Author: Chris Boyd

Scripture is clear that both go hand in hand.

In seminary, my discipleship courses had a particular focus: passing on what the apostles had taught about doctrines like the Atonement and practices like Bible reading and prayer. For me, as for many evangelicals today, this made discipleship mainly a matter of nurturing faith and spiritual growth.

Michael J. Rhodes had a similar experience. But then one day he heard John Perkins speak: “He pointed out all this stuff in Scripture I’d never paid attention to, stuff that had never crossed my discipleship radar.” Poverty relief, love for other races and ethnicities, and other justice issues were central to the discipleship modeled by Jesus and the apostles.

Rhodes, a pastor and an Old Testament professor, came to realize that community justice needs to be part of Christian discipleship, “not because of some liberal agenda or to ‘keep up with the times,’” but “because ‘the Bible tells us so!’” And so he devoted himself to this fuller perspective in his own ministry. His book Just Discipleship: Biblical Justice in an Unjust World is the fruit of that work.

The book is structured in four parts. The first gives a biblical definition of justice and shows its place within the Bible’s mandate for discipleship. As Rhodes observes, the American church in particular has “offered the world a justice-less, or at least justice-light, version of our faith,” but Scripture is a story of unjust people being justified and renewed in God’s just image.

Part 2 explores several ways God’s people were shaped for justice in biblical times, distilling key concepts from those examples for our own day. Rhodes explores the just community created through Israel’s …

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The NYC founders of Pray March Act want church-led activism to outlive news cycles and divisive politics.

James Roberson III scaled a ladder in downtown Brooklyn on June 2, 2020, with a megaphone in his hand, as protestors converged below him. He had expected a few hundred; thousands showed up.

One week earlier, Roberson—a married father of three and pastor of Bridge Church NYC—had watched the infamous video of George Floyd dying. He couldn’t believe the “total disregard for humanity.”

As a Christian, a pastor, and a Black man in America, he felt compelled to say something. Beyond the crowd in New York, his remarks have been viewed more than 19,000 times on Facebook Live.

“Anyone whose heart doesn’t break when you see that video, don’t ask me to explain why my heart breaks,” Roberson says, crying. “If your heart doesn’t break when you see something like that, please … don’t make me explain my rage.”

Roberson had spent decades explaining—particularly to his white evangelical friends—why the killings of Black men and women at the hands of law enforcement officers or white vigilantes were so painful and so personal.

He and a group of fellow local pastors and believers soon grew their grief and activism into a movement: Pray March Act (PMA). Their marches in Brooklyn, Long Island, and Minneapolis drew media attention in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death.

Their language was not filled with violent or hateful rhetoric but aimed at advocating for police and other enforcers of the law to regard and treat Black citizens with the same dignity and respect as their white counterparts.

“We wanted the protest to be deeply Christian,” Roberson said. “The cops are made in the image of God, just like George Floyd was made in …

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Native American Christians, involved in both their tribes and in child placement situations, know the complexity of these cases better than most.

Native American tribes will retain priority for placement in the adoption of Native American children after a US Supreme Court ruling on Thursday.

The high court rejected all challenges to the federal Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) in a 7–2 ruling by Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.

An evangelical couple, along with two other adoptive couples, had challenged the law on multiple grounds, one being that it hinders non-Native families from fostering and adopting Native American children.

The court rejected every argument and defended the fundamental constitutional principles behind ICWA.

“This case is about children who are among the most vulnerable: those in the child welfare system,” wrote Barrett in the decision. She shared a comment from a Choctaw chief who testified in Congress in 1978, when ICWA became a federal law: “Culturally, the chances of Indian survival are significantly reduced if our children, the only real means for the transmission of the tribal heritage, are to be raised in non-Indian homes and denied exposure to the ways of their people.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch, who handled many cases involving Native American affairs out West before coming to the high court, wrote a concurring opinion that detailed the history of the federal government forcing child removal from Native American families through boarding school initiatives, including through some missionary-run schools. He noted that surveys showed “approximately 25–35 percent of all Indian children [were] separated from their families” by 1974.

The court avoided the thorniest issue in its ruling: whether ICWA’s rules for child placement were unconstitutionally race-based. …

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However, convincing faithful voters to choose him over Trump or DeSantis will not be easy.

Around Mike Pence’s 40th birthday, his wife Karen booked a trip to a ranch near the Roosevelt National Forest in Colorado. Pence was mulling over a second run for Congress after a failed bid years earlier. As the Pences sat atop a bluff in the park, they noticed two red-tailed hawks riding a hot-air current, rising higher and higher.

“We should step off this cliff and make ourselves available to God,” Karen Pence remembers telling her husband. “And this time instead of ambition driving us, we should allow God to lift us up to wherever he wants to use us, with no flapping.”

