Can the United States Be ‘Forgiven Our Debts’?

Even if the debt ceiling resolves, we should consider future generations.

When my husband and I wanted to buy our first house in 2012, we ran into a problem: Neither of us had a credit history. We both came from families with a typical evangelical wariness of debt, and so we’d gotten all the way through college and marriage without a single loan payment between us. We’d earned scholarships and gone to cheaper schools, hosted a cookout for our wedding reception, and squirreled away cash to buy used cars.

“The borrower is slave to the lender” (Prov. 22:7), my mother had often warned. But declining to take on debt also made sense to me at a personal level. I have all the skepticism of complex financial systems you’d expect in someone who finished college during the Great Recession. I dislike the feeling of obligation and limitation debt can entail (Prov. 22:26–27). With a few exceptions like mortgages and some business loans, I associated accumulation of debt with poor stewardship and lack of self-discipline. Having no debt felt right and responsible.

Like many evangelicals, that attitude easily mapped onto my politics. The US national debt was around $15 trillion in 2012, one year after the debt ceiling drama of 2011. If you’d asked me then, I’d have described that debt just as ethicist David P. Gushee did for CT in 2014. It’s “immoral and unwise,” he argued, even citing my mom’s favorite debt proverb:

Certainly, the Bible regularly calls for generous lending and debt forgiveness. But when it speaks of borrowing, the Bible is negative, and not just when addressing individuals. Borrowing is emblematic of national weakness that invites subservience to creditors (Deut. 15:6; 28:12). Borrowing for short-term needs risks long-term decline …

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Died: Rachel Kerr James, Missionary Nurse to War-Torn Vietnam

One of the first Southern Baptists into Indochina, she started medical clinics while raising four children and helping her husband plant churches.

Rachel Kerr James was the first medical professional to arrive on the scene of the US embassy bombing in Saigon in March 1965. She saw the smoke, mangled metal, and scores of people wounded by the blast that ripped a hole in the side of the five-story concrete building. She knew immediately what she had to do.

“I am going to stay here as long as necessary,” she said to her husband, Sam. “It could be a long time.”

James spent three days tending to the wounded at the embassy—and 13 years caring for the people of Vietnam during the war. A Southern Baptist missionary nurse, she volunteered with the Red Cross, set up medical clinics in the villages around Saigon, and launched a mobile clinic, all while raising four children and helping her husband plant churches and start a seminary.

James died in Virginia in April. She was 88.

“I felt God called me to be a foreign missionary,” James said. “My whole life has been centered around this call.”

James was born October 17, 1934, in Durham, North Carolina. Her father, Theodore Kerr, worked at a local hospital. Her mother, Ethel Peed Kerr, was a homemaker who had once dreamed of being a missionary and passed her passion for mission work on to her daughter.

James accepted Jesus as her personal savior at 14. Shortly afterward, she started to feel a call to nursing and missions that was, as she later described it, “increasingly definite.” As she started to date, however, that call was challenged. Few if any of the young men she knew were committed to missions. Fewer still liked the idea of getting married to a woman who wanted to be a missionary.

One day, praying in church before dawn, she was convicted that following Christ had …

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When Politics Saved 25 Million Lives

Twenty years ago, Republicans, Democrats, evangelicals, gay activists, and African leaders joined forces to combat AIDS. Will their legacy survive today’s partisanship?

In Malawi, medical records look a bit like passports: little blue books emblazoned with scribbles and ink stamps. When Agnes Moses was starting out as a doctor at a Christian hospital there more than 20 years ago, one stamp would bring her spirits low.

In those days, no treatment was available for patients diagnosed with HIV. So doctors would write an order in patients’ books for spiritual counseling. After a visit, the counselor would stamp the page by the doctor’s notes.

“To me that was a death sentence, every time I saw the stamp,” Moses said. At the time, about a third of the patients in her ward had HIV. She lost medical colleagues and members of her church to the virus, too. In southern Africa especially, hospitals were overwhelmed with dying patients.

