Author: Chris Boyd

The former COGIC leader and Oral Roberts mentee said he wore his “heretic” label “like a badge.”

When Carlton Pearson was a teenager, he cast out a demon in church. He was the son and grandson of Church of God in Christ (COGIC) ministers and knew what to do. He looked at the girl in front of him—his girlfriend at the time—and started rebuking the Devil in her and claiming the power of the blood of Jesus.

“The blood, the blood, the blood, the blood—come out!” he said. “You lying wonder, in the name of Jesus, I command you to cease and desist. Loose her.”

She seemed, to Pearson and the Black Pentecostals around him, to be loosed. She screamed and fell on the ground possessed, and then there was a release, like something let go. The church gathered around the girl, rejoicing, and they praised Pearson for his spiritual gifting and the way he had used it with such authority.

When Pearson was in his late 40s, he tried to cast hell out of church. That time, it didn’t go so well. He lost nearly everything he had and became a pariah among Pentecostals. He watched his megachurch collapse almost overnight, lost his relationship with his mentor, lost his respected status, lost his community, and ended up almost completely alone.

Whether there was peace or not—whether he was loosed from something—was, in the end, a matter of debate.

Pearson died Sunday, November 19 at the age of 70.

It was “a strange thing to go from a very popular, sort-of loved person that everybody seems to like, and everybody wants you, and then overnight, your name is a scandal,” he told the popular public radio show This American Life in 2005.

Yet he insisted he had made the right choice.

“I can handle my stuff, okay?” he said. “I know what God spoke to me. So I’m cool.” …

Continue reading…

My outsider experiences have only strengthened my confidence in God’s goodness and sovereignty.

Four years ago, I embarked on a master’s program at a theologically conservative seminary. As a Black, politically liberal woman, I stood out from most of my classmates.

I’m toward the lower end of the income scale compared to most of my peers. I’m also in my late 30s and happily unmarried, while my friends have nearly all coupled off. Three years ago, I began suffering from as-yet-undiagnosed health problems. To top it all off, I run in nerd circles, but I’ve never seen any of the Star Wars, Star Trek, or Harry Potter movies, and I’ve never heard the Hamilton soundtrack.

Sometimes being an outsider has been beyond my control. Sometimes it was a consequence of my choice to pursue certain interests or communities. Other times I sought it out, as with my choices of universities, churches, and living abroad.

No matter how being an outsider has come about for me, I’ve always learned from it. Over time, I moved from insecurity about my difference to neutrality to recognizing the value in it and letting it better me. It has taught me about the bigness of God, his closeness, his power, and his person- and circumstance-specific care.

During a trying season of life, I wrote to a friend, “Are all stations and circumstances that illuminate the true nature of grace a gift? Since Paul boasts in his weakness and hardships because they facilitate his most powerful encounters with grace (2 Cor. 12:8–10), then are all things gifts that bring to rest on us Christ’s power?”

It was my very differences that convinced me of God’s sovereignty over things like the time and place in which I lived and the family into which I was born. The realization that God was …

Continue reading…

Christians can love America—with all of its flaws and failures—precisely because we don’t expect it to be the kingdom of God.

This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

If any political idea in American life has proven itself over the past several years, I can’t think of a better candidate than the “horseshoe theory”—the notion that, at their extremes, Left and Right bend toward each other, sometimes as to be almost indistinguishable.

One of the ways we can see this is in a bleak and darkening view of the United States of America. The question is not so much whether extremists of the Right or Left seem to hate America these days as much as it is the question of why.

Over 15 years ago, then-candidate for president Barack Obama’s campaign was rocked by a videotape of sermons from Obama’s pastor, Chicago preacher Jeremiah Wright, in which Wright spoke of the September 11 attacks in language reminiscent of that of Malcolm X after the John F. Kennedy assassination, as “chickens coming home to roost.”

Wright denounced the idea of “God bless America,” replacing it with instead a call of “God damn America.” The controversy proved to have no staying power—not because most Americans would agree with Wright but because almost no one really believed that Obama himself held to such views. In fact, Obama repudiated his pastor and left the church.

Wright’s bleak view of America was not unusual for a specific strand of the further reaches of the American Left, at least since the Vietnam era. Counter-culture protesters, after all, once burned American flags and referred to the country as “Amerika,” equating the United States with an imperialist dictatorship.

In more recent years, some initiatives such as the 1619 Project have gone beyond …

Continue reading…

Duterte tried a hardline policy. Marcos is prioritizing rehab. Christians point to Jesus.

While running for office last year, Philippines president Ferdinand “Bong Bong” Marcos Jr. promised to seek a new path to curb illegal drugs: Catch the “big fish” and rehabilitate drug users.

“Let’s educate the younger ones,” Marcos said in a Taglish interview. “And those who are already involved [or already addicted], we should treat them. … We’re trying to formulate … the best way for the rehabilitation.”