Last Wednesday, on his 64th birthday, Pence stepped off that metaphorical cliff once again when he announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. In a speech peppered with biblical references at the Future Farmers of America Enrichment Center in Ankeny, Iowa, he vowed to fight “the radical Left,” defend the Constitution, and oppose abortion, among a laundry list of other conservative promises.

Iowa’s caucus is seen as a bellwether for the GOP’s primary race. It is also a litmus test for a candidate’s popularity with evangelical Christians: Nearly two-thirds of caucus participants in 2016 were evangelicals, according to an entrance poll.

Pence, who will appear at the Family Leadership Summit, a gathering of conservative Christians in Des Moines next month, is hoping his evangelical credentials will garner the support of his fellow believers in the state. And if he wins the caucus, he could find himself at the top of a crowded field of Republican hopefuls led by former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

On paper Pence would seem like the ideal choice for evangelical …

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If UFOs are real, exercise some humility before sharing the gospel.

A Las Vegas family called 911 in April to report a disturbance in their backyard. The city has its share of crime so that couldn’t have surprised the emergency dispatcher too much, but then the man on the phone said, “They’re not human.”

The beings, he said, were 8 feet or maybe 9 or 10 feet tall, with big, shiny eyes.

“They look like aliens to us. Big eyes. They have big eyes. Like, I can’t explain it, and big mouth,” he said. “They’re 100 percent not human.”

Police responded but they didn’t find aliens or spaceship—just one freaked-out family. Leaving the house, one of the officers said, “If those 9-foot beings come back, don’t call us alright?”

Stories of close encounters have been lent some credence in recent days by official reports that the Pentagon and NASA are both studying “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” the fancy alternative title for undefined flying objects. Recently a whistleblower came out with claims the US government has secretly recovered and hidden “craft of unknown origin.”

If there are aliens in our collective backyard, I want to know: Where are they from? How did they get here? Are they friendly?

And as a Christian, I have another question: Should I share the gospel with them?

That may seem like a question only a theologian from the future could address, but C. S. Lewis was wrestling with the idea decades before the United States and the Soviet Union began to compete to send people into space.

Lewis’s investigation of the theological questions that would be raised by an alien encounter began when he was a child. He was captivated by H. G. Wells and science fiction space adventures.

“The …

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The costs and complications of UMC disaffiliation are leaving many congregations stuck.

Editor’s note: This story was updated with the new information about disaffiliations on June 14.

Carolyn Moore assumed that her Evans, Georgia, church would be one of the congregations disaffiliating from the United Methodist Church (UMC). Across the country, as of June 14, more than 5,500 churches have separated along the lines of the deep fissures in the denomination: LGBT acceptance and Methodist authority structures.

But for a long time, Mosaic UMC looked like it was going to get stuck in the UMC.

Moore, Mosaic’s lead pastor, waited for directions on the process from the North Georgia Annual Conference, the regional UMC body, which had told churches they could send notice of their intent to disaffiliate starting on January 1, 2023. But the conference paused the disaffiliation process before it began.

North Georgia leaders sent an email to pastors in December 2022 saying they had concerns that local churches had relied on “misleading, defamatory, and false statements and materials” to make their decision to leave and join a new Methodist denomination, the Global Methodist Church, calling the discourse “antithetical to the concept of a gracious exit.”

Moore said she made “a hundred phone calls in the weeks after that email, hoping for some conversation partner who might help us make a way through,” but nobody in conference leadership would step up.

To date, between 10–20 percent of the approximately 30,000 Methodist congregations in the US have disaffiliated. But there are hundreds more, like Mosaic, whose members want to leave but can’t.

The decision to pause the process for churches in the North Georgia Annual Conference didn’t just delay …

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The move to disfellowship churches with female pastors in top positions has spurred a larger debate.

Nobody expected Rick Warren’s appeal to be successful—not even Rick Warren. But he still stood up in front of 13,000 Southern Baptists gathered in New Orleans to make his case.

“No one is asking any Southern Baptist to change their theology! I’m not asking you to agree with my church,” he insisted, reading from a printout at a microphone on the floor of the convention hall during a three-minute speech. “I am asking you to act like a Southern Baptist, who have historically agreed to disagree on dozens of doctrines, in order to act on a common mission.”

For messengers at the SBC annual meeting, employing women pastors was not an agree-to-disagree issue. A vast majority—88 percent—voted to uphold the decision made back in February to disfellowship Saddleback.

The vote concludes two years of scrutiny and criticism toward the California megachurch for ordaining female pastors from its stage, welcoming a female teaching pastor to preach on Sundays, and naming a female campus pastor. This was the only chance to appeal.

After the vote, Warren said he wasn’t counting the appeal to succeed. Instead, “I wanted to push the conversation that’s been stagnant for years.”

Warren, who founded Saddleback and led the church for 43 years until his retirement last September, did not leave quietly. In the weeks before the meeting, the fourth-generation pastor launched a campaign in his church’s defense, with dozens of tweets, a website, three videos, an open letter, and a four-page messenger’s guide arguing that removing Saddleback violates the fellowship’s belief in church autonomy.

“I wanted to speak up for millions of Southern Baptist women … …

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In the farming community of Dirt Town Valley, family friends grapple with a difficult truth: One ancestor was enslaved by another.

Friends and neighbors Stacie Marshall and Melvin and Betty Mosley chat over coffee in Marshall’s farmhouse kitchen in Dirt Town Valley, Georgia. Windows frame cattle pastures in every direction as they catch up on family weddings and local farming news. A mass of cheerful daffodils rests on the table between them.

On the surface, this encounter seems like any other between close friends. But a striking history sets their relationship apart—Betty Mosley’s great-great-grandmother was enslaved by Marshall’s great-great-great-grandparents in this community 150 years ago.

Marshall, 43, a mother of three and former campus minister, has been friends with the Mosleys for decades in this largely segregated corner of Northwest Georgia. Her father grew up as best friends with Melvin Mosley, and Melvin was her assistant high school principal.

Stacie Marshall and the Mosleys did not know their shared painful past until it was uncovered in 2021 through a Berry College documentary called Her Name Was Hester. The filming began in 2015 and followed Marshall’s discovery of her family’s history and her attempts to reconcile with the descendants of those they enslaved as she learns to run her family’s 300-acre cattle farm.

In 2017, Marshall was clearing out the family farmhouse when she discovered an 1860 county slave schedule in a boot box. The document, which listed enslaved people as part of the federal census, confirmed what her grandfather had told her years before—that her great-great-great-grandfather had purchased seven people, including a wet nurse named Hester.

“My grandparents are dead, and now all of this belongs to me,” Marshall remembers thinking. She described the strange …

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A former dean alleges over $1 million in staff kickbacks and payouts as his case against the university goes to court.

Four months after Liberty University filed a motion to dismiss a whistleblower’s lawsuit, the former dean suing the school amended his complaint with more detail about the alleged fraud he reported to authorities. He alleges that the school offered payouts to third parties and concealed the use of university funding for business expenses.

According to the suit, John Markley made “repeated good faith reports of disturbing violations” of state and federal law at Liberty, only to be terminated from his role as administrative dean for academic operations in June 2022.

“Dr. Markley’s position provided an eye-opening perspective on the inner workings of a multi-billion-dollar enterprise that operated to maximize profits without ethics and at the expense of truth and those willing to fight for it, and to the detriment of the students, and professors,” the lawsuit says.

The university maintains that Markley was let go as part of a reorganization and that his allegations are without merit.

Markley’s original suit lists 15 “improper activities” he said he raised concerns about, including potentially fraudulent management of Liberty charitable organizations and corporate subsidies, the intentional misrepresentation of acceptance rates and enrollment numbers for financial gain, and a compensation scheme for LU business executives.

In a public statement obtained by CT, Strelka Employment Law—which represents Markley—said Liberty filed a demurrer to dismiss the case, arguing that Markley’s allegations “were not sufficiently specific.” The Lynchburg Circuit Court filed an order for Markley to amend his complaint.

The update, filed last Thursday, includes specific …

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Top issues at the annual meeting in New Orleans include Saddleback, female pastors, abuse reform, and entity finances.

Long before the 10,000-plus messengers show up in a massive conference hall each June, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has already begun debating the issues at stake at its annual meeting.

Southern Baptists have come to expect the online back-and-forth in the weeks leading up to the gathering, with pastors and leaders taking sides, strategizing, and detailing arguments around the issues before the convention.

This year, as the denomination readies to meet in New Orleans June 11–14, the biggest disagreements aren’t over what they believe but what the SBC should do to uphold those convictions across 47,000 autonomous churches.

“There are serious disagreements, and we’re dealing with some very sophisticated and complex things in many ways … but the heart is really right,” said Jed Coppenger, a Tennessee pastor and the cofounder of a group called Baptist 21, on a recent podcast. “We got Bible-believing complementarian people who are disagreeing about bylaws and stuff like that, so it’s a tension, but don’t let it turn you off. The mission’s too important.”

The SBC will vote on whether to overturn a decision to disfellowship Saddleback Church (and one other congregation) for involving women as pastors and, in turn, will consider proposals around specifying appointing female pastors as grounds for removal from the convention.

Messengers will hear updates on the ongoing response to a 2022 investigation into the SBC’s handling of abuse, including the upcoming launch of a website database of abusive pastors. They’ll consider the financial state of the denomination’s entities, such as the Executive Committee (which handles SBC business outside the …

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