A United Nations report in 2000 was grim, predicting that as many as half of teenagers in southern Africa would die early due to AIDS. In 1998, 30 percent of pregnant women in Blantyre, Malawi, were testing positive for HIV. Life expectancy in Malawi that year was 43 years. In sub-Saharan Africa, the epidemic was hitting women much harder than men.

In Botswana and South Africa, life expectancy dove by about a decade as HIV took over in the 1990s. “We are threatened with extinction,” Botswana president Festus Mogae said in 2002, when 39 percent of adults in his country were infected with HIV.

There was a way to make HIV a survivable condition: Effective antiretroviral therapy (ART) had been developed in 1996, but few had access to it.

In 2003, president George W. Bush convinced Congress to pass the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR. It was an unprecedented global health program, appropriating about $5 billion a …

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UK Coronation Remains Religious, Even if the Country Isn’t

With King Charles’s ceremony, Christians debate the theology of the monarchy and celebrate a unique opportunity for public witness.

Last year, a Washington Post journalist interviewed Ian Bradley, a professor of cultural and spiritual history here in the United Kingdom, about the accession of King Charles III to the throne. The reporter remarked, “For a country which is so secular and where so few go to church, you sure mention God a lot.”

It’s a fair comment. As monarch, King Charles is not only the head of state for the UK but also the Defender of the Faith (a title given to King Henry VIII by the pope in 1521 before the king’s famous break with the Roman Catholic Church) and Supreme Governor of the Church of England.

When he is crowned this week in Westminster Abbey, he will be anointed with holy oil by the Archbishop of Canterbury while the choir sings “Zadok the Priest,” an anthem used in every coronation since 973 that draws on the anointing of Solomon by the priest Zadok in 1 Kings.

“It is the coronation more than any other event that underlines the sacred nature of the United Kingdom monarchy,” writes Bradley in his book God Save the King: The Sacred Nature of Monarchy. “At their coronations kings and queens are not simply crowned and enthroned but consecrated, set apart and anointed, dedicated to God and invested with sacerdotal garb and symbolic regalia. Here, if anywhere, we find the divinity which hedges the throne.”

All of this will take place in a country in which, as a recent census revealed, fewer than half the population describe themselves as Christian. The Church of England’s own statistics suggest that just 1.5 percent of the population attend a weekly service, while a 2018 British Social Attitudes survey found that 43 percent of us “never or practically never” …

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Our Aging Politicians Are a Warning to the Church

Trusting the next generation to take our places is an act of faith.

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

Sitting in the coffee shop, I overheard two women at the next table talking politics. I expected to hear the typical red versus blue partisan talking points, but I was wrong. They were talking about age.

“I don’t ask for much,” said one woman with a sigh. “I just hope whoever’s hand is on the Bible at the end of it all isn’t wearing a MedicAlert bracelet.”

I don’t know whether these women were Democrats, Republicans, or Independents. They didn’t give away who would get their votes. They were just lamenting the fact that the frontrunners of both major parties are hovering somewhere around 80 years old.

By the end of the next presidential term in 2028, current president Joe Biden, who announced his reelection campaign this week, would be 86, and Donald Trump would be 82. The woman sighed again, asking, “Don’t we have anybody younger than these two?”
Her question applies to far more than a presidential campaign. Democratic senators are concerned about the prolonged absence of 89-year-old Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), some of them speaking on background about what they perceive as her cognitive decline.
Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), a dean of the Senate who was reelected in 2022, is also 89. A few years ago, when I brought a group of Southern Baptist pastors to meet with some senators, Grassley kicked things off by complaining about how loud the drums were at his Baptist church back home.
Despite pollsshowing that most people agree with the two women in the coffee shop, next year’s campaign does seem—barring a health event—to be about choosing which octogenarian …

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After My Dad Died, God Didn’t Answer My Anguish

But he gave me something more enduring.

On Thanksgiving week the year I turned 11, my father had a heart attack and died suddenly in his sleep. My parents had divorced when I was two, and my dad lived by himself in an apartment in suburban Atlanta.

He was a man of exceptional kindness and gentleness, gifted in music and patient with the elderly. But when I visited him on the weekends, I got the impression things weren’t going well for him. He was overweight and sedentary, and his apartment was often full of empty pizza boxes and fast-food wrappers, disheveled clothes and dirty dishes. He had remarried after my parents split up, but that relationship had foundered as well, so he was alone when he died. In the parlance of our times, I would classify my dad’s passing as a “death of despair.”

I was shooting hoops at my grandmother’s house when my mom arrived and tearfully broke the news to me. As a preteen, the unfamiliar, highly physical sensation of grief was terrifying to me. It was not unlike seasickness, except that I could not find the horizon. I was overcome by a brutal combination of anxiety, nausea, and vertigo, a visceral experience that over the years I’ve come to refer to as “the pit.”

A brief encounter with this toxic brew of emotions made me dead certain I needed to move on from the pain as quickly as possible. No one in my family told me I needed to, and in fact, to her great credit, my mom did everything in her power to keep me connected with my dad’s family and his memory until I left home.

But I silently intuited the existential danger posed to me by my father’s death. If I become vulnerable to the suffering, I thought, I will enter an unremitting darkness and chaos with no companions or guides …

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Sammi Cheng: ‘Not Having a Smooth Path Allowed Me to Be Gentler and More Humble.’

The Hong Kong Christian actress and singer experienced God’s grace in depression and marital crisis and grew in her acting career

“I give today’s glory and praise to God. I want to thank God for not giving me a smooth path, because only without a smooth path have I better learned to be humble and gentle.”

On April 16, 2023, Sammi Cheng won the Best Actress and Best Original Film Song Awards for her part in the movie Lost Love at the 41st Hong Kong Film Awards, and she thanked God in her acceptance speech. Over the past 20 years, Cheng has been nominated six times for Best Actress without winning. She looked excited and moved as she stepped up to the stage to accept the award.

Though Cheng is not the only Christian among the many Hong Kong entertainers, she is indeed a special one. At a time when many Christian entertainers have left the public view for various reasons or even abandoned their faith, she never seemed far from us. Not only has she been present for the growth of our generation of Hong Kongers, but she has also let us witness her own transformation.

Those days of smooth paths

Chotto matte yo…” (Do not pour out your love at once). “Chotto” (“Wait”) is a Cantonese pop song cover of a Japanese song. (“Chotto matte means “wait a minute” in Japanese.) Cheng performed the song with cool dance moves and in cutting-edge fashion in the 1990s, beginning her path to Cantopop Queen. She won third place in a contest as an up-and-coming singer and, within a few years of starting her career, captivated the attention of music fans with this particular song, winning over many Hong Kong youth in the day.

Later on, Cheng switched label companies and came out with many familiar hits, such as “Miss You,” “Can’t Let You Go,” “Understanding,” and …

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Steven Curtis Chapman Ranked Alongside George Strait and Madonna

And other news briefs from Christians around the world.

Contemporary Christian music star Steven Curtis Chapman has joined the ranks of George Strait and Madonna as one of the few musicians who have topped radio charts 50 times. Chapman’s song “Don’t Lose Heart,” written about the struggle to hang on to faith in a time of crisis, was the most-played song on adult contemporary formats of American Christian radio in early March. His first No. 1 song was “His Eyes” in 1988. Chapman has sold 11 million albums.

United States: Mennonites repent of anti-music ‘sins of the fathers’

The children of a Mennonite revivalist apologized for a 1927 ban on musical instruments that forced a neighbor family to get rid of two pianos, destroy an organ, and hide a violin. At the time, the Virginia Mennonite Conference mandated a cappella singing in worship services, since there is no record of musical instruments in New Testament churches. Bishop George R. Brunk and his son revivalist George R. Brunk II also believed using instruments outside of church was a slippery slope to improper worship. The Brunks successfully pushed the conference to enact additional prohibitions. It had an immediate effect on their neighbors, Chester and Myra Lehman, who were forced to choose between their church and their music. Five Brunk siblings apologized 93 years later. They noted in the public letter, “It is often later generations upon whom the responsibility falls to apologize for ‘the sins of the fathers.’”

Jamaica: First woman leads island’s Christians

Elaine McCarthy, elder of the Pentecostal Gospel Temple Family of Churches and chair of the Jamaica Pentecostal Union, is the first woman named to lead the Jamaica Umbrella Groups of Churches. …

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One in Four Pastors Plan to Retire Before 2030

Yet churches struggle to prepare those coming next.

Olive Baptist Church in Pensacola, Florida, has gotten serious about raising up a new generation of pastors. Normally, the congregation produces one or two young people every couple of years who feel a call. Right now, however, 12 young men are preparing to enter pastoral ministry.

Ted Traylor, who has led the church for 33 years, meets with them weekly.

“You’ve got to get old and see that you’ve got to have someone else coming,” Traylor said with a laugh. “I really do laugh at that, but it was a reality in my life. I’m now 69 years old, and I take a greater responsibility for the coming generation.”

Research released this month from the Barna Group suggests more baby boomer pastors need to follow suit. America’s churches are struggling to find a new generation of pastors as the current generation prepares to step aside, according to the research.

The graying of America’s pastors isn’t a new phenomenon, but it has become more pronounced. In 2022, just 16 percent of Protestant senior pastors were 40 years old or younger. The average age of a pastor is 52. Thirty years ago, 33 percent of US pastors were under 40, and the median age was 44.

“As a generation of clergy ages and prepares to step down, it is not clear that churches are prepared for the transition,” Barna says. “If this trend goes unaddressed, the Church in the US will face a real succession crisis.”

Many pastors worry their successors won’t be ready by the time they retire. Seventy-five percent agree with the statement “It is becoming harder to find mature young Christians who want to become pastors.” That’s up from 69 percent in 2015. Just …

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Jesus Is Calling … on Netflix’s ‘Beef’

The tearful worship prompted good and bad memories from growing up in Korean American Christianity—and a needed discussion on church hurt.

Are you hurting and broken within? Overwhelmed by the weight of your sin? Jesus is calling…”

I’ve sung these lyrics from “O Come to the Altar” countless times. I’ve heard the song at church, at conferences, in my car … but never did I expect to hear it on a hit Netflix show.

It wasn’t just the song. The entire church scene from Beef felt pulled from my life. As the worship band sang, the camera panned through the room to reveal congregants with their eyes closed and hands raised, a sea of black hair swaying in a rhythm that I knew all too well.

The sanctuary was well worn and outdated, the kind of space that could easily be converted into a multipurpose room. Mismatched chairs in rows served as pews, and the tilted commercial vertical blinds didn’t really block out the light. The doughnuts after the service were all too familiar. The only way it could’ve been better is if they had eaten rice, kimchi, and bean sprout or radish soup.

In the Netflix dark comedy Beef—currently the most popular show on the platform—actor Steven Yeun costars as Danny Cho, a struggling contractor who gets involved in a road rage incident. He’s had a hard life, and in a rock-bottom moment, he walks into a church sanctuary. Danny feels out of place in a room that aesthetically is anything but conducive to worship, yet he gets immersed in the communal praise around him. He cries, and a pastor comes to pray over him.

The worship hit especially close to home for me; not only did it remind me of nearly every Korean American immigrant church I attended growing up, but I also used to serve at the Los Angeles church whose band appears in the show. Hearing lyrics about God’s …

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