblical, not sentimental.

She weaves Scripture throughout the book, from Moses’s speech limitations to Paul’s thorn in the flesh. These aren’t cherry-picked proof texts but part of a broader narrative: Throughout the history of his people, God’s power is revealed through human weakness. The church, if it would reflect Christ, must learn to see beauty and purpose in what the world calls limitation. “As churches,” Peoples suggests, “we may need to lay down our preferences, our traditions, and our reputations for the sake of the gospel.”

The book presents sobering statistics about the relative absence of people with disabilities in our churches, measured against disability rates in our larger communities. Such figures point to a glaring discrepancy between churches’ self-perception as a welcoming environment and the actual experiences of families impacted by disability.

Peoples encourages readers to consider why these families might avoid our congregations. The reasons aren’t that mysterious. Lack of support, physical inaccessibility, behavioral misunderstandings, and theological confusion all play some role. Peoples names these dynamics honestly, without shame or blame, and invites churches to build structures that allow a wider range of people to feel at home rather than merely “accommodated.”

She also clarifies an important matter: Disability is not a monolith. From physical and cognitive disabilities to learning differences, mental health challenges, and trauma histories, the needs—and strengths—of people in this category vary widely. The book offers differentiated strategies that reflect this complexity instead of flattening disability into a single model.

As an autistic adult, I found this nuance deeply affirming. I know what it feels like to sit in a space that was not built for me—where participation requires performance and the unspoken message is “Act normal, and maybe you can stay.” Peoples envisions a better way: a church that aims higher than simply letting people like me attend. A church, in other words, that expects my attendance and plans for it in advance. That mindset shift—from accommodation to anticipation—has the power to transform church culture at its roots.

Accessible Church excels in its practicality. For Peoples, inclusion can’t be reduced to an abstract value or a sentimental gesture. It is a calling that must shape physical environments, volunteer policies, communication structures, and leadership assumptions.

The book outlines four basic models of accessibility in church classrooms and other ministry settings: inclusive environments, which host people with disabilities alongside their peers; specialized environments, which cater to specific cognitive and sensory needs; hybrid models, which allow movement between inclusive and specialized settings; and reverse inclusion programs, which invite a church’s teens and young adults into otherwise specialized spaces for the purpose of fostering relationships. These options offer churches of all sizes flexible starting points based on their resources and context. There is no one-size-fits-all model, and that humility is refreshing.

The book provides a wealth of practical tools grounded in love, not avoidance of liability. The emphasis is clear: Accessibility is about people, not just programs. When churches prioritize safety and belonging, gospel encounters become possible. This is especially true for children who may struggle with communication, emotional regulation, or participation.

“People with disabilities just can’t hide their neediness as easily as the rest of us try to hide ours,” Peoples points out. I’ve spent much of my life trying to mask my own “neediness,” so this truth hit me hard. The church is meant to be a place where we stop hiding. The more we can learn to treat visible vulnerability as a strength, not a liability, the closer we’ll come to Christlikeness.

As a parent, I long for a church where children like mine are seen not as exceptions but as fellow image-bearers with spiritual gifts to offer and discipleship needs to be met.

Peoples rightly emphasizes that disability ministry is a team effort. It’s not the work of one overwhelmed volunteer. It requires pastoral support, leadership buy-in, and a framework for sustainability.

I was especially encouraged by her description of “buddies”—volunteers who support children one-on-one, not as babysitters but as co-ministers. Peoples outlines how to recruit, train, and celebrate these volunteers—reminding readers that inclusion is a joy, not a burden.

Still, I couldn’t help noticing a gap: While the book offers a rich treatment of ministry and support to individuals with disabilities and their caregivers, it says little about adults with disabilities serving as leaders. Peoples cites Erik Carter, director of the Baylor Center for Developmental Disabilities, who has charted five steps in “the evolution of disability ministry”: “ministry apart,” “ministry to,” “ministry among,” “ministry with,” and “ministry by and with people with intellectual disabilities.” But she could have offered more examples of what it looks like when those people take the leadership reins.

