Sudan’s Refugees Are Building New Lives. They Could Still Use the World’s Attention.

Morgan Lee in Chad

American evangelicals once helped foster global empathy toward those suffering in the large African nation. But that was 30 years ago.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: World Vision

Thirty years ago, American evangelicals were mailing $50 donations to organizations that liberated enslaved Christian in Sudan from their Muslim captors. Evangelicals flew halfway around the world to see women and children receive their freedom in real time. They advocated for US foreign policy that hit religious freedom violators with sanctions. Those penalties hit Sudan in 1999, the year after Washington established the Office of Religious Freedom. American evangelicals cheered on a peace agreement that ultimately allowed Sudan’s majority-Christian population to separate and form the new nation of South Sudan. Their investment even prompted them to speak out in 2004 when violence broke out in Darfur, a majority-Muslim part of Sudan.

Two decades later, Sudan’s civil war has once again created an enormous humanitarian crisis.

The once “straightforward” narrative of genocide has been complicated by a political reality where the Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces (RSF), former political allies that collectively overthrew a dictator, now wage war against each other. Observers accuse both of murdering thousands of men, raping women, and displacing hundreds of thousands of people.

But this time, American evangelicals have yet to personally connect with the Sudanese plight. The perpetrators are Muslim, as are most of their victims and the residents in the region of Chad where many have fled. Chad’s larger Christian denominations have failed to organize large-scale relief projects or evangelistic initiatives for refugees. Their absence reduces the profile of local church efforts, said a local missionary.

Even though World Vision and Samaritan’s Purse—two groups American evangelicals regularly support—have provided humanitarian aid to fleeing Sudanese, their efforts come at a time when ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza have captured significant Western attention and money. Even US taxpayer money that had funded initiatives for Sudanese refugees is likely a victim of the Trump administration’s USAID demolition.

Two years into a conflict that has killed at least 20,000 and forced 12.5 million—approximately the population of Illinois—out of their homeland, the existence of the crisis, much less its specifics, hasn’t reached the radar of most American evangelicals. I recently traveled to Chad to see what life is like for the 200,000 refugees at a settlement in a border town of Adré and at a camp of 56,000 in Farchana, 20 miles west.

World Vision

Entisr with one of her children at a refugee camp in Farchana.

With the world’s attention elsewhere, Entisr must pick up the pieces of her life by herself. (Christianity Today is using a pseudonym for her because she is a sexual assault victim.) Before she crossed the Chadian border, the 27-year-old from Darfur had already been displaced five times. But she still had plans. She was studying public health.

Now she’s sleeping on the ground sheltered by a couple pieces of tarp, along with more than 700,000 others in Adré, a city of 40,000 people along the Chad border, where people kick up dust clouds as they travel back and forth on foot, donkey, horse, or the occasional motor vehicle. Given Adré’s proximity to the border, the government is nervous about the war spreading into Chad, so it won’t turn the spontaneous settlement into an official refugee camp, meaning that Entisr’s three children don’t have any school options.

Instead, she has too much time. Time to worry about her children’s education and time to think about the degree she wanted. Time to miss her husband, whom she hasn’t heard from since June 2023. Time to relive her husband’s coworker imprisoning her for two days so that he and other RSF soldiers could take turns raping her. Time to cry for hours and wish her mom was still alive to comfort her. Time to ponder the future.

“Tell the American people to push for peace and stop the war,” she says. “The majority of victims are women and children. We’ve had enough. We shouldn’t experience this.”

Entisr hasn’t told her family about what the RSF did to her. But she has begun bringing women together to talk about the trauma they endured. These meetings have also turned into savings circles, where women pool money they earn each month to buy materials for handicrafts. The camaraderie has propelled her to share her story as a way to support her fellow survivors.

World Vision

Khadija Mohamed Adam, a midwife at the refugee camp.

Khadija Mohamed Adam, a croc-wearing 38-year-old Sudanese midwife, fled with her family to neighboring Chad during the height of the early-2000s Darfur crisis. Each week, she and her teammates at Farchana Camp Health Center deliver an average of 30 babies, the children of refugees like her and of those who fled the country when Sudan’s latest civil war began.

Some of those children now chase each other around the Farchana camp wearing T-shirts with TikTok logos their families bought at the market. Others lie lethargically alongside their moms on beds in the clinic’s malnutrition center, their wasting frames desperate for the supplements they’ve received to kick in.

Daytime temperatures often rise above 100 degrees in the camp. Women in hijabs with wrist-length sleeves and ankle-length skirts doze under a shaded shelter in the middle of the clinic campus.

Adam could use that type of break. On the day I visit, her team has delivered three babies by mid-afternoon. In the next hour, two midwives escort a woman inside a birthing room, and within minutes, the wails of a newborn puncture the courtyard air.

Adding to Adam’s workload are the effects of faraway policies: Canceled USAID grants forced the clinic to fire more than half its staff, including 6 of the 14 women on the maternity team. Adam, a mother of four, now works two extra hours each day to pick up the slack.

“We will not say we are happy,” Adam says, her feet dangling off a bench outside the maternity ward. “We just pray the situation will be changed.”

World Vision

Hatim Abdallah al-Fadl

Hatim Abdallah al-Fadl, an English-speaking former UN administrator and translator with a master’s degree in peace and development, has helped catalyze change. When he arrived in Farchana a year ago, he found only three water distribution points in his section of the camp. There were no schools in the area either, even though the camp could have received funding to establish them.

This was unacceptable, Fadl thought. He invited people to a meeting where he asked everyone to share their professions and areas of expertise. Then, he set up health, engineering, and agriculture committees. He formed a group for women’s activists and organized religious leaders into a wisdom council to advise on social problems.

Fadl helped the water committee contact external organizations to inform them that the camp had technicians and engineers living onsite—they just needed tools and infrastructure to build more water-distribution points. A German nonprofit helped the teams to extend several pipelines, and by January, the camp had 20 water taps.

“Twenty instead of three,” says Fadl. “But still we are asking for more.” He also hopes that they will be able to drill boreholes so they can stop relying on the town’s water supply.

As he stands several feet away from a group of children who are giggling loudly while copying the dance moves of World Vision staff members, Fadl feels a sense of satisfaction to see the kids in school. After tracking down teachers, Fadl asked them to start instructing students in the shade of leafy trees. Different charities began donating blackboards and tents. In less than a year, this part of the camp had launched three primary schools, serving hundreds of students each.

World Vision

Abdulrashid al-Mohammed teaching school in Farchana.

Like many of the recent refugees forced from Darfur since 2023, Abdulrashid al-Mohammed is still dealing with trauma. The RSF burned down his home in Al Junaynah, a city in West Darfur, and killed 11 of his neighbors.

He’s haunted by the voices of the wounded and dying villagers calling out for water when he and his family fled, a journey that took them three days. He couldn’t stop—not with his wife and four children—but he can’t bear that he didn’t. Even though he has changed his phone number, RSF members still spam him with video footage of gunmen shooting people and homes burning down.

And yet he’s building a life in Farchana. As he stands in the center of his primary school campus on a sunny Sunday morning, students scurry around with heaping trays of rice, flavored with pinto beans, salt, and oil that comes from a can boasting an American flag and the USAID logo. Behind him lie seven tent classrooms arranged in a U. In front of him sits the former prayer room that now serves as a storage closet, while just outside the school, a cluster of women hunch over giant vats, stirring the day’s meal over open flames.

Mohammed has served as the refugee school’s headmaster since it opened last year. The tent classrooms overflow with more than 100 students.

With classes in full swing, Mohammed has a list of ways he wants to improve the school. He needs at least one other French teacher so students can learn Chad’s other official language. He doesn’t understand why progress has slowed on building brick classrooms (“Other schools have bricks”), which keep everyone dry when the rainy season hits.

He’s still in awe that the school now serves lunch, an initiative that keeps students on campus during the school day and feeds entire families, as kids balance plates of rice on their heads and carry their leftovers home. But the school doesn’t have onsite access to water, which makes sanitizing utensils and pots time-consuming. He’s also frustrated with how quickly open-flame stoves lose heat. He wants his cooks to use gas.

Mohammed is now losing sleep over a new problem. In January, when the Trump administration dismantled USAID, it slashed funding to a secondary school program that served 256 young adults, ages 15 to 25. He says some disillusioned students have already ditched the camp to return to Sudan, where the RSF has subsequently kidnapped and conscripted them. The former teacher loves seeing children learn how to read and believes learning offers his students a life beyond the camp. He blames the war on a lack of education.

Young people tell him they’d rather enter Libya and board boats to cross the Mediterranean “because there’s nothing for us here.” If the secondary education program stays closed, “it will be like we did nothing,” he says.

USAID cuts have also affected the Farchana camp’s relationship with the Chadian residents in the adjacent city. Because the two groups share water and food for their livestock, the influx of refugees has overwhelmed the community of 128,000.

In recent months, an increasing number of locals have visited the clinic, which also offers vaccines and primary care “We are a medical center, but we function like a hospital,” says Albachir Mahamat Albachir, the director and doctor.

