Author: Chris Boyd

As a militant Muslim, I never expected to have any dealings with Christians, much less to befriend them.

I was born and raised in Saudi Arabia as part of a devout Muslim family. Growing up, I considered myself a devoted follower of Islam, one who applied its teachings to every aspect of his life. I believed that Islam was the only true religion and that those who didn’t accept Allah as their God and Muhammad as his messenger were doomed to hell.

I had nothing but contempt for Christianity. I believed that Muslims were superior to all others, that all non-Muslims were infidels, and that Jesus was a prophet sent by Allah, not the divine Son of God. As far as I was concerned, he had never been crucified, never died on a cross, and never been resurrected. I believed he had ascended into heaven, but only to be saved from his persecutors before coming back at the end of times to restore Islam as the true religion of Allah. All in all, I grew up harboring intense hatred for Christians, Jews, and all who refused Islam.

By age 12, I had memorized half of the Qur’an, and my goal was to memorize all of it—all 114 chapters, all 6,236 verses. At age 15, I was prepared to die on behalf of Allah, like so many young people who were journeying to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union alongside Osama bin Laden. (He was a hero to us at that time.)

Were it not for my mother, who pleaded with me to stay behind, I would have joined this “holy war.” I believed that the rewards awaiting Muslims who died in the name of Allah were greater than any other a Muslim could receive. I was certain that by sacrificing my life in this manner, I would make it to paradise with all my sins forgiven.

Interacting with Christians

The more I grew up, however, the more notes of doubt began to creep in. As I gained a greater familiarity with …

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Churches also find that having them in community with older members and answering their “whys” help them stay in the church.

Since Heart of God Church in Singapore started more than 20 years ago, it’s succeeded in attracting a hard-to-capture demographic: The average age of its congregants has remained steady at 22 years old.

Today, about 5,000 people attend Heart of God Church each Sunday. Cecilia Chan, the church’s co-founding senior pastor affectionately known as Pastor Lia, noted their strategy: “Youths need to be invited, included, involved, before they can be influenced and impacted.”

That means teens as young as 12 are given responsibilities like designing slides, filming church livestreams, running the soundboard, or even helping coordinate Sunday services. At the same time, they are mentored by others a few life stages ahead of them.

Churches in Singapore face similar struggles as their counterparts around the world in keeping Gen Z engaged, as the digital natives are bombarded with distractions and noise from the rest of the world. Many young people’s views on issues like sexuality or what comprises a family unit are no longer defined by Asian societal norms. A 2020 census found that a growing number of young people (ages 15-24) say they have no religious affiliations: The number rose from 21 percent in 2010 to 24 percent in 2020.

Singaporean students, who are known for their chart-topping test scores, also experience high levels of anxiety and stress about doing well academically. With pressure from their parents as well as their peers, students spend afterschool hours in tutoring and enrichment classes. In their remaining free time, many spend it on their phones. Activities that provide opportunities to interact face-to-face and don’t focus on schoolwork are a breath of fresh air.

Christianity Today spoke …

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While a former leader hopes for change, women who sought refuge in biblical counseling at John MacArthur’s church say they feared discipline for seeking safety from their abusive marriages.

Last year, Hohn Cho concluded Grace Community Church had made a mistake.

The elders had publicly disciplined a woman for refusing to take back her husband. As it turned out, the woman’s fears proved true, and her husband went to prison for child molestation and abuse. The church never retracted its discipline or apologized in the 20 years since.

As a lawyer and one of four officers on the elder board at Grace Community Church (GCC), Cho was asked to study the case. He tried to convince the church’s leaders to reconsider and at least privately make it right. He said pastor John MacArthur told him to “forget it.” When Cho continued to call the elders to “do justice” on the woman’s behalf, he said he was asked to walk back his conclusions or resign.

It’s been 10 months since Cho left Grace Community Church, and he has not been able to forget the woman, Eileen Gray, whose experience was described in detail last March in Julie Roys’s news outlet, The Roys Report.

Though Cho stepped down quietly, he continued to hear from other women from his former church. They had also been doubted, dismissed, and implicitly or explicitly threatened with discipline while seeking refuge from their abusive marriages. Even at his new congregation, Cho began to meet visitors with connections to Gray’s case, which he saw as a sign of God’s providence.

No, he couldn’t “forget it.”

The more he learned, the more people he talked with, the more the injustice weighed on his conscience and the more concerned he grew about the church’s biblical counseling around abuse.

As Cho wrote in a 20-page memo to top leaders at Grace Community Church last March, “I genuinely believe …

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Using sports to market Christ has a long history, but Sunday’s iteration might skip the muscles for heart.

This year during the Super Bowl, all eyes will be on Jesus—at least during the two ads sponsored by the He Gets Us campaign.

Aiming to make Jesus more relatable through a massive public relations campaign, He Gets Us has already received plenty of attention and criticism. What fascinates me, as a historian of American sports and Christianity, is its continuity with the past. By choosing the Super Bowl as the moment for its “largest splash” to date, the He Gets Us campaign is standing in line with Christian marketing efforts that date back a century, while also attempting to chart something new.

One hundred years ago, American Christian leaders worried about polarization and irrelevance in a rapidly changing culture. Division threatened to split churches, with modernists and fundamentalists battling for control of denominations. A surging white Christian nationalism, embodied in the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan, wedded a white supremacist understanding of American identity with Christian language and symbols. Meanwhile, many young Americans opted out of formal religion altogether, showing more interest in baseball games and prizefight boxing than church.

Into this moment of crisis stepped a leader in the advertising industry named Bruce Barton.

The son of a preacher, Barton looked at the Christian anxieties of his age through the eyes of his marketing expertise and saw a public relations problem. The image of Jesus had gotten tied up in narrow controversies and outdated modes of understanding. Americans, particularly men, did not find him compelling; Christ did not speak to their needs.

Barton’s solution? Write a book that could demonstrate the human Jesus’ relevance to a changing culture. Focus …

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With one pastor dead, another saved, and churches of all denominations destroyed, local believers race to the frontlines of emergency response.

Local Christians were among the first responders to the massive earthquake in Turkey and Syria that left more than 5,000 people dead and more than 20,000 injured. They just don’t know how to make sense of it.

“God have mercy on us, Christ have mercy,” said Gokhan Talas, founder of the evangelical Miras Publishing Ministry in Istanbul. “This is our only spiritual reflection right now.”

His first instinct was to go. But as reports came in of deep snowfall and damaged roads, he shifted gears. His wife stayed up all night making phone calls to believers in Malatya, trying to coordinate aid. And with members of his church and Protestant congregations throughout Turkey, they bought blankets, medicines, baby formula, and diapers to send onward to the afflicted areas.

“From this side of eternity, nothing is clear,” Talas said. “But our sweet Lord is suffering with us.”

He warned of scams preying on the outpouring of generosity from around the world, even among the small Turkish evangelical community of roughly 10,000 believers.

Their own supplies are being donated through İlk Umut Derneği—in English, First Hope Association (FHA), a Turkish Protestant NGO working closely with the local Red Crescent and AFAD, Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority.

Officials said more than 5,000 buildings have been destroyed by the 7.8 magnitude quake. More than 13,000 search and rescue personnel have been deployed, supplying 41,000 tents, 100,000 beds, and 300,000 blankets. Almost 8,000 people have been rescued so far.

This includes pastor Mehmet and his wife Deniz in Malatya, longtime friends of Talas, who spent half the day freezing under the rubble until neighbors succeeded …

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You won’t remember most of it, but that was never the point.

About five years ago I was having coffee with a local pastor, and we were discussing literature and my passion for reading. I was telling him about how vital I believe reading to be for us as ministers.

After hearing me out, my pastor friend sighed and said, “You know, I envy your ability to read like that. I really do. For me, the main reason I don’t read is because, whenever I do read, I don’t remember any of it.”

“You mean fiction or nonfiction?” I asked him.

“I mean all of it,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s a story or a book of statistics. I spend all that time reading and then, three days later, I don’t remember a bit of it.” He paused and then added, “So, truth be told, it just seems like a bad use of time to me.”

I sat forward and said, “But that’s the point I’m trying to make. Remembering what we’ve read is not the most important thing about reading; instead, just doing the reading is what matters. Taking the time is the whole point!”

Then I added, “I completely share your frustration—I’m only saying that uploading information to our brains is not the main reason for reading.”

I then pulled out a book from my briefcase, one I had stayed up into the wee hours of the morning grappling with and marking up. “You see this?” I asked him, putting Mircea Eliade’s classic The Sacred and the Profane on the table between us. “I have now dedicated at least 15 hours to this book … and I can barely tell you any of what I have read. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are certain ideas that stay with me. But the vast majority …

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The Scriptures denounce officials who abuse their authority to harm rather than protect the people they serve.

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

The nation stands shocked, once again, by a video of horrific violence by police officers against a young Black man beaten to death—this time Tyre Nichols of Memphis.

We instinctively flinch from watching this video because most people with a functioning conscience intuitively know it to be evil. At this moment, Christians should acknowledge not only that the Bible condemns this sort of police behavior but also why.

Whenever a violent revelation like this occurs, some are immediately defensive, saying, “Not all police officers are like this; most are good.” And, of course, that is true; but that truth makes such actions even worse.

That’s why, among those I know, police officers are some of the angriest of everybody at this kind of behavior. They see it in the same way I might view preachers using the Bible to “justify” their financial grifting or sexual predation. I realize what they’re doing and, even further, how awful it is. Good police officers see such horrors the same way.