It’s a starkly different approach from his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, who outraged Filipinos and the international community with his brutal war on drugs, giving police blanket authority to kill anyone found using or dealing drugs.

During Duterte’s six-year presidential term, government data reported around 6,000 drug-related killings. Human rights groups, however, peg the number much higher, estimating that up to 30,000 people were killed.

“I will never, never apologize for the deaths,” Duterte said in January 2022. “Kill me, jail me, I will never apologize.”

Since taking office, Marcos has established more than 100 community-based drug rehab centers that provide drug users with temporary shelter and reintegrate them into society. Today there are nearly 500 of these centers, called Balay Silangan Reformation Centers, in the Philippines.

However, during the first year of Marcos’s presidency, the number of drug-related killings actually increased from the last year of Duterte’s term, according to a recent report by the Dahas Project at the University of the Philippines’ Third World Studies Center. They counted 342 killings from Marcos’s inauguration in July 2022 until June 2023, 40 more …

Continue reading…

Jesus could end this crisis. His followers almost certainly can’t.

The way to resolve the Israel-Hamas war is very simple, journalist Matt Yglesias recently explained. We could do it in just five steps:

It’s great, right? I love it! Only—well, that third step seems a little tricky.

And that’s the point, as Yglesias wrote at greater length on Substack. Obviously, the five-step plan is a joke. But it gets at something that so much commentary on this subject seems to miss—certainly in America, and probably elsewhere—which is that Israeli political leaders (to say nothing of the murderers in Hamas) are not ignorant of what we outside observers believe is the right and prudent way forward.

“They just disagree,” Yglesias notes, and they are unlikely to stop disagreeing, and we are unlikely to shift their thinking much, if at all. By “we,” I partly mean the US government, which, for all its power, is objectively limited in its capacity to shift the behavior of combatants who believe, quite rightly, they are in an existential fight. But I also mean you and me specifically—as well as our fellow Christians in America and around the world.

We cannot fix this crisis, no matter how faithful, factual, and fervent we are.

This bears saying, I think, for two reasons. One is our modern habit of “awareness,” as in, I am posting this article on Facebook because I want to raise awareness.

On many issues of great import, the reality is most of us can do very little to effect significant change. Sometimes we can give money to a relevant cause. Always we can pray (1 Thess. 5:17) and take care we do not sin in our hearts or our speech as we react to the news (Matt. 5:21–30). …

Continue reading…

Online pop psychology has a simple solution to every relationship problem. Love and prudence call us to something messier—and better.

Everyone on social media is asserting their boundaries. Everyone is cutting toxicity out of their life. Everyone is prioritizing their own healing journey and giving up on one-sided relationships. Everyone is disarming the narcissist, protecting their space, deleting that number, going no-contact. Or at least, it feels that way.

There is a mode of self-help, overwhelmingly generated and reinforced online, that I call the “dump them” school of thought. It solves every problem with an elegant, unified simplicity of which physicists can only dream: Just dump them. Whether it’s your mother failing to respect your child-rearing rules, your boyfriend who said something hurtful, or your friend who flaked on you twice in a row, you know what you need to do: Dump them. Cut them off.

“Dump them” conversations online are rarely about the church, but the church—universal, if not always a specific local congregation—is a highly dump-able target. The universal church is filled with sinners, and particular churches bring otherwise disparate people together in the work of governing a community and discussing profoundly sensitive and important topics; they often comprise a complex emotional landscape where quotidian frustrations mingle with histories of power abuses (or worse). It would be surprising if the “dump them” school of emotional hygiene had not made its way to the church.

It’s not difficult to see why this school of advice has gained traction. For one thing, it’s extremely well-suited to the internet, where we encounter the interpersonal problems of others at a far remove. Without being deeply embedded in the real-life context of the problem …

Continue reading…

Sauls spent a decade leading Christ Presbyterian Church and had been on leave since May.

Scott Sauls, an influential pastor and author, has resigned from the Nashville megachurch he had led for the past decade.

Members of Christ Presbyterian Church (CPC) voted to accept Sauls’s resignation during a congregational meeting on Sunday night.

Sauls had been on an indefinite leave of absence since May after apologizing for an unhealthy leadership style. A group of church leaders known as the session had asked the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) congregation to accept Sauls’s resignation.

In addressing the congregation, Sauls apologized to those he had hurt and said that he and his family would continue to serve Jesus.

“We had hoped to continue forward and help with CPC,” Sauls told the congregation during the meeting, according to The Tennessean, which first reported the news of Sauls’s resignation. “But we now believe the most merciful thing to do is step aside so the church can seek new leadership and we can seek the Lord’s will for whatever comes next as well.”

The church declined to comment on news of Sauls’s resignation.

Sauls’s tenure at the church began with great promise and was marked by growth. A protege of the late Tim Keller, Sauls promoted a Christianity marked by kindness and grace, rather than culture war politics, in books like A Gentle Answer: Our “Secret Weapon” in an Age of Us Against Them, Befriend, and Irresistible Faith.

Sauls admitted earlier this year that he had been harsh with church staff and used the power of the pulpit as a weapon against those who disagreed with him.

“I verbalized insensitive and verbal criticism of others’ work,” he said in an apology to the congregation earlier this year. “I’ve …

Continue reading…

This sounds counterintuitive. But there are biblical and cultural reasons for believing it.

We talk about enemies less than we used to.

It may not feel that way. The amount of infighting, mudslinging, name-calling, and downright nastiness in public discourse today, including within the church, is both tragic and self-defeating. Slander and snark have been normalized in many circles. So thinking and talking about enemies in these fractious and divided times might sound like the last thing we need.

Yet the opposite is true for two reasons. The first is biblical: The Scriptures talk about enemies with robust clarity and remarkable frequency, including in ways we are explicitly urged to imitate. The second reason is cultural: Confusion about who exactly God’s enemies are, and how the church should respond to them, makes Christians more likely to attack one another, not less.

Take the biblical argument first. There are around 400 references to an “enemy” or “enemies” in Scripture. (By way of comparison, that’s about twice as often as the words gracious and grace appear.) Admittedly, plenty of these examples relate to political or military opponents of Israel that no longer exist. But some refer to those who love the world, hate the Cross, and hate the church (James 4:4; Phil. 3:18; Rev. 11:5, 12).

Many references concern the work of the Messiah himself, who will “possess the gate of his enemies” (Gen. 22:17, ESV), and who—in the biblical text that’s quoted most frequently by Jesus and in the whole New Testament—will sit at God’s right hand until his enemies are made into a “footstool” (Ps. 110:1). Apparently, crushing the head of his enemies is a central feature of what Christ came to do. It is the subject of the …

Continue reading…

More than 300 Christian families have been affected, says a local pastor.

Nepali Christians are mourning the loss of many of their own after a series of devastating earthquakes in early November.

On Friday, November 3, a 5.6-magnitude earthquake rocked the mountainous Nepali villages of Jajarkot and Rukum West just before midnight, burying people under layers of rubble as they slept. A subsequent earthquake occurred on Monday, November 6, this time measuring 5.2 magnitude.

Many rural churches planted in the districts of West Rukum, Jajarkot, and Kalikot were “flattened,” Hanok Tamang, chairman of the National Churches Fellowship of Nepal, told CT. “It is true [that] many pastors, leaders, and Christians have died.”

Nepal’s current population is 31 million and is divided into seven states and 77 districts. The earthquake-hit areas are located in the midwestern region of the country.

The overall estimated death toll is more than 150 people so far, including more than 80 children, according to the non-governmental organization Save The Children. Villagers have taken to sleeping outdoors in freezing conditions for fear of continuing aftershocks, but also because their homes have been destroyed.

The 2023 earthquakes are the “deadliest” occurrence since the devastating 2015 quake near the city of Kathmandu when believers were attending church on a Saturday, as Sunday is a work day. “Many Christians were buried while they were worshiping on Sabbath and died,” the president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Nepal, Umesh Pokharel, told Adventist Review at the time.

Nepal’s Christians make up between 1 to 3 percent of the population, and Protestants were disproportionately affected in the 2015 disaster, said one Catholic leader.

Preliminary reports …

Continue reading…

An inquiry at Alan Scott’s former church found evidence of manipulation, narcissism, and spiritual abuse.

Vineyard USA is calling on a breakaway congregation to launch a “thorough, independent investigation” into allegations of misconduct, narcissism, and spiritual abuse.

“We pray for those who were hurt, harmed, mistreated, or in any way negatively impacted by their time under the leadership of Alan Scott,” the denomination’s statement says. National leadership is pleading with “current and former board members” at the Anaheim, California, church to “fulfill their legal and spiritual responsibilities.”

Scott has not publicly responded and did not reply to CT’s request for comment.

His Southern California church was founded by the late charismatic leader John Wimber and has long been seen as the “mother church” of the movement. Scott and his wife Kathryn took over Vineyard Anaheim in 2018 and then unexpectedly led the congregation out of the denomination in 2022. There was little explanation, beyond the claim they were following the leading of the Holy Spirit.

“We don’t really understand why,” Scott said in a sermon at the time. “We don’t always know what’s on the other side of obedience.”

Some former members of the church, which is now called Dwelling Place, have sued for fraud, claiming Scott misrepresented his relationship to the Vineyard in an attempt to seize control of $62 million of church assets. The building is debt free and sits on more than five acres zoned for commercial use in Orange County.

Scott also may have been reacting to efforts to reorganize the Vineyard to provide more oversight and accountability. National director Jay Pathak, who took over in January 2022, had dinner with the Scotts to tell them …

Continue reading…