At the end of February, Albachir planned to celebrate that the clinic now had consistent access to running water and electricity under a World Vision initiative. For months, they had to charge expectant mothers for water.

But since losing 70 percent of its funding due to USAID cuts, the milestone feels bittersweet. They no longer offer vaccines. With other service reductions, Albachir says some patients will die because it will take too long to drive the sickest people in the clinic’s sole ambulance 20 miles over sandy and rocky roads to the nearest medical provider.

If the money doesn’t come, they may have to close.

- More from Morgan Lee

Culture

How Dude Perfect Won Me Over

Brad East

Contributor

The hit YouTube channel features five Christian guys who have wholesome, competitive fun. As a tech-skeptical father to boys, I’m grateful.

Illustration by Abigail Erickson / Source Images: Getty

As a father of boys, I worry about them constantly. I’m far from alone. Boys have risen to the surface of our society’s consciousness as both a source of anxiety and an object of concern. There are many things worth worrying about—education, work, dating, friendship, faith—but at the center of it all are screens.

What I want most for my sons, besides knowing God, is a life that isn’t absorbed by digital surfaces. Like a horror movie, these devices simultaneously draw people in and reach into the “real world” with a kind of hypnotic, supernatural power. Such language may seem hyperbolic, but if you’ve ever been around children (or their parents) enamored with their devices, then you know that screens can bewitch.

At the same time, unless I am willing to abolish screens from my household—no TVs or tablets, no laptops or wireless, no smartphones or video games—the question is not whether my boys will use screens but which ones, for how long, to what end. This is the long campaign so many of us are waging. As a parent, you discover early on that some battles are worth losing if it means you’re more likely to win the war.

Lately I’ve been happy to lose one particular battle. Sometime in the last year, my boys (one in sixth grade and one in fifth) have become obsessed with a particular YouTube channel. To be clear, we don’t let our boys “on” YouTube, which is rightly considered ground zero for where screens and boys go awry. They don’t have the app, and they aren’t allowed to scroll. But we decided to let them try out this channel on the family TV together, and, in their minds, this is a great victory.

It’s called Dude Perfect.

Parents of boys, male readers themselves, and certainly anyone from Texas will already know of whom I speak. But if that isn’t you, allow me to be the one to introduce you to the Dude Perfect phenomenon.

To begin, Dude Perfect is many things. It’s a YouTube channel with more than 60 million subscribers. It’s also an app, a regular multicity tour, and a flourishing business with merchandise, a multimillion-dollar headquarters just north of Dallas–Fort Worth, and a theme park in the works.

At bottom, though, it’s five buddies who roomed together in college continuing the fun in front of the cameras.

The fun started at Texas A&M in 2009, when the dudes—Tyler Toney, Garrett Hilbert, Cody Jones, and twins Cory and Coby Cotton—caught attention online with their backyard trick shots. Then they set a Guinness World Record by making a basketball shot from the third deck of Kyle Field. The video capturing the shot went viral, they kept making similar videos, and a year later they started Dude Perfect. It’s been going and growing in the 15 years since, with no signs of slowing down.

The “show,” if you want to call it that, has a thousand gimmicks: trick shots, pranks, Guinness Records, a game show, set pieces, murder mysteries. These barely scratch the surface. As its popularity has grown, guest appearances from celebrities and especially from professional athletes have become a mainstay: Tom Brady, Chris Paul, Keanu Reeves, Zac Efron, Paul Rudd, Russell Wilson, Drew Brees, Dak Prescott, Rob Gronkowski, Luke Bryan. These names give you an exact picture of the show’s vibe.

The core of the show isn’t the famous names, however. It’s the friendship between Tyler, Garrett, Cody, Cory, and Coby. Sure, the surface appeal—the reason people tune in, cheer, and laugh—is the crazy competitions, the running gags, the inside jokes. But the dudes aren’t trying to hide their deeper purpose. Each is a husband, a father, and a Christian. They’re trying to create entertainment for the whole family to enjoy together, boys and young men in particular.

And their faith is out in the open. “We’re about giving back, spreading joy, and glorifying Jesus Christ,” their website explains. The documentary covering their first national tour a few years ago concludes with a visit to a boy with leukemia who couldn’t make the show that evening. After some fun with him and his family, they finished their time by praying over him.

Watching Dude Perfect, you won’t find a hint of politics—there’s no rancor or division or conspiracism. It’s a refuge and escape from a polarized world perpetually set on edge. Call it antiapocalyptic content. On the spectrum of masculinity, if Andrew Tate is one pole, these dudes are the other.

And thankfully, as the numbers on their videos attest, there’s a lot of interest today in this style of masculinity. Dude Perfect is part of what commentator Ted Gioia calls “alternative culture,” which isn’t found in legacy media and elite institutions but is flourishing online nonetheless.

Granted: There are a lot of other things flourishing online too. Hence the convergence of cultural anxieties on boys and screens. I mentioned Tate, whose image trades on a glorified caricature of misogyny, wealth, and violence. Other online dangers and dead ends include video games, pornography, conspiracism, political extremism, and simple loneliness.

Yet at the heart of these concerns lies an ambiguity. When thinking about boys today, you can frame the issue in one of two ways: nature or nurture. The technical term for the first option is endogenous, meaning the problem is masculinity as such. For example, in 2019 the American Psychological Association issued guidelines for best practices with men and boys. It asserted that “traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful.” The question for such a view then becomes how best to educate males out of such things, which is to say, out of ourselves.

No doubt the APA would protest that “traditional” masculinity is not the only type of masculinity, but their guidelines give away the game. It’s a laundry list of male-coded traits that transcend local culture; pick a time and place in history, and you’ll find them well represented. Consider competitiveness. To seek to root out competitiveness per se is to seek to root out part of what makes boys boys (to say nothing of competitive girls!). Put differently, it’s to stipulate in advance that there are no healthy or “pro-social” avenues into which competitiveness can be funneled.

For Christians, at least—in fact for pretty much everybody—“masculinity” cannot be a problem to be solved. God made us male and female. Christian parents raising boys and girls are raising sinners, one and all, but the solution to sin isn’t to destroy nature. It’s to discover how God’s grace might heal, restore, and perfect nature. We want our children to grow into mature, faithful adults. In the case of boys, that means becoming men.

If, therefore, the problem isn’t nature, then it’s nurture, which means the issue is exogenous. On this view it’s not masculinity itself that needs addressing but a culture-shaped, “toxic” masculinity. This is the approach of Richard Reeves in his book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. Reeves agrees that boys and girls are biologically different and that this difference is not pathological. Men are no more malfunctioning women than women are second-class men. Whereas patriarchal societies are beset by the latter prejudice, egalitarian cultures are tempted by the former.

Christians are right to welcome Reeves’s intervention. Sex differences are not a problem to be solved but a gift to receive with gratitude and delight. We might haggle over terms—toxic seems to me overused to the point of meaninglessness—but it’s a wonderful sign that public discourse has converged as much as it has on this point. Believers can join with all parents and scholars of goodwill in seeking out reliable strategies for raising boys well in a time when that has become particularly tricky.

This is where Dude Perfect enters the picture, at least for my family. Discovery of a suitable YouTube channel may seem like a small thing, and in a sense it is. Moreover, it’s no mystery what my boys need most day to day: a father and a mother who love each other and them (together with their little sisters); a safe and hospitable home in a safe and familiar neighborhood; a church that welcomes, teaches, and forms them; an extended family of cousins and grandparents, aunts and uncles; Christian adults to mentor and model the life of faith; friends, friends, and more friends; and finally thousands of hours offline, outdoors, climbing trees, playing sports, reading books, riding bikes, scraping knees, getting lost, and finding home again.

Yet on top of all that and intermixed within it will be screens—not unlimited, not unsupervised, but screens nonetheless. My wife and I ask ourselves: Which options run the least risk of reaching out and absorbing them, of casting a spell we’re unable to break? And which, by contrast, are most likely to push them off screens, to give them ideas for the real world, even to model life-giving pursuits? Might we dare to hope for role models of a sort?

For me and my house, Dude Perfect has been one answer to these questions. My oldest now creates “murder mysteries” for his younger siblings to solve. He does trick shots in the yard. Just this year, over spring break, he convinced his mom to shoot a basketball from a fourth-story window. And she made it! Like the dudes, we’ve got the video to prove it.

Yes, Dude Perfect is on YouTube. Yes, it’s part of the digital ecosystem. Yes, it’s one more thing begging for clicks and eyeballs and dollar bills. In a perfect world, maybe, there would be no YouTube, no alternative culture, no self-starting streamers and podcasters and influencers. In that world, you and I wouldn’t own TVs or smartphones, we wouldn’t have wireless internet, and you wouldn’t be reading this article.

But so long as we don’t live in that world, so long as the question is how and not whether, I for one am grateful, as a father of two boys, that Dude Perfect exists. I’m glad to know my sons aren’t bleeding brain cells while watching MrBeast play a video game. I’m glad they’re not scrolling social media. And I’m certainly glad they’re not chasing rabbits down crazy digital rabbit holes.

Instead, for their daily allotted time—and maybe mine too if I care to join them—they’re watching some 30-something friends, brothers in the faith, joke around and have some fun before heading home to their families. In a time as troubled as ours, that’s an unexpected answer to prayer.

Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint.

- More from Brad East

News

Freed from Cyberscam Compounds, Victims Face New Challenges

Caleb Maglaya Galaraga

Christian ministries in Thailand are helping the thousands of recently released captives find their way home.

Scam center victims sit on the ground during a crackdown operation in February 2025 by the Karen Border Guard Force (BGF) in Myanmar.

STR / Getty

Last November, 27-year-old Bea felt a wave of relief as she stepped onto a plane at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport heading back to her home in Central Philippines. It was the end of a two-year nightmare that began with a Facebook message.

In June 2023, Bea was teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) at a business process outsourcing center in the Philippines when she received a job ad over Facebook for a customer service position in Thailand. The recruiter, who had a convincing Facebook profile, said the company would pay her $1,200 a month—a huge pay increase—and provide free accommodations and airfare.

Yet when she arrived in Bangkok, a driver whisked her away to a compound across the border in Myanmar, where Chinese criminal gangs held her captive and forced her to scam unsuspecting victims in the US. If she didn’t meet their monthly quota, her captors beat her. Christianity Today is not using Bea’s real name due to fears that the criminal actors could find and threaten her for sharing her story.

For the next two years, she was trapped in the compounds, and she was sold twice from one scam operator to another. Then in October 2024, the International Justice Mission (IJM) was able to “leverage capital and collaborative networks” to help get Bea out, an IJM spokesperson told CT. She remembers two Burmese military officers arriving at the compound and asking to see her passport, which she had managed to hide from her captors. They brought her to a military facility before she could cross the border back into Thailand.

There, two workers from the Christian group Global Advance Projects (GAP) waited to receive her. GAP paid for her stay at a hotel in the border town of Mae Sot as she waited for the Thai government to accommodate her at a shelter. In the meantime, GAP helped her fill out forms and prove that she had been trafficked and had unintentionally overstayed her Thai travel visa. A month later, the Philippine embassy paid for her flight back home.

As she waited at the airport, she remembers thinking, “I really want to hug those people who helped me a lot because I feel like I need someone to … share everything.”

Recently, GAP, IJM, and another Christian group, Acts of Mercy International, have had their hands full, as the number of people freed from the scam centers has skyrocketed since February, when the Chinese, Thai, and Burmese governments cracked down on the cyberscam centers.

So far, 7,200 people, mostly from China, have been repatriated to their home countries since their release from the compounds, according to the Thai government. Another 1,700 people remain in Myanmar in camps run by ethnic militias.

Thai officials won’t allow them to cross the border unless their home governments have arranged for their immediate departure. In April, about 270 of them, mostly from Ethiopia, rioted and stormed the gates, desperate to cross over to Thailand.

“We’ve been warning [the Thai authorities] for weeks that they were getting very, very agitated and they might try to attempt to flee across the river into Thailand,” said Amy Miller, Southeast Asia regional director for Acts of Mercy International. Thai authorities estimate that another 100,000 people are still forced to work as scammers along the Thai-Myanmar border.

For the past two months, Miller’s team has been busy helping the released victims in Mae Sot. Along with other nonprofits, they give the victims food and water, help them fill out paperwork, connect them to their embassies, and provide personalized care after the trauma they’ve experienced.

“We are often the first face victims see when they come out,” Miller said. Amid a busy, bureaucratic situation, “I’m thinking about the experience of the potential victim.” She thinks to herself, “How can I be a kind, soft, human person for them in the midst of this kind of government-to-government interaction?”

Even before the criminal gangs released the first large group on February 12 Miller had worked to rescue individual victims who got in contact with her over the past two years. In January, Beijing began to push Thailand and Myanmar to crack down on the compounds after a high-profile case in which a Chinese actor was trafficked. Thailand’s government then cut electricity, internet, and gas to the border towns where the centers are located. The ethnic militia ruling the area escorted the people out.

On the day of the first big release, Andrew Wasuwongse, head of IJM’s Thailand office, was about to start an anti–human trafficking training for 100 Thai police officers when he saw a message from his colleague that 260 people from 19 countries had just been released to the Thai military on the border.

“Wow. All right. Great. It’s happening!” he said. It was what he had been hoping for since 2022, when he began helping people trafficked into scamming.

After his talk, Wasuwongse arranged for a group of four IJM staff members to drive to Mae Sot the next day. There, they began the monumental task of identifying victims of trafficking. The rescued victims meet with staff from nonprofits as well as Thai government officials. IJM members served as Thai-English translators and provided food to the freed survivors, along with addressing other immediate needs like access to medical services.

Many survivors dealt with physical and mental trauma: One 19-year-old Ethiopian national named Yotor spoke to Thai media and showed cuts along his leg, saying he had received electric shocks every day during his time at the compound. Some governments treat the released as criminals when they return home or ostracize them for the criminal activities they’ve taken part in.

Cybercriminal syndicates in Southeast Asia likely make $43.8 billion a year in profits, which is 35 percent of the combined GDP (gross domestic product) of Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar, according to a report by the Center for Strategic & International Studies. A 2023 FBI report found that Americans lost more than $12.5 billion to online fraud in 2023, a 22 percent increase from the year before.

The transnational nature of the crime makes it difficult to investigate and prosecute perpetrators, Wasuwongse said. Often, victims from all over the world are trafficked through a country like Thailand into another country, like Myanmar. Convictions are rare.

Miller said that on that day in February, they were expecting the operation to result in 50 people freed,only to find more than four times that number. As part of the screening process, the released are typically moved from one holding room to another in a highly official setting, which may come across as impersonal and cold, Miller said.

So Miller is mindful of how she and the staff of the Christian groups approach the victims. On at least one occasion, they brought journals with “gospel resources and messages of hope,” Miller said. “[We offer] that picture of humanity to look them in the eye, to give them dignity, to tell them God has a plan for their life.”

When victims’ home governments cannot repatriate them due to budgetary challenges, as is the case with the Ethiopian victims, Acts of Mercy International and other nonprofits raise money to pay for their plane tickets home. However, some embassies have told the victims that their names are not on Myanmar’s official list of people waiting for repatriation, meaning they may not be able to return home even if they have tickets.

“What I’m doing at that moment is just welcoming them back,” Miller said, “telling them we’re so glad that they’re free, we know that they’ve suffered a lot and endured a lot, and we’re very honored to get to walk alongside them.”

When Bea returned to the Philippines, she took time to rest, as she felt mentally and physically exhausted. The Philippine government provided some financial assistance. In February, she began searching for a job and is now working as an online ESL teacher again.

“I’ve also become more cautious when using social media, knowing there are people who try to deceive or trick others,” she said. “Whenever I see something suspicious, I report it and leave a comment to warn others that it might be a scam.”

Her community in the Catholic church she attends has helped her family cope. “Just recently, one of the nuns at the church asked my grandmother how was her grandchild who got scammed,” said Bea. She said her grandmother responded, “Finally, she’s … back here.”

- More from Caleb Maglaya Galaraga

Books

Review

As Celebrity-Driven Churches Rise and Fall, Capitol Hill Baptist Endures

Eric C. Smith

Over its 150-year history, the old-school DC congregation has embodied faithfulness over flashiness.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

In 2010, The Gospel Coalition’s website posted a video of a roundtable conversation about multisite churches between three well-known pastors. At the time, two of these pastors, Mark Driscoll and James MacDonald, oversaw multisite churches (Mars Hill Church in Seattle and Harvest Bible Chapel in Chicago, respectively). The third, Mark Dever, led Capitol Hill Baptist Church, a single congregation in Washington, DC. In the video, buddies Driscoll and MacDonald mercilessly double-teamed Dever over his refusal to entertain a multisite model.

The debate seemed good-natured enough, with Driscoll and MacDonald aggressively pressing Dever to leverage his preaching gifts and expand his influence while Dever made his minority case with patience and good humor. Yet the 12-minute discussion revealed two vastly different visions about churches, their leaders, and the path to wielding influence in the 21st century. Fifteen years ago, Dever’s stalwart commitment to one assembly at a single service seemed almost quaint, with successful multisite pastors Driscoll and MacDonald representing the future of evangelicalism.

Yet by the end 2020, both Driscoll and MacDonald had left their churches in at least some disgrace. In the words of one commenter on another site where the video appeared, their bravado had aged “like fine milk.” Meanwhile, Dever’s Capitol Hill Baptist congregation continued to gather weekly for worship, preaching, and discipleship. All the while, the church steadily trained an army of young pastors and flung them out to plant and revitalize other local assemblies within the city and beyond. Could it be that one old-school congregation committed to ordinary gospel faithfulness offered the best strategy of all?