This killing would be a grave moral evil no matter what group of people carried it out. Tyre Nichols was a human being made in the image of God, and to take his life not only robs his family of their loved one but also assaults his Creator. But the fact that this violence was carried out by those entrusted with maintaining justice perverts the situation even more.

Police brutality is wrong not because the idea of policing is wrong. However one interprets Romans 13, we can all agree the apostle Paul acknowledged the legitimate authority of those charged with keeping order and restraining injustice. Paul recognized this in his own life. …

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Hobby Lobby’s David Green and other Christian funders back three-year effort to reintroduce people to Jesus.

The first time she saw an ad for “He Gets Us,” a national campaign devoted to redeeming the brand of Christianity’s savior, Jennifer Quattlebaum had one thought on her mind.

Show me the money.

A self-described “love more” Christian and ordinary mom who works in marketing, Quattlebaum loved the message of the ad, which promoted the idea that Jesus understands contemporary issues from a grassroots perspective. But she wondered who was paying for the ads and what their agenda was.

“I mean, Jesus gets us,” she said. “But what group is behind them?”

For the past 10 months, the “He Gets Us” ads have shown up on billboards, YouTube channels, and television screens—most recently during NFL playoff games—across the country, all spreading the message that Jesus understands the human condition.

The campaign is a project of the Servant Foundation, an Overland Park, Kansas, nonprofit that does business as The Signatry, but the donors backing the campaign have until recently remained anonymous—in early 2022, organizers only told Religion News Service that funding came from “like-minded families who desire to see the Jesus of the Bible represented in today’s culture with the same relevance and impact He had 2000 years ago.”

But in November, David Green, the billionaire co-founder of Hobby Lobby, told talk show host Glenn Beck that his family was helping fund the ads. Green, who was on the program to discuss his new book on leadership, told Beck that his family and other families would be helping fund an effort to spread the word about Jesus.

“You’re going to see it at the Super Bowl—‘He gets Us,’” said Green. …

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As blockade begets an emerging humanitarian crisis, Artsakh’s Armenians receive groundswell of support.

Armenian Christians have been calling for help. As their ethnic kin in the Caucasus enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh approach two full months under a near-complete blockade imposed by alleged eco-activists from Azerbaijan, the voices have amplified.

“Everyone knows this is the Aliyev regime,” stated Biayna Sukhudyan, a pediatric neurologist trapped inside the Delaware-sized mountainous region, which Armenians call Artsakh. “There is no time to wait and allow the next genocide, because this is genocide.”

The doctor referred to Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev, and several investigations have linked the protesters to his government. When the blockade began on December 12, official statements attributed the long-haul demonstration to illegal gold and copper mining on their still-occupied but internationally recognized sovereign territory.

In 2020, Azerbaijan launched a 44-day war to retake a region under three decades of de facto control by ethnic Armenians. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Artsakh declared itself an independent state, and with Armenian military assistance was able to hold Nagorno-Karabakh and additional Azeri territories—pending peace negotiations.

A vastly improved Azerbaijani force, aided by drone technology from Turkey, recaptured three-quarters of the land through bloody combat. Russia mediated a ceasefire, and its peacekeepers guard the Lachin corridor—the one road connecting over 100,000 beleaguered Artsakh residents with Armenia and delivering the 400 tons of daily food and medicine that supply their needs.

Since the end of the war, Sukhudyan has traveled every two months to Nagorno-Karabakh, which lacked specialist doctors. This time, amid acute shortages in …

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A new book records the reflections on church and state in China by the imprisoned pastor and other house church leaders.

When I first met Wang Yi, he ushered me into a conference room overlooking a landscape of old and slightly run-down office buildings in central Chengdu, western China’s most important metropolis. It was 2011, and his church was then called Early Rain Reformed Church, later taking the name Early Rain Covenant Church. Like many churches that weren’t registered with the government, it was housed in an office building. This one was fairly old, with one functioning elevator that groaned its way up to the 19th floor. I had taken one look and walked up.

I explained that I was working on a book about the revival of religion in China. I had been to many rural churches in traditional Christian heartlands of China, such as the province of Henan, but felt that big, urban churches like his were becoming more important. Would he let me sit in on his services and talk to congregants?

Pastor Wang immediately agreed on two conditions: First, no photography in the church; and, second, if I wanted to quote anyone, I was welcome to do so but needed their permission. His reasoning was simple: Early Rain had nothing to hide. It was a public institution. All were welcome, and no one should be restricted in what they wrote. So if I wanted to visit his church that was my right. And if I wanted to write something, that was also my right as a free person. His restrictions were simply means to respect the privacy of those who attended, and to keep the service dignified.

At that point I had worked in China off and on since the mid-1980s. I knew that for me to visit his church regularly carried inherent risks. I asked him about the building security guards downstairs and whether they would report to the authorities that a foreigner was regularly …

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