Many autistic adults—myself included—are parenting neurodivergent kids, quietly navigating Sunday mornings without being invited to contribute. I’ve had the blessing of being involved in shaping a disability ministry at my home church, but I know this is the exception.

We adults with disabilities carry lived, embodied wisdom about our experiences—about regulation, communication, and sensory needs. And if churches are serious about inclusion, we need to be part of the leadership conversation—not just the care plan.

What sets Accessible Church apart is its unwavering focus on the gospel.

Inclusion is not framed as a charitable outreach, a performative gesture, a political imperative, or a ministry niche. It runs through the very fabric of the gospel. The church cannot fully reflect the body of Christ if it excludes its most vulnerable members.

This is not about extending pity or carving out “special needs ministries” as side projects. This is about ecclesiology. It’s about what we believe the church is. If the body of Christ has many parts, then exclusion is not just unfortunate—it is theologically devastating.

As Peoples observes, “Being an accessible church benefits the church as well as the families who are included.” Families impacted by disability are not burdens. They are co-laborers, image-bearers, and fellow heirs of grace. When we welcome those whose needs are different from ours, we remember our own needs. When we build spaces where difference is not just tolerated but embraced, we begin to look a little more like Christ.

Too many disability stories in the church focus on healing. This book offers a better story—one where grace sits at the table with disability and says, “Stay. You belong here.”

Perhaps your church is just beginning the journey of disability inclusion. Perhaps it’s been walking this path for years. In either case, Accessible Church is an indispensable resource. It will stretch your theology, strengthen your ministry, and maybe, as it did for me, offer healing in places you didn’t expect.

Sunita Kapahi Theiss is a writer, communications consultant, and homeschool parent based in Georgia.

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News

In Immigration Court, Christians Show Up to Fill the Back Benches

Emily Belz in Los Angeles

Some asylum seekers face arrest at their hearings under a new ICE tactic. Now clergy are learning how to be witnesses in those moments.

Federal agents detain a man at immigration court in New York City in July.

Spencer Platt / Getty Images

Early one June morning in downtown Los Angeles, a group of eight people was learning how to observe immigration hearings.

Holding notebooks to write down all their instructions, they were mostly Protestant clergy but also Jews and those of other faiths, all under the tutelage of a local faith-based group called CLUE (Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice). In recent weeks, more Catholics have signed up for the court-observation training with CLUE, too, according to its director Jennifer Gutierrez.

Ashley Hiestand, a minister from Mount Hollywood United Church of Christ was among the group visiting immigration court for the first time. It was initially intimidating, especially seeing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in the hallways, but when she learned the process, it felt simpler.

“Our congregants might not know how to plug in in this moment—but this is one way,” she said.

There are 58 immigration courts around the country, most in major cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Miami or near sizable immigration detention centers like Adelanto, which sits about 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

The vast majority of those facing deportation now are Christian.

The public can sit in on immigration hearings. More clergy are starting to observe hearings in big cities since the Trump administration began a new deportation tactic at courts.

In the removal hearings, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) lawyers will move to dismiss the case. If the judge grants the dismissal, that ends the immigrants’ court cases and makes them eligible for “expedited removal.” That means ICE can arrest them outside the courtrooms and they are subject to deportation.

This process ends most legal remedies available to individuals who successfully obtained legal parole in the US—for example, through the app CBP One—but are now facing deportation because President Donald Trump has canceled many of those asylum programs.

In May, a Queens pastor observing immigration court in New York was arrested, right when ICE first began its tactic of arresting people at their court hearings. Authorities later released him.

Before going into Los Angeles court on this morning, CLUE’s Jennifer Coria, leading the group, emphasized that this was not an attempt at civil disobedience. It was about following rules—observing the court hearings, offering resources to immigrants there, witnessing ICE arrests outside courtrooms, and recording detainees on video as ICE agents load them into vans outside the court.

Observers also might be the only way a detainee without a lawyer can get word to family before being sent to a faraway facility, perhaps in another state. Volunteers offer to connect with an emergency contact if they can.

Coria hadn’t been in the LA courthouse before, but she had been observing immigration court in nearby Orange County and had watched people have their cases dismissed and then ICE arrest them for deportation.

Though CLUE’s Christian volunteers who showed up this day were mostly mainline, evangelicals from Spanish-speaking churches have been coming to CLUE events.

After going through security, the group walked under the observation of some bored National Guard soldiers in the lobby and to an elevator bank, then up to the executive office for immigration court to find the rooms that would be holding what are called “master calendar” hearings.

In those courts, immigration judges hear multiple cases in a row, and ICE agents linger to arrest people after hearings.

Coria suggested a few people sit in the courtroom and a few sit outside to see what the agents were doing.

Each courtroom functions in its own way, but when two clergy members went into the courtroom to sit in on the hearings, the court clerk came over to ask who they were, and they shared what church they were from.

“The judge on Friday really noticed the clergy was present in the courtroom—he looked at them when he was speaking,” said Coria.

Seven immigrants sat on benches waiting for the judge to call their cases. One was a woman carrying a baby, juggling toys to keep the baby happy. The judge allowed her to stand and bounce the baby during her hearing.

Outside the courtroom, four unidentified men in cargo pants, big watches, and short-sleeve collared shirts gathered, whom CLUE staff guessed to be ICE agents.

Judge Rachel A. Ruane, drinking from a large coffee tumbler at a standing desk, called up several immigrants at a time to hear their cases, a practice reflecting the high caseload of immigration judges. Some of the cases she heard that day involved immigrants who entered the country in 2022 and who would have merit hearings in 2028.

The first three cases she heard were for immigrants without lawyers—the woman with the baby, a young man, and another man who had come all the way from Houston for his hearing. Ruane gave them a sheet listing free legal-aid services: a resource if they wanted representation, she said.

The DHS lawyer motioned to have two of the cases dismissed, which would allow the agents outside to arrest the immigrants.

The judge asked the two immigrants, through a Spanish interpreter, if they agreed with the motion or if they would like to have time to find a lawyer.

Though the dismissal of deportation proceedings could sound like a win for the immigrants, the woman with the baby understood the implications—she began weeping and said in Spanish that she feared persecution if she returned to her country.

To the DHS lawyer the judge said, “I’m holding those motions [to dismiss] in abeyance today.” She said she would give the immigrants time to find lawyers for their next hearing.

After her ruling, the presumed ICE agents left the hall outside the courtroom.

As the immigrants left the courtroom, CLUE clergy intercepted them to ask whether they had legal resources. The volunteers learned lessons for their next court visit: Have a printed resource page in Spanish to hand to people. The immigrants were receptive and chatted briefly.

After one round of cases, the volunteers left and convened outside the court. The woman with the baby on her hip continued talking with one of the clergy members in Spanish. The volunteers asked each other if anyone could give her a ride, but no one had a car seat. So instead they waited with her for someone else to pick her up.

Hiestand, one of the pastors, said the constant immigration raids have felt like “hell” in LA, but showing up felt like the “small next right thing.”

“You don’t have to know all the things,” she said, but just show up, maybe with a buddy if not an official group. “To bear witness now matters. … I noticed people reacted to our presence there. The folks in court see it; the folks who work at court see it.”

The group discussed a plan to go to LA court weekly, with volunteers in the morning and afternoon.

“The community feels that presence even if ICE isn’t there,” said Coria.

- More from Emily Belz

News

Newsboys Scandals Show Christian Music Has Few Moral Guardrails

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Michael Tait’s admissions raise questions about industry accountability.

Stephen J. Cohen/Getty Images

When frontman Michael Tait left the Newsboys suddenly, he wasn’t the first.

In 1997—long before Tait’s recent departure and subsequent confession—John James abruptly left one of the biggest acts in contemporary Christian music (CCM).

At the time, the Newsboys said James was returning to Australia to preach. That was not the truth. The truth, as James later said publicly, was that he was getting drunk before noon, spending hundreds of dollars on cocaine, and wrecking his marriage with serial infidelity. He left the Newsboys because he couldn’t hide the disaster of his life anymore.

When James has talked about this in recent years, he has not blamed the Newsboys or CCM more generally for what he did. He made his own decisions. He is responsible for his moral failures.

At the same time, James raised questions about the industry.

“The industry has the ability to expose defects in your character,” he said in 2024.

And it does little to provide direction or offer meaningful accountability.

In 2007, James told a journalist that no one in Newsboys or the CCM industry tried to stop him from straying from the straight and narrow until it was way too late. He said there were no real moral guardrails.

“The success, the fame, the money, the screaming girls, the autographs. It’s like, how do you deal with that? How do you process that?” James said. “There wasn’t anyone mentoring or helping me to deal with this, mentally or emotionally. It’s like, you’ve got people that surround you and help you to become successful but no one really mentored us in regards of how to keep our heads in check.”

Tait’s scandal is re-raising questions about corporate culpability. Cory Asbury, known for his song “Reckless Love,” said “everyone knew” something was going on behind the scenes at Newsboys. The band’s lead singer, Adam Agee, said they heard lots of “rumors over the years” but they couldn’t be confirmed.

Performers may face audience backlash (especially in the internet age), but the Christian music industry doesn’t seem to have a reliable way to check artists’ misbehavior.

There have been inconsistent attempts to create accountability systems for Christian musicians over the years. For example, some bands—including DC Talk and Newsboys—have brought “road pastors” on tour to try to provide spiritual guidance.

John Cooper, frontman of the veteran Christian rock band Skillet, isn’t convinced that’s effective.

“If you’re not committed to living in the light, you can just lie,” he told CT. “It’s about the culture of the band.”

An unusual corporate structure shaped the culture of the Newsboys. Despite the group’s band-centric image and its plural name, the Newsboys operates more like a traveling Broadway show or circus than a typical rock band. The performers are employees or independent contractors.

“The Newsboys is a brand,” said John J. Thompson, founder of the Christian-music magazine True Tunes. “Wes Campbell created a show, and the show is the priority.”

Once just the band’s manager, Campbell registered the trademark for the Newsboys in the US in 1994. Since 2009, when founding member Peter Furler left, Campbell has also been sole head of the company. As owner, he has worked to keep the Newsboys going despite major disruptions.

The Newsboys transitioned from James to Furler in 1997, moving Furler up as frontman, and from Furler to Tait in 2009, with Furler literally handing his microphone to Tait during a live performance.

When Tait stepped down, it didn’t take Campbell long to find a new face for the Newsboys. He brought on another singer, Adam Agee, a CCM veteran who previously played in Christian rock bands Stellar Kart and Audio Adrenaline, which Campbell has also managed since 2012.

Campbell wrote in a letter to the Gospel Music Association leaked on the internet last week that “each band member has personal accountability procedures in place,” such as a road pastor, a manager, and a traveling companion. Tait joined the band with an “established accountability infrastructure,” the letter says, and those people were responsible to take care of him.

Campbell has been involved in the management of a roster of other Christian musicians—including Tasha Layton, Cochren & Co., Rhett Walker, and 7eventh Time Down—through a management company he cofounded.

This corporate model can contribute to a group’s longevity, according to True Tunes’s Thompson. He compared the Newsboys to The Imperials, a Southern gospel quartet formed in the early 1960s and still actively performing, retaining its name while frequently changing the roster of performers.

The model allows a single successful band to live in its own ecosystem. Campbell cultivated the Newsboys’ close connections with nonprofits and formed two limited liability companies, Thriving Children Advocates and Thriving Charity Advocates. They function as broker agencies between the Newsboys and nonprofit organizations seeking to sponsor events or promote child-sponsorship programs at concerts.

Campbell also developed and maintained the brand’s relationships with labels and publishing companies. He oversaw the band’s close affiliation with the God’s Not Dead film franchise, including the group’s appearances in three of the five movies.

Campbell benefits from the success of the Newsboys’ music on radio and streaming platforms and with church-licensing providers. He holds songwriting credits on over 40 Newsboys songs and publishing rights on others.

Neither Campbell nor his lawyer returned requests for comment for this article, but Campbell has denied any knowledge of inappropriate behavior by Tait.

Steve Taylor, former Newsboys producer and songwriter, told CT he believes it “utter nonsense” that Campbell didn’t know what was happening. He said Campbell is involved in every aspect of the Newsboys business.

Taylor said CCM includes many “upright and honest” people, but in his experience, Campbell was “not a trustworthy person or a particularly ethically minded person.”

CT spoke with others within CCM who said they feared speaking out would lose them business or lead to lawsuits. Sheena Hennink, a concert promoter in Canada, said a lawyer representing the Newsboys sent her an intent-to-sue letter in response to an Instagram video she posted explaining why she canceled a series of concerts following Tait’s departure.

While the corporate structure of the Newsboys is unusual, it’s not clear to industry experts that other approaches provide more accountability. CCM historian Leah Payne, who wrote the book God Gave Rock & Roll to You, said some industry attempts to enforce moral standards for Christian musicians have not been successful.

“A lot of Christian record labels have had morality clauses, but the only real guardrail is the marketplace,” Payne told CT. “The dollar is the governing body.”

If performers’ behavior shocks audiences, they stop buying albums and attending concerts. That’s the most serious check the industry has—the possible damage done to an individual’s reputation and the economic fallout for the label and management.

Several high-profile CCM artists are calling for industry-wide reform in the wake of the Newsboys scandal. John Cooper, the Skillet frontman, said it may be discouraging for listeners to hear, but the industry doesn’t care whether an artist is a good Christian or even a good person.

He told CT there’s a temptation to trust people in CCM because they’re Christians or because they’re making faith-oriented music. He’s had to learn through experience that CCM industry professionals aren’t necessarily more principled than their secular counterparts.

“Sometimes you let your guard down when you’re dealing with Christians and assume we’re all dealing with a particular set of principles,” Cooper said. “People are just going to lie and steal and cheat sometimes.”

With the rising popularity of worship music, more artists are selling themselves as not just performers but worship leaders. Even with performers who pray and lead worship songs during their concerts, Cooper said, it’s not safe to assume that everyone is being transparent or that the persona the audience sees on stage is consistent with the off-stage individual.

Many fans are likely aware of an element of artifice to CCM. Artists project and perform spiritual fervor, night after night, show after show. Christian listeners generally know the figures on stage aren’t perfect, but when fans resonate with the music, they want to believe—or at least hope—that the musicians are earnest people of faith.

That belief, said Cooper, is what makes it so disappointing when a Christian artist has a public scandal. He does not think CCM is more morally corrupt than the mainstream but about the same.

“And because it’s not supposed to be the same,” Cooper said, “it feels worse.”

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

News

Why Scotland’s Christian Minority Stays Quiet

Timothy W. Taylor

Research finds that churchgoers want to share their faith but don’t see others doing so.

George Pachantouris / Getty Images

For the first time in Scotland, the majority of the population has no religion, and only 39 percent would call themselves Christians.

While many wonder how Scotland lost the faith, Christians, greater in number than a mere remnant, remain faithful. Some may predict a continuous decline in church attendance, but new evidence bolsters optimism for Christian Scots.

A national survey from Logos Scotland asked Christians about their participation in the church, experience in discipleship and training, and willingness to engage in public discourse.

Church attendance may have fallen dramatically since 1984, but Logos found that engagement is still incredibly high. Over 80 percent of Christian respondents say they go to their church at least one time each week—a level of commitment that is uncommon in many other countries.