Caleb Morell argues that case in A Light on the Hill: The Surprising Story of How a Local Church in the Nation’s Capital Influenced Evangelicalism. Capitol Hill Baptist Church (or CHBC) is not “an extraordinary church,” argues Morrell, who serves on the church’s pastoral staff. Yet in contrast to megachurches and celebrity pastors “who burn hot and fast and rarely last,” this downtown congregation in the shadow of the US Capitol has remained faithful to the gospel—and its location—for more than 150 years.

One could be forgiven for questioning the inspirational value of a 300-page congregational history. But Morell’s account, while attentive to numerous fascinating details, never gets bogged down in minutiae.

The book crafts a compelling narrative that advances from a humble prayer meeting in 1866 to a church of global influence in the present day. Over 14 chapters, Morell ably situates the Capitol Hill Baptist story within its wider historical and cultural context. Readers follow the church’s fortunes through Reconstruction, World War I, the fundamentalist-modernist conflicts, the dawn of neo-evangelicalism, the Civil Rights Movement, and more. The book provides a sweeping tour of American evangelical history through the lens of one local church.

Plenty of colorful characters parade through the pages. These include prominent leaders like Green Clay Smith, a former congressman and territorial governor who pastored CHBC at the end of the 19th century. Stephen Tyree Early, a press secretary during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, was a longtime member. Carl F. H. Henry, founding editor of Christianity Today, shaped the church for decades as a Sunday school teacher and resident theologian. K. Owen White is best remembered for publicly questioning presidential candidate John F. Kennedy about his Roman Catholic faith, but first he preached through books of the Bible and cleaned up the CHBC membership rolls in the 1940s. Harry Kilbride, the Martyn Lloyd-Jones protégé whom R. T. Kendall called the “best preacher in England,” led the church in the early ’90s before tragically resigning over an adulterous relationship.

But Morell also draws attention to individuals like Celestia Ferris, the washerwoman whose prayer meeting birthed the church. Unnamed Sunday school children scoured the city for bricks for the first building, inspiring local brickyards to donate the bulk of the needed materials. Agnes Shankle asked probing questions in a members’ meeting that pulled the church back from calling a modernist minister in the 1940s. Margaret S. Roy, joining the church as its first African American member in 1969, resolved to “treat people right regardless of how they may treat her,” remaining until her death in 2001. A man named Bill, who served as chairman of deacons, held CHBC together with his energy and financial savvy during a low ebb in the late 1980s. Morell attributes much of the church’s enduring impact to the prayerful labors of its unheralded members.

Surprises abound. For instance, the church faced two government-enforced shutdowns in 1918, first over a World War I–induced coal shortage and then for the Spanish flu epidemic, which left 3,000 DC residents dead over a five-month span. Under the strain of war, the church coped with congregational deaths and groped for creative solutions for safe assembly. In an effort to “stop the spread,” city leaders eventually extended a ban to the church’s outdoor gatherings, creating a tension between submissive citizenship and faithful discipleship.

Ultimately, the congregation pushed back against the local mandates and assembled on the Lord’s Day. Morrell discovered this remarkable episode back in 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 crisis. For him, it was more than a historical curiosity, because CHBC was embroiled in its own conflict with local leaders about meeting for worship under pandemic conditions. The church’s principled witness in 1918 convinced him of the relevance of its entire history.

Readers may also be shocked to learn how many early fundamentalists happily listened to women preachers in the 1920s and ’30s. Capitol Hill Baptist opened its pulpit to fundamentalist Amy Lee Stockton (1892–1988) more than a dozen times in the years before World War II, even as it hosted fundamentalist giants like J. Frank Norris, T. T. Shields, and W. B. Riley. The church would not distance itself from female preaching until it aligned exclusively with Southern Baptists in the late 1940s. Stockton’s example stands as a reminder of how theological debates often take time to develop and resolve.

Indeed, each chapter invites thoughtful application for churches and individual believers. One cautionary tale comes from the clumsy succession of beloved longtime pastor John Compton Ball, who refused to yield leadership to K. Owen White. Ball still attended deacons’ meetings and insisted that White recognize him during services. Little wonder that White’s hair went gray six months into his tenure.

Other lessons abound as Morrell considers topics ranging from a downtown church grappling with suburbanization, to cautions against consumerist appeals and overreliance on programming, to the handling of a prominent minister’s infidelity, to the importance of congregational prayer.

Of course, most readers will be drawn to this volume through the influence of Dever, the current pastor. Followers of Dever’s ministry will especially enjoy learning how he came to CHBC in 1993. Morell portrays the young Cambridge graduate as an unglamorous pulpiteer but also as a student of Scripture and church history, a man of prayer, and a leader of remarkably clear (if countercultural) vision.

Indeed, three years before accepting the call to Capitol Hill Baptist, Dever had already outlined his now-famous nine marks of a healthy church in a 1990 letter to New Meadows Baptist Church in Topsfield, Massachusetts. Arriving at CHBC at age 33, Dever committed to a long-range strategy of “preach, pray, love, and stay,” gradually leading the congregation to clean up its rolls, revise its constitution, implement a church covenant, and install a board of elders.

By the early 2000s, Dever’s church reforms and writings had elevated Capitol Hill Baptist to a national platform. Morell accordingly chronicles the origins of both 9Marks ministries and the Together for the Gospel conference (T4G), which in 2014 would host 12,000 attendees in Louisville’s Yum Center. He acknowledges the division that marked the final years of the T4G movement amid national controversies related to sexual abuse in the church, the #MeToo movement, Donald Trump’s first presidency, and highly publicized police shootings of African Americans. Honest but unsensational in his account, Morell suggests only that terminating T4G after nine gatherings supplied a fitting end to a conference designed to parallel the nine marks.

The book shows a far greater interest in CHBC’s unconventional management of its explosive growth in the early 2000s. After purging its rolls in 1997, the church claimed 274 members; by 2011, elders were overseeing 1,095 souls. Amid this remarkable prosperity, Capitol Hill’s leaders bucked the prevailing evangelical trend of growing a multisite network around Dever’s popular ministry. Instead, the church committed to raising up new ministers who could plant and revitalize churches in and beyond the Beltway region.

Morell traces the strategy back to Dever’s 2004 internal staff memo titled “Doing Nothing and Church Planting,” a reference to Martin Luther’s famous dictum that he “did nothing” to spread the Reformation while the Word did it all. For Morell, this approach provides a refreshing example of how a church can “steward success without losing its soul.”

As a CHBC staff member, Morell documents this history with love, not hiding his own commitment to the church’s theology, methods, and leadership. But if he credits Dever with prescient pastoral vision, he also maintains that Dever’s ministry comprises only one chapter in a far more significant story: one of the Lord keeping the Capitol Hill lampstand burning for a century and a half.

Dever has repeatedly asserted his own dispensability, but perhaps never so dramatically as on the Sunday after 9/11. Just days after terrorists attacked the Pentagon, Dever insisted that seminary student Bert Daniel keep his preaching appointment rather than yield the pulpit to Dever in a historic moment. For Morell, this decision illustrates Dever’s core approach to ministry: Rather than build a movement around himself, he empowers younger pastors who will continue to serve Capitol Hill Baptist and other local churches after he is gone.

For this reason, Morell is convinced that the light on the Hill will keep burning after Dever’s tenure has concluded. “I look forward to being reassured of how much the Lord has done here is not dependent on Mark Dever,” observed associate pastor Jamie Dunlop. “I’m quite confident it’s not person dependent, and yet a lot of people think it is. And I look forward to that assumption being vindicated, and it being evident that the church really is built on Jesus and not on Mark Dever.”

Morell deserves applause for this warm, well researched, and elegantly written volume. This is an institutional chronicle that reads like a compelling biography and frequently invites personal reflection for pastors and churches. Readers weary of consumer-driven and celebrity-centered church cultures will find that Capitol Hill Baptist’s model of faithfulness over flashiness has aged very well indeed.

Eric C. Smith is associate professor of church history at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

- More from Eric C. Smith

News

In Trump’s Trade War, Bibles Are Safe for Now

David Roach

The administration says Christian books printed in China remain exempt from tariffs.

Amity Printing Company in China specializes in thin-paper Book printing and has produced over 277 million Bibles.

Nanjing Amity Printing Company

Christian publishers can breathe a sigh of relief, at least for now, when it comes to the effects of President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

Neither reciprocal tariffs on various nations nor tariffs specific to China apply to Bibles and other religious books, according to an April 24 email to Christianity Today from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

CBP told CT it could not speak to the administration’s general tariff strategy regarding religious literature.

As the administration unrolled its responsive tariff plan in April, Christian publishers spent weeks juggling “a lot of questions” and “a lot of uncertainty,” said Jeff Crosby, president of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association.

The administration listed books, including Bibles, as exempt from the reciprocal tariffs Trump announced April 2 under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

But tariffs on Chinese goods enacted under a separate statute to curb the flow of fentanyl and opioids had not clearly designated Bibles or other religious literature as exempt. CBP clarified that these tariffs also exclude the category of “Bibles, testaments, prayer books and other religious books.”

The question of whether China tariffs apply to Bibles is no small issue. China has specialized in Bible-printing technology for decades—by some counts, producing more than 75 percent of all new Bibles.

The country’s largest Bible-maker, Amity Printing Company, printed 17 million copies in the past 12 months. Amity operates in partnership with the United Bible Societies and says it has exported Bibles in 229 languages. A counter tallies the total number of Bibles to come across its printing lines over its 37-year history: 277 million as of this week.

Bible publishers and distributors see a missional advantage to printing in China, since cheaper production costs make Bibles more affordable and more accessible.

“To import Bibles from a country other than China would require time, extensive quality tests, and higher prices incompatible with the high and consistent demand for Bibles in the United States,” the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission said in a 2019 statement, the last time copies of Scripture from China escaped Trump’s tariffs.

The recent tariff threat falls during a period of high demand for Bibles; Bible sales overall were up 20 percent last year and up 30 percent among certain publishers.

Days after the announcement at the start of April, it was “all hands on deck” at HarperCollins Christian Publishing, president and chief executive Mark Schoenwald told The Wall Street Journal. HarperCollins publishes several translations, including the New International Version, the King James Version, and the New King James Version.

But as the weeks went on, Christian publishers continued to wait for clarity.

Tyndale House Publishers, which releases the New Living Translation and the One Year Bible, told CT through its spokesperson, “We are still waiting for Washington to sort through the many details involved.” Lifeway Christian Resources’ Devin Maddox said the Southern Baptist publishing arm, which offers the Christian Standard Bible, was “continuing to monitor this very fluid situation.”

Despite the current good news for religious publishers, the climate of economic uncertainty lingers across the industry. Some experts have cautioned that the Trump administration sends mixed signals.

“Right now, there are not clear lines of distinction about who’s running what” portions of tariff policy in the administration “and who’s responsible for what,” said Stephen Kho, an international trade lawyer who served in the office of the US Trade Representative during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. “The decisions being made right now are not running through the normal interagency process. A lot of it is driven by what’s going on in the White House.”

This week, Trump softened his stance on Chinese tariffs overall and indicated the countries could negotiate a lower rate.

Tariffs on the paper used for printing books had also been a concern for publishers after Trump announced potential tariffs on wood-related products, including paper.

Of the $1.82 billion in uncoated paper imported to the US in 2023, 67 percent came from Canada, according to Publishers Weekly. But CBP told CT it is not aware of any tariffs under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, the law cited by Trump in his executive order on wood products, that would target religious books.

- More from David Roach

News

India Celebrity Pastor Faces Life in Prison for Rape

Surinder Kaur

Bajinder Singh’s fall from prophet to prisoner exposes deeper cracks in Punjab’s fast-growing megachurches.

JesusisGreat7, WikiMedia Commons / Edits by CT

Typically, tens of thousands of churchgoers gather each Sunday morning at Church of Glory and Wisdom, a five-acre compound in Tajpur village in Punjab state, to hear from Bajinder Singh.

Millions more watch his YouTube videos, which show the megachurch pastor allegedly healing people in wheelchairs and prophesying over them.

Yet since late March, the services have continued without Singh, whom followers call “prophet” and “papaji” (ji is an honorific). That’s because on March 28, a Punjab court found him guilty of raping a woman in 2018 and sentenced him to life in prison.

Days after Singh’s sentencing, news outlets reported allegations that another Punjab pastor, Jashan Gill, had raped a 22-year-old student who attended his church in Gurdaspur. According to her father, the pastor also forced her to undergo an abortion, causing an infection that led to her death.

The two cases came after a woman in the Punjab city of Fatehgarh Sahib filed a police complaint in February accusing pastor Faris Masih and four others of gangraping her when she visited his house to collect money that he owed her.

The scandals point to concerns over the recent growth of megachurches in Punjab that are built around charismatic leaders and promote spectacle—often healings or other miracles—over discipleship. The megachurches have also forced smaller churches to close as the larger churches entice congregants away.

Tarsem Peter, a Catholic leader in Punjab’s Jalandhar, noted that some Christian pastors are creating their own deras, independent religious congregations each centered around a guru. In Punjab, deras are traditionally associated with Sikh sects and have often drawn criticism for encouraging personality cults, unorthodox practices, and abuse of power. Now, Peter warns, similar patterns are emerging within Christian communities.

“I do believe Jesus can make miracles happen but not the way the priests in these so-called deras practice,” Peter told The Tribune. “I have had a hunch from the very beginning that the Christian dera culture would go the same way as with other religious deras.”

Singh is a member of Haryanvi Jat, a wealthy and influential people group in northern India. According to Singh’s testimony, he was harassed by evil spirits when he was young, joined the wrong crowd, and ended up in prison after he was implicated in a murder case. He fell ill, only to recover after a pastor prayed for him. Through his experience, he became a Christian and began his ministry in 2012 after leaving prison.

Always sharply dressed in blazers and dress pants, Singh built a massive social media following through his dramatic healings. During his services, he would lay hands on people said to be suffering from serious conditions—blindness, chronic illness, or demon possession. Many would tremble, convulse, and then declare they’d been miraculously cured.

As his profile grew, Singh cultivated relationships with celebrities, regularly hosting Bollywood stars, such as Shakti Kapoor, Prem Chopra, and Jaya Prada, at his Christmas celebrations. At the gatherings, Singh would make prophecies about them and pray for them as cameras rolled.

Singh and his inner circle promoted stories of his alleged miracles on social media. His Facebook page banner is a picture of him in front of screenshots of his services and the words World’s No. 1 Ministry in glittering gold and silver. His ministry expanded beyond Jalandhar to include locations near Chandigarh as well as 260 branches in countries including Canada, US, UK, and Dubai.

Yet in 2018, a woman who volunteered at Singh’s church filed a complaint against Singh, claiming that he had repeatedly raped her after he promised to help send her abroad. She alleged that Singh first raped her in September 2017 at his rented apartment in Chandigarh, filmed the assault, and used the footage to blackmail her. Police arrested Singh at the Delhi airport in 2018 while he was attempting to flee to London. After securing bail, he returned to his preaching ministry. Finally, on March 28 of this year, the court convicted him and a few days later sentenced him to life in prison.

In the past few years, Singh has made headlines for other allegations, including financial mismanagement, sexual assault, and physical assault, as well as charging families of the sick hundreds of dollars for prayers and healings.

Singh’s conviction prompted divergent responses within Punjab’s Christian community. While many leaders from Catholic and mainline Protestant denominations, including the Church of North India, have distanced themselves, others have rallied to his defense.

Some of Singh’s supporters—such as Hamid Masih of the Punjab Christian Movement—described Singh’s conviction as an attack on the Christian faith. Sukhwinder Raja, pastor of an independent church from Amritsar, called Singh’s opponents “cubs of fox” and warned, “God will slap them. … They will face the wrath of God; rather, their generations will face it.”

One female pastor from Punjab, who asked for anonymity amid government persecution of Christians, told CT, “We must forgive him and pray that he would confess and come clean.” She added that the faith of his many followers is at stake.

Singh’s ministry did not emerge in a vacuum. Punjab has weathered profound trauma in recent decades: an insurgency that claimed thousands of lives in the 1980s and ’90s, agricultural distress that has pushed many farmers to suicide, and a drug addiction epidemic that devastated communities.

These difficulties created fertile ground for ministries promising immediate divine intervention. “Since the governments have failed to ensure that medical facilities reach the lower sections, the likes of Bajinder have got ample opportunities to proliferate,” Peter told The Tribune.

Many of Singh’s followers are from the Dalit and the poor—people often marginalized within traditional religious structures and desperately seeking solutions to pressing problems.

Dalits, formerly known as “untouchables,” represent nearly a third of Punjab’s population—the highest proportion in any Indian state. Despite legal protections, many still face discrimination. Christianity’s emphasis on equality has historically appealed to Dalit communities across India.

When Singh began his ministry, he tapped into this demographic dynamic. Preaching primarily in Hindi rather than Punjabi, he attracted followers not only from Punjab but also from other states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

“The Pentecostal-charismatic movement is drawing adherents primarily from those who have never felt welcome in traditional churches or other religious communities,” explained Paul, a pastor from the north Punjab area. He asked to use only his first name due to security concerns for Christians. “When someone offers them both spiritual experience and social dignity, the appeal is understandable.”

Paul sees Singh as part of a broader pattern that began around 2000, when Southern Indian evangelists such as Paul Dhinakaran brought a charismatic approach modeled after American televangelism to Punjab. Since then, dozens of independent “prophet” figures have established ministries following a similar template: large-scale services focused on healing and breakthrough with a charismatic leader as the central channel of divine power.

According to a 2022 India Today investigation, there may be as many as 65,000 pastors spread across Punjab’s 23 districts. While many operate small, village-level ministries, the most visible are those who, like Singh, have built substantial followings through claims of miraculous powers.

