Author: Chris Boyd

In the village of Kemadang, long dry spells threatened local farmers’ livelihoods until a church-led granary brought hope.

Standing in her rice field in the rural village of Kemadang along the southern coast of Java, 53-year-old Marni Mariani pointed to the dry soil at her feet. “This is the land that we will harvest in three weeks,” she said. Yet due to the lack of rain this season, two of her four rice fields have already failed.

She noted that she doesn’t sell the rice harvest from her plot, which measures 32 by 49 feet, but rather that the food is for her family to eat. “But sometimes if there is a famine and the harvest is small, we are forced to buy [rice] from outsiders,” she said. “That’s what burdens us here.”

Yet since 2020, Marni hasn’t needed to worry about buying rice at a high price. Her 70-year-old neighbor, Mbah Gepeng Harjo, also no longer struggles to buy the expensive seeds and fertilizer he needs to cultivate the rice fields that he tends to. (Mbah means “old man.”)

That’s because of an innovative church-run granary program created by local pastor Kristiono Riyadi of Kemadang Javanese Christian Church that seeks to maintain community food reserves, especially during times of drought. It provides a grain savings and loan program and a produce buyback program. It also sells seeds at an affordable price.

The granaries are a local solution to tackling food insecurity in Indonesia, a widespread problem facing nearly 1 out of every 10 Indonesians and that is only increasing as the climate becomes more unpredictable. The poverty rate in the regency of Gunungkidul, where Kemadeng is located, is about 16 percent, with about 6,000 families living in extreme poverty.

The church also sees their work as an outreach to share the love of God to the community by helping with …

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Rather than follow the equal protections secured in Supreme Court decisions, the Biden administration opted for a complicated and soul-killing alternative.

Nine federal departments have issued new regulations governing social service grants for a range of programs including drug rehabilitation; assisting penitentiary inmates reentering their communities; sheltering the homeless; aiding needy families with dependent children; settling refugees; and providing overseas lifesaving aid in response to natural disasters, war, famine, and public health crises.

The regulations take effect on April 4, 2024, governing tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer funds. And they represent a threat to the many Christian ministries that have long provided these social services with the help of federal grants while maintaining their religious identity and mission.

Rather than follow the rule of equal treatment secured in recent Supreme Court decisions, the Biden administration opted for outdated and unwieldy alternatives that will entangle the government in the work of religious nonprofits offering social services.

Since the 1996 welfare reform enacted in the Clinton administration, faith-based organizations have been invited to compete on an equal basis for social service grants under the “Charitable Choice” act sponsored by former senator John Ashcroft.

At the time, it seemed foolish for federal grants to exclude community-serving organizations that were already embedded in depressed neighborhoods via churches and storefront outlets, and whose mercy workers were known to the poor and trusted by those they were serving. These ministries of hope had a holistic approach that proved especially effective for addressing certain afflictions.

Early in 2001, then-president George W. Bush created the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives to nurture the idea. The hope was that …

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A seminary professor from Sierra Leone shares how African arrivals are changing the church in Belgium and the rest of the continent.

Joseph Bosco Bangura is out to reshape how we think about migrant churches.

For more than 25 years, he has been exploring how new Christian movements open up opportunities to engage with and transform societies. Bangura’s research on the growing Pentecostal movement in his home country of Sierra Leone revealed both its popular appeal and the creative ways charismatic and Pentecostal churches have accommodated indigenous African religious traditions.

Now he’s turning his focus to the impact of migrant churches in Europe. Bangura, who teaches missiology at the Evangelical Theological Faculty (ETF) in Belgium and Protestant Theological University (PThU) in the Netherlands and also pastors a migrant church, spoke with CT about the opportunities and challenges facing migrant congregations in secularized European societies.

What motivated you to study migrant churches in Europe?

There is always a connection between people’s mobility and the spread of their faith. Any time the Jews migrated—in fact, it is from them that we have the term diaspora—something happened to their faith. The same was true in the early church. They didn’t go immediately; persecution brought about their dispersal. Migration inevitably coincides with the spread of the gospel. It widens the possibility of bringing new aspects of the faith to places where they were not initially known.

In Western Europe today, there is a greater awareness among indigenous [i.e., white European] churches of the missionary implications of migrant communities. What can they do for the configuration of the church in a secular Europe? They might be the lifeline for the survival of the faith in a secularized world.

Mission organizations are taking the …

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Christian journalism has become even more important after the government passed a tough new national security law.

Editor’s Note: Hong Kong officials unanimously passed its own version of a national security law Tuesday that could put people found guilty of political crimes, such as treason or external interference, in prison for life.

Article 23 of the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, mandates the enactment of a national security law, which locals have protested in the past over fears that it could curtail freedoms. Now with a pro-Beijing parliament, the bill was passed at record speed.