The survey also showed that many Christians feel equipped and ready to share their faith with others, yet they believe that their fellow Christians are hesitant to do so. This perception gap may contribute to a wider silence of Christian voices in public discourse and stifle their freedom to joyfully share their faith.

From the earliest missionaries, such as Saint Ninian and Saint Columba, to the Scottish Reformation, Christianity has influenced Scotland’s moral framework and political institutions. Even as the nation grapples with evolving secular and pluralistic values, the legacy of Christian virtues undergirds the freedom and civility expected in public discourse.

Yet the public square becomes diminished if any one part of the vibrant fabric of Scottish society is self-censoring. Christian leaders are challenged to correct any misunderstandings within the broader church to promote engagement within local neighborhoods and in public spaces.

A supermajority of 71 percent of Christians report feeling equipped to discuss their beliefs with people of different religious or secular views. This is a significant finding in an era marked by reports of declining church attendance and waning Christian influence.

Across various denominations—Catholic (76%), Church of Scotland (74%), Free Church (71%), and Independent (51%)—Christians express confidence in their ability to articulate their faith.

The majority of Christians (57%) also feel equipped to speak about current issues from a biblical perspective. As commentators worry about the decline in biblical literacy, Christian Scots feel confident in their biblical viewpoints, even in the context of current issues capturing headlines.

There is a good amount of variation, however, across church affiliations. Congregants in the Church of Scotland feel the least equipped (50%) and Christians in the Free Church feel the most prepared (70%) to speak on issues affecting Scotland from a biblical perspective.

While Christians may feel equipped, they are not as confident when the potential for negative reactions is introduced. The survey indicates that 43 percent of Christians disagree with the notion that they are reluctant to speak about their faith due to fear of reprisal. Yet a significant number remain neutral or slightly agree, suggesting a nuanced hesitation when it comes to public expression.

This reluctance is more pronounced among certain denominations, with the Free Church members (39%) expressing the most hesitation and Catholics (28%) the least. Indeed, Catholics in Scotland are the most confident in speaking about their faith with others both in terms of feeling equipped and being less reluctant to self-censor due to fears of negative reactions.

The survey also found that Christians notice the reticence among fellow believers. In fact, 67 percent of Christians consider others to be reluctant to share their faith; fewer than 10 percent of Christians disagreed.

This is a surprising finding given that a majority of Christians feel individually equipped and only a minority are personally reluctant to speak about their faith. It may be that a self-fulfilling prophecy is at work.

Even if individuals feel confident, they may be less prone to speak about their faith if they believe others are reluctant. No one wants to be alone in speaking from one’s faith identity in public, and thus, a joint perception of others’ reluctance may paradoxically cause the most equipped and ready Christian to become individually reluctant.

Interestingly, non-Christians do not think Christians are reluctant to share their faith in public spaces. When non-Christian respondents were asked whether Scottish Christians were reluctant to share their faith in public, only 22 percent agreed that Christians were reluctant, and 42 percent disagreed.

Christians often view their peers as hesitant or ill-equipped, which may foster a sense of collective insecurity. The public square, therefore, risks becoming less vibrant if any group, including Christians, is self-censoring.

Christianity has profoundly shaped modern Scotland, leaving an indelible mark on its societal values and public discourse. The Scottish church has played an important role in developing the freedom and civility that undergird the public square.

But too few Christians avail themselves of these freedoms to enter public spaces and represent their faith-based identities. It is not that Christians are ill-prepared, but their very belief in others being reluctant leads to a general retreat from public thought and conversation.

Thankfully, leaders can use data to dismantle myths of timidity and biblical illiteracy across Scottish churches. Christians are able and ready to join conversations on important societal topics. May each congregation believe other churches are standing as faithful presences within their communities.

A necessary step in entering the public square is believing one is not alone. For centuries, Christians have boldly and joyfully engaged public discourse. It is time for Christians to reenter public spaces and trust that many more will follow.

Timothy W. Taylor is associate professor of politics and international relations at Wheaton College.

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