Ankur Narula’s Church of Signs and Wonders in Khambra village exemplifies this approach. His ministry compound spans approximately 100 acres, with 160,000 people attending the Sunday service, according to India Today’s report. A computer engineer by training and the son of a Jalandhar businessman, Narula converted to Christianity in 2004 and has built a ministry with 125 branches within and outside India.

The relationships between these prominent pastors can be competitive. Tensions arose between Singh’s supporters and Narula’s followers in December 2023 after Narula criticized Singh’s Christmas gathering, calling it a “circus ring.” Singh’s followers then held a press conference denouncing Narula’s comments.

Paul noted that while these megachurches create powerful experiences, “they’re less effective at building the day-to-day habits and relationships that transform people over a lifetime.”

Instead of promising that the ministry would develop attendees’ character, a social media post for Singh’s April services promised that attendees would “receive permanent residency wherever they have applied, launch new businesses, achieve financial stability, secure government jobs, experience health improvements, and find matrimonial matches.”

Meanwhile, these megachurches are attracting congregants of smaller churches throughout Punjab, Paul said.

“A decade ago, we had dozens of independent churches serving 50 to 100 people each in this district,” Paul said. “Many have closed because their members left for the mega-ministries. Some pastors have even joined the staff of these larger operations because they couldn’t support their families otherwise.”

The landscape of Christianity in Punjab is increasingly dominated by a few large entities rather than a diverse ecosystem of communities.

Yet some pastors are pushing back against the megachurch model and trying to put systems in place to keep leaders accountable and ensure members are discipled. For instance, R. L. Gupta and his wife, Rajni, lead Siyyon Prayer Tower, a large urban church in Ludhiana. A former schoolteacher, Gupta is meticulous with records and seeks to care for his congregants holistically by offering counseling sessions, care and encouragement for students, and regular community meals. Members also serve the community through free medical camps, literacy programs, and care for the poor and the disadvantaged.

Meanwhile, although Paul’s church is small compared to Singh’s or Narula’s—he has several hundred congregants—it has produced dozens of leaders who are now leading churches and ministries throughout the state, Paul said. He noted that the smaller church size allows for him to know his members by name, understand their struggles, and provide genuine pastoral care.

Some leaders within the megachurch movement have begun to acknowledge the need for more accountability and structure. In 2021, pastor Harpreet Deol formed the Pentecostal Christian Parbandhak Committee (PCPC) to bring independent pastors under a common framework and encourage self-regulation. The committee claims a network of more than 1,000 registered pastors and has since spawned a political party as well.

“The PCPC represents a step in the right direction,” Paul said. “But more fundamental changes may be needed. Ministries built entirely around personalities are inherently vulnerable to those personalities’ failings.”

He believes the most promising path forward would be to combine the evangelistic energy of the larger ministries with the discipleship depth of smaller communities. He envisions networks where central ministries are connected to smaller groups led by trained pastors.

This would allow large gatherings to continue providing inspiration and corporate worship experiences while smaller groups facilitate the personal relationships essential for discipleship.

“The desire for authentic spiritual experience evident in [megachurch] ministries’ appeal is genuine and valuable,” he acknowledged. “The challenge is channeling that hunger into sustainable expressions of faith that don’t depend on single charismatic figures.”

- More from Surinder Kaur

News

Atlanta Pastor Apologizes for Remarks Blaming Police Killings on Disobedience

Haleluya Hadero

Philip Anthony Mitchell, who leads 2819 Church, said his teaching on complying with earthly authorities contained “harmful” framing around police violence.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Screenshots of Youtube

A prominent Black pastor in Atlanta has apologized for remarks in a recent sermon about instructions for obeying government authority, saying he should have used “more nuance” when providing lessons from his own encounter with law enforcement and blaming some police killings on disobedience.

“Without a doubt, I understand the framing I used about Black children and their relationship with police was and is harmful. I know that Black people have been killed by the police when being both compliant and noncompliant,” Philip Anthony Mitchell wrote in an Instagram post last week. Mitchell pastors 2819 Church, a growing multiethnic congregation with a large following among Black evangelicals.

His response comes after a flurry of online criticism from some fellow Black Christians and internet personalities, who said his April 13 sermon discounted the history of Black people who were killed by police despite following orders. The backlash was picked up in Black publications, such as The Root and Atlanta Black Star. However, some social media users also came to Mitchell’s defense, saying his comments were biblical, though unpopular. During the sermon, some in his congregation cheered along.

In recent years, several high-profile police shootings of Black people have sparked protests for racial justice and national conversations about biases in policing. Many pastors have used those moments to speak out against racism and advocate for reconciliation. And while Black Christians don’t take issue with the Bible’s teachings on authority, many are wary of a narrative that implies deaths would have been avoided with greater compliance.

Mitchell waded into the topic of race in policing while preaching on a passage in the Book of Matthew that details how the Pharisees and the Herodians worked to trap Jesus by asking him whether it was lawful to pay taxes to Caesar (22:15–22). Jesus responded by asking for a coin and questioned them about whose image was on it, to which they replied, “Caesar’s.” Afterward, Jesus instructed them to “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” (v. 21)

In the passage, Mitchell said, Christ was laying down the principles of submitting to earthly authorities and teaching that Christians should be “model citizens” under any government. He listed some contemporary examples of how to do that, such as paying taxes and complying with parking ordinances. Later in his sermon, he got into the subject of policing, saying that while there are “bad cops out there,” not “every killing of a Black man was because of a bad cop.”

“Some of that is because we have not taught our children to … be obedient to authority,” Mitchell said during the sermon, which was posted on the church’s YouTube page. In another clip circulated online, Mitchell said, “Stop blaming white cops for the killing of Black kids. Instead, teach your Black children to be obedient to authority.”

In a video posted online, UrbanLogia Ministries founder Damon Richardson said that though he found no fault with Mitchell’s explanation of the biblical text, he was troubled with how the pastor attempted to relate it to the conversation of policing in America.

Richardson said the sermon should have provided information on the long, tense history between the Black community and law enforcement, including warranted mistrust bred out of over-policing. Mitchell, he said, should have balanced his comments with “an honest conversation that offers prophetic rebuke and critique to law enforcement.”

During his sermon, Mitchell did not speak about specific cases highlighted in the media. Instead, he recounted an incident that took place while he was a 15-year-old living in Queens, New York.

One day, Mitchell said, he was walking down a street in Queens when he locked eyes with an officer who was driving in a police car. The officer, whom he described as Italian, then got out of the car, grabbed him in the neck, and smashed him against a brick wall. Mitchell said the officer then pointed a gun at his neck and dared him to “say something.” At that moment, he said, he heard the voice of his mother, who frequently told him to obey authority and “stop getting into trouble with the police.”

“In that moment, I got to decide what will be stronger: my ego or my submission,” he said.

In his apology statement, Mitchell noted the passage he preached presents an opportunity “to examine our relationship with governments and authoritative figures who we may personally oppose, yet have to comply with.” At the same time, he said, his framing of the encounter he had with the officer as a teen “was not helpful and should have been done differently and with more nuance.”

“I have a responsibility to my local congregation, our Digital Disciples, and all the people watching me expecting to see an example of what true discipleship of Christ looks like,” the statement said. “That includes acknowledging when you have made a misstep or been wrong. Due to the size of my platform, I am learning that my words carry more weight and influence than I even sometimes can fathom or acknowledge.”

In the past, Mitchell has garnered attention by publicly criticizing other ministers who he says have spewed “theological garbage.” The things he’s lambasted include talk that a church-aided cannabis business could help drive membership among Black men, an idea floated in 2022 by pastor Jamal Bryant of Atlanta.

Last Friday, Mitchell’s own apology received support on Instagram from prominent Black Christian influencers, including podcast host Megan Ashley and writer and poet Preston Perry, who has attended the church with his wife, Jackie Hill Perry.

The worship musician Eddie James also applauded Mitchell, saying that though he understood what the pastor was trying to communicate, he also saw how it could be taken by others.

“Unfortunately, there are abuses from authorities that have hurt so many,” James wrote. “How you are handling this moment demonstrates the heart of a pastor.”

- More from Haleluya Hadero

News

The Mental Health Crisis Ministers Struggle to Talk About

Adam MacInnis

Their own.

dlewis33 / Getty Images

Nicholas Davis thanks God he’s still alive.

That wasn’t his plan.

He was a young man serving as senior pastor at a Presbyterian church in Southern California. And he was drowning in anxiety, depression, and thoughts of suicide. What started as a mundane case of overwork or maybe burnout became something much more dangerous.

“It was a very busy season,” Davis told Christianity Today, “kind of taking on too much and not realizing that I was in the midst of too much.”

He had never struggled with mental health growing up. In 2015, though, it just felt as if his mind was shutting down and his body was overwhelmed with an impossible weight. He barely slept for weeks. But it eventually subsided.

Then, in 2019, life at the Presbyterian Church in America was very busy, and it happened again.

“I bit off way too much and kind of hit a wall,” he said. “I had never had a panic attack before, so I thought it was a heart attack.”

Still, he didn’t seek help from a psychiatrist. He has his wife, Gina, to thank for eventually getting him help. She was, at first, just hoping that he could be prescribed something to help him sleep and that a little regular rest would alleviate the anxiety. So she made an appointment and made him go. While talking to the doctor, Davis mentioned he had had thoughts about ending his life.

Following protocol, the psychiatrist admitted Davis for care. Today, Davis is glad he did.

Davis went through various forms of treatment and is thankful to now be in a healthy place. He has since left ministry and is teaching, but he has a heart for those who are in ministry and struggling.

Nearly one out of five senior pastors at Protestant churches report that they have contemplated self-harm or suicide in the past year, according to a 2024 Barna study. Most downplay it, saying the thoughts are fleeting (8%) or not especially severe (9%), but nonetheless acknowledge the thoughts are there.

Many American pastors are quietly grappling with mental health struggles. Nearly half—47 percent—report feeling lonely or isolated. A majority self-report feelings of depression. And 65 percent say they’re not talking to a therapist, counselor, spiritual advisor, or mentor.

“Pastoring can feel like you are responsible for everything and control nothing,” said Barna CEO David Kinnaman. “It’s a particularly challenging kind of job description. … They’re constantly trying to push a rock up a hill, in some ways.”

Barna’s research indicates that pastors’ mental health has gotten worse in recent years. The COVID-19 pandemic was one obvious cause of stress and isolation. People in ministry also talk about the struggle of seeing political polarization come into their churches. Growing awareness of abuse also leads to increased suspicion of people in leadership, which can make the job of being a leader that much more difficult.

Being a pastor is also just a hard job. Anxieties amp up. Stresses build. Emergencies accumulate.

Michael Chiles, founder of Abide Leader Care, said most pastors don’t talk about the pressures of the job and don’t seek help “until they get to a place where everything is crumbling.”

Early red flags include overwhelming stress, feelings of isolation, and marriage problems. But many deftly ignore them.

When Chiles started Abide Leader Care about a decade ago in Austin, Texas, he wanted to figure out how to make it easier for ministers to seek help. He is a pastor himself, so the ministers who come to him don’t have to explain the dynamics of ministry. And the first consultation doesn’t cost anything, so concerns about cost can be deferred to a later date.

“We want to remove the most common barriers,” Chiles said. “Once they start sharing what’s going on and bringing it into the open and bringing it to the light, they start to feel the healing start.”

Abide Leader Care now has counselors in 21 states. Online counseling is also available and can be a good option for many people, Chiles said.

Care for Pastors, located in Florida, works with ministers across the US. Ron and Rodetta Cook are former church planters who founded the practice in 2004 after “multiple painful situations causing hurts so deep” that they considered quitting.

Ron Cook said he realized through his own experience the acute need for pastors to be able to be vulnerable.

He has noticed that many pastors come in unsure whether they really need counseling. But then they also describe feeling hopeless.

“They just give and give and give until there’s nothing left to give,” he told CT. “Pastors put unrealistic expectations on themselves and allow church leaders to quite often put those unrealistic expectations on them.”

Many are dealing with burnout, compassion fatigue, and decision fatigue. Church divisions have made things worse. He encourages churches to send their ministers to counseling for preventative care instead of waiting until their mental health is bad.

Too many churches, he said, ignore all the warning signs until their pastors leave the churches or leave ministry altogether.

Mary Hulst, Calvin University chaplain, tries to teach future ministers to work on their mental health and spiritual well-being before there is a problem. She talks to students about navigating conflict, managing expectations, and taking practical steps to take care of themselves. Regular exercise is too often ignored. Pastors often imagine they should be able to go long stretches without moving their bodies, getting adequate sleep, or eating healthy meals.

She emphasizes the need for good spiritual practices and recommends regular spiritual retreats and sabbaths.

“We need rest. We need renewal. And we’re only as good as our own health,” Hulst said. “In the ideal world, you build these rhythms into your life so that you don’t get to the point of crisis.”

Getting ministers to take of themselves can be a real challenge, though. And getting them to recognize that they’re having mental health crises can be incredibly difficult too.

Sometimes even pastors having panic attacks and thinking about suicide still believe it might be better just not to tell anyone.

“It’s not an admission of weakness. It’s an admission of strength to say, ‘I know myself well enough to know I’m not as well as I can be, and I want to get healthy,’” Hulst said. “That’s a beautiful thing to acknowledge.”

- More from Adam MacInnis

Ideas

How to Live in the ‘Negative World’

Pete Nicholas

Gospel centrality seeks to draw people into the kingdom—as an alternative to drawing lines in the sand.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

For many Christians in America, author Aaron Renn’s “negative world” hypothesis sums up their experience of living in a culture hostile to Christianity. Even if recent trends like surging Bible sales, a possible slowdown in Christianity’s decline, and a few celebrity conversions indicate that it is not all bad news, there is an enduring feeling of a culture less open to Christianity.

In a negative world, Renn’s call to believers is to find “a different approach from the strategies of the past.” This has led some within evangelicalism to draw lines in the sand. Like certain plants that turn inward when affected by blight in cold weather, surviving in a strange and distorted form, there is a danger that Renn’s posture to the cool winds of the negative world could lead to insularity.

I want to advocate an alternative, which draws on the historical riches of God’s community and Word. Pastor Tim Keller called such a posture “gospel centrality,” which he embodied through his ministry at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, where I now serve as senior pastor at its downtown location.

Gospel centrality is an approach as old as the early church, which blossomed in some of the harshest cultural climates of church history not by turning in but by turning out. It requires Spirit-filled hope alongside clear gospel convictions—an approach that works in every world, positive, neutral, or negative. And it’s an approach that I continue to see bearing fruit in New York City today.

Gospel centrality advocates a particular mode of gospel engagement. Renn and others have criticized this approach as “triangulation” or “third-wayism,” saying that Keller’s middle-of-the-road approach to tribal partisanship may have worked in a neutral world but is no longer fitting for a negative one. Renn proposes instead that evangelicals should “have a firm resolve as to what they believe to be true and then have the courage to speak it clearly.”

Amen to resolve, amen to (gospel-centered) courage, and amen to truth. However, the gospel is not just the truth—it’s the message of the one who is “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

Merely proclaiming truth without extending grace leads to moralism. Various cultural thought leaders like Jordan Peterson, for example, who claim to be “culturally Christian,” are great at proclaiming truth.

But cultural Christianity is not to be confused with the transformative gospel of Jesus Christ.

Proclaiming grace and truth is the approach that gospel-centered churches hold to. It is the approach that Keller articulated in response to Renn’s (and others’) critique in 2022. It is a posture found in Scripture (1 Cor. 1:18–25) and championed by Augustine and Abraham Kuyper. It is the age-old conviction that all of our deepest questions find their resolution in Christ.

In gospel centrality, Jesus first confronts us with the truth (that Renn rightly wants us to proclaim). Then Jesus comforts us with grace (which seems lacking from Renn’s approach), with forgiveness, and with the acceptance available through his death.

Finally, Jesus shows how this confrontation and comfort is uniquely resolved in his life, death, and resurrection. First, by his living a perfect life of grace and truth. Second, by his dying for our lies and our lack of truthful living so that we might both realize the seriousness of our sin and the grace of God’s salvation.

Grace without truth tends toward relativism. Truth without grace may be provocative but quickly sours into condemnatory moralism and excludes those who fall on the wrong side of the line.

But the uniquely compelling grace and truth of Jesus Christ has the resilience to stand against culture’s untruths and beckons those who have turned away to return to God.

D. A. Carson similarly articulated the central importance of the gospel when he wrote that it “ought to shape everything we do in the local church, all of our ethics, all of our priorities.” Only then can gospel renewal start to happen.

In his book Life in the Negative World, Renn lists the proclamation of the gospel as one of his aims—and when he and I spoke recently, it was clear that he cares about seeing people come to know Christ. But the gospel does not seem central to his priorities in the way Carson describes.

Instead, the three-world framework of positive, neutral, and negative seems primarily concerned about the church’s standing in culture. Renn’s arguments thus orbit around critiquing “wokeism” and the triumvirate of race, gender, and sex rather than centering how people are responding to the gospel.

Renn pinpoints the shift from a neutral to a negative world in 2014 with the rise of wokeism. However, sociologists of religion present an alternate view, arguing that spiritual attitudes shifted much earlier, back in the late 20th century. As Robert Wuthnow wrote in 1998, reflecting on the previous decades, “The transformation of American spirituality poses new challenges for the public life of the nation as well as for individual lives.”

Ethical shifts in race, gender, and sex are certainly significant. I engage with these issues frequently from the pulpit myself, because the gospel does too. But the gospel is not just one concern among many for the church. It is the central concern and the transforming power that makes all things new.

Gospel centrality shapes not just the mode of our engagement but also the character of our engagement.

One of the strongest parts of Renn’s book is its emphasis on the importance of obedience to Christ, in both its clear-sighted call to personal obedience—recognizing that this may be particularly difficult when it comes to sex and gender issues—and its insistence on the support of the church community to make this possible.

However, obeying Christ and his gospel is more than just living out certain challenging ethical stances in culturally hot areas. It is also a call to faith that goes deep and changes our hearts in the formation of our characters.

Unsurprisingly, secular thinkers are realizing the benefits of a Christian ethic, particularly in contrast to the broken promises of secularism.

Consider journalist Louise Perry’s bestselling book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, where she advocates for the Christian sexual ethic. Think of the voices coming out of Silicon Valley arguing for the Christian philosophical framework when engaging with technology. Observe the increasing number of people who, like Elon Musk and even the New Atheist Richard Dawkins, call themselves “cultural Christians.”

But being culturally or ethically Christian is not the goal of gospel centrality. The Pharisees were equally hot on a call to be moral. And like the throng of those calling for an end to winsomeness or “third-wayism” today, the Pharisees also urged a more strident approach.

Jesus repeatedly rebuked them for their lack of mercy, compassion, and love, because an emphasis on truth without a corresponding emphasis on grace dangerously leads to self-righteousness, hypocrisy, and fear.

The world does not need more anxious presences shouting across the divide, even if the words they are shouting may be true. The culture at large is hungry for a different character in our approach.

In my context in New York City, we recently hosted a course designed for those investigating or doubting Christianity. The overwhelming feedback from attendees was how much they appreciated not only the proclamation of the gospel’s grace and truth but also the character of the course’s environment as a whole, which relies on patient and gracious conversations with Christians.

This aligns with a 2022 Barna report that describes the top six values that Gen Z is searching for in evangelism: judgment-free listening, mutual understanding, calm and natural conversation, words matched by action, healthy disagreement, and safe relationship.

Of note is how much these values overlap with the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22–23).

It is faith, hope, and love, after all, that will remain (1 Cor. 13:13). For all his talk about the negative world, Renn himself has wondered if it may already be changing, perhaps even coming to an end. Whether this is the case or not, what will never change is the gospel and its call to godliness.

Gospel centrality—that which confronts and comforts us, holds grace and truth together, and transforms us to be more like Christ—is still, as ever, compelling and attractive to a generation hungry for conviction. That’s because it is God’s work, not ours.

Whether we continue in this current negative cultural mode or enter one that becomes more receptive to Christianity, our posture should be the same as it has been since the beginning. Such an evergreen approach has led to renewal throughout the church’s long history. May the Lord do so again.

Pete Nicholas is senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church Downtown in New York City and author of A Place For God: Timeless Questions for Our Modern Times, Five Things to Pray for Your City, and Virtually Human: Flourishing in a Digital World. Pete is married to Rebecca, a surgeon, and they have two boys.

- More from Pete Nicholas

Ideas

The Bible and the Tariffs Debate

Haleluya Hadero

Staff Editor

Abraham Kuyper argued for tariffs with thin theological support. A later thinker, Frederick Nymeyer, mounted a vehement biblical critique.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Pexels

This spring has been a season of chaos where trade policy is concerned. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump levied dramatic new tariffs on US imports, including those from allied countries, only to make a jarring reversal a mere 13 hours after they went into effect. For now, most new tariffs are in a 90-day pause, except for a sky-high rate on goods from China, which seems likely to come down soon following weeks of market volatility.

Caught in the middle of this uncertainty is the global economy, countless businesses, and consumers who will pay higher prices for a wide range of items, including necessities like food and clothing. This is likely to be painful for everyone, but especially for lower-income households that spend a larger proportion of their income on critical supplies.

For Christians, the value and wisdom of tariffs can’t be settled by a simple appeal to Scripture, as some ethical questions can. But Christian thinkers have grappled with this issue in prior eras of protectionism. The Dutch thinker and statesman Abraham Kuyper staked out a pro-tariffs position around the turn of the 20th century, and decades later, his stance came under fire from Frederick Nymeyer, a Calvinist businessman from Illinois who advocated for free trade.

Neither man was a trained economist, and both argued from the Bible and their political contexts alike. But where Kuyper largely presented a pragmatic, economic case, Nymeyer argued that tariffs violate well-established biblical principles of justice and honesty.

Born in 1837, Kuyper was a pastor in the national Dutch Reformed Church before he retired from his post in 1874 to join the Dutch parliament. Over the course of his life, he edited a daily newspaper; founded a university, a denomination, and a political party; and eventually led his country as prime minister between 1901 and 1905. Kuyper is most known, though, for pioneering the theology and cultural engagement of Neo-Calvinism, which encouraged Christians to transform realms like politics and labor without confusing those things with the church.

Kuyper’s views on tariffs were formed in a world significantly different from ours. The Dutch economy experienced a decline—and limited growth—in the first half of the 19th century. By the second half, when Kuyper came into public life, the country was beginning to industrialize. Coupled with construction of roads and railways, industry helped achieve steady economic growth. Official data indicates only a third of the Dutch population still worked in agriculture around 1900, while the rest took jobs in other services or industries, such as textiles.

By the time Kuyper entered the political scene in 1874, debates about the merits of free trade were widespread across Europe, with the continent toggling between protectionist and more open trade policies. Kuyper primarily engaged with the issue as a politician. And in booklets, newspaper editorials, and at least one book, he praised protectionism, which he—like many politicians now as then—saw as a method of promoting worker interests, funding social programs, and creating better jobs for ordinary people.

One of the most robust defenses of his views came in the second volume of his book Antirevolutionaire Staatkunde (Anti-Revolutionary Politics), in which Kuyper bemoaned an outflow of Dutch workers into better-off Germany. He blamed this pattern on his country’s trade policies and posited that more tariffs would spur home-grown manufacturing, allowing Dutch workers to stay in the Netherlands. Kuyper also criticized the idea that the Netherlands would have to rely on other countries, like Germany, for necessities.

Kuyper built his arguments with statistics and appeals to secular authorities, including other protectionist writers. Joost Hengstmengel, a university lecturer in the Netherlands, told me that insofar as Kuyper made theological arguments, he primarily used the universal economy doctrine, which says God divided gifts “at the creation of the world, forcing the nations to specialize in certain industries.” And “in order to maintain this division of nations and labor, Kuyper argued, tariffs are necessary.”

That connection between God’s creation purposes and tariff policy seems strained—and Kuyper seems to have wanted a more extensive Christian position. He bemoaned that he was not an economist and that his Anti-Revolutionary Party “had not produced technical economists whose views were grounded in a Reformed world and lifeview,” Jordan J. Ballor, coeditor of a 12-volume compilation of Kuyper’s work, said in an email interview.

And part of Kuyper’s opposition to free trade appears to have stemmed from the less noble motive of negative partisanship. Free trade’s “greatest champions in the Netherlands of his day were also radical secularists and anti-Christian ideologues,” Ballor said, which meant being “for or against free trade had more baggage than simple trade policy.”

Decades after Kuyper’s death, Nymeyer challenged his case for tariffs and argued that protectionism was “unscriptural and unsound.” A protégé of libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises and a Calvinist himself, the Illinois businessman believed Kuyper’s way of seeing the world centered communities and institutions to the detriment of the individual and, when it came to tariffs, divided at least some individuals along industrial or national lines.

In a 1956 entry of his periodical Progressive Calvinism, for example, Nymeyer tackled Kuyper’s argument that free trade would lead to higher unemployment for sawmill employees due to a flood of finished goods flowing into the Netherlands. Even if new tariffs on products (in this case, lumber) could protect some jobs, Nymeyer said, such policies would also raise the price for the consumer. In this, he charged, Kuyper did not “recoil from hurting other people in the Netherlands for the sawmill employees”—not to mention sawmill employees in other countries who would see demand for their work fall. “What virtuous morality,” Nymeyer asked, “is there in helping one man at the expense of another”?

“In plain language, Kuyper has scales for morality with two sets of weights; one set of weights for Dutchmen; another set of weights for Swedes (foreigners),” Nymeyer wrote. “Somewhere in Scripture there is a very unfavorable comment on the morality of different sets of weights (Deut. 25:13-16; Proverbs 20:10 and 23.)” The Scriptures Nymeyer cited are concerned with dishonesty, though fairness is a clear theme too.

But for all Nymeyer’s certainty on the subject, Scripture doesn’t prescribe a Christian position on tariffs. It does extoll wisdom (Prov. 4:7), foresight (Prov. 22:3), impartiality (Lev. 19:15), prudent use of resources (Prov. 6:6–8), and care for the poor (Deut. 15:4). Christians have debated trade policy before and will again in the future, and we can at least expect these virtues of each other—if not our leaders.

Haleluya Hadero is the Black church editor at Christianity Today.

- More from Haleluya Hadero

Share

Share

Related

Share

related

related

related

related

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

related

related

Share

Related

Share

related

related

related

Share

Related