John Lee, the city’s top leader, said the new law was needed to close gaps in the existing national security law that Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in 2020. He hailed its passage as “a historic moment Hong Kong people have been waiting for over 26 years.”

A coalition of 77 international parliamentarians and public figures, including Hong Kong’s last British Gov. Chris Patten and US Sen. Marco Rubio, have issued a statement condemning the Article 23 legislation, calling it a “flagrant breach” of the Basic Law, the Sino-British Joint Declaration, and international human rights law.

While many Hong Kongers have left the city, others, like Lo Man Wai, editor in chief of the Christian Times newspaper, have decided to stay. He writes here about his work in Hong Kong as the city undergoes unprecedented changes.

In the past four years since the implementation of the first national security law, Hong Kong has experienced a seismic shift. Many citizens who have been devoted to this city for decades, including prominent pro-democracy activists, journalists, opinion leaders, social workers, and politicians, have disappeared from the public sphere. Some have been detained; others are in exile. Still others remain …

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Knott wrote rock operas, sang with honesty and conviction, called out hypocrites, and bucked the norms of the Christian music industry.

Michael Knott, whose music and influence helped cultivate the Christian alternative music scene of the 1990s and 2000s, died Tuesday at the age of 61. He is survived by his daughter, Stormie Fraser.

Knott was the founder of the label Blonde Vinyl and later collaborated with Brandon Ebel to launch the highly influential Tooth & Nail Records, known for bands like Underoath and MxPx.

His raw, innovative, and controversial music pushed against the norms of the industry and laid the groundwork for contemporary communities around Christian alt music.

“Knott helped prove that Christian music could be something legitimate, rather than running two to three years behind mainstream trends,” said Matt Crosslin, who runs the site Knottheads and has become an unofficial archivist of Knott’s work.

Even with his reputation for bucking standards, Knott’s sense of mission was earnest and singular.

“He wanted people to come to Jesus and be saved,” said Nathan Myrick, assistant professor of church music at Mercer University. “He seemed to offer a way of holding faith and raw authenticity in tension.”

Knott was born in Aurora, Illinois, and grew up with six sisters in what he described as a modern “von Trapp family.” They were constantly singing and immersed in music through their father, a folk singer, and their mother, a church organist.

When Knott was in second grade, his family moved to Southern California, where he began to take piano and guitar lessons at the YMCA. He started writing songs in his preteen years and would bury them in a folder in his backyard, convinced that nothing would ever come of his private creative life.

Despite his early shyness about his songwriting, Knott …

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I needed female heroes, and I found them in ancient churches.

I grew up believing women could do it all. In rural South Dakota, I was surrounded by farm women, who are some of the toughest, most resilient people I have ever met. My mom could bake delicious chicken and also slaughter them.

South Dakota also frequently leads the nation in the percentage of women and mothers who work outside the home. So as a young girl, I never doubted that women could do whatever they wanted, that they were as equally capable as men. I could become president. I could be an astronaut. I could do whatever I set my mind on doing.

But as I prepared to do so, I discovered a gap between what I had always been told and what I now saw—and that gap was distinctly female-shaped. Despite the many women visible in the workforce in South Dakota, women felt largely invisible when it came to the work of theology. My home church had never had a female preacher. During seminary, I had one female professor. In my doctoral studies, I had two, but none in my religion classes.

I was confident that Scripture supported women in teaching and leading the church: Women were the first to proclaim the gospel (Luke 24:5–12), and Paul names women like Junia and Phoebe, who acted as apostles and deacons (Rom. 16:1, 7). But compared to the pages and pages dedicated to Peter and Paul, Augustine and Aquinas, Calvin and Luther, women often felt like names merely mentioned in the margins.

I wanted more than names. I wanted to see women leading. I wanted to see women teaching. I wanted to see their faces and hear their stories. I wanted exemplars I could imitate: women who, with Paul, could say, “Imitate me, just as I imitate Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1, NLT).

I wanted heroes.

Eventually, on a trip to Italy, I found them. It …

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A new study finds white evangelicals are most eager to see their faith reflected more in the government, but very few say they support Christian nationalism.

In a country where 80 percent of adults believe religion’s influence is in decline, white evangelicals stand out as the group most likely to want to see their faith reflected in the US government.

According to a new survey from the Pew Research Center, most white evangelicals want a president who reflects their religious beliefs, believe the Bible should have some influence on US laws, and see the retreat of religion as a bad thing.

Yet they oppose adopting Christianity as an official religion and very few (8%) have a “favorable” view of Christian nationalism.

Overall, nearly half of adults see the decline of religious influence in the country as a bad thing. White evangelicals are the most likely to see the trend negatively, at 76 percent. The majority of other Christians across traditions agree.

Most Americans want to see someone in the White House who stands up for their religious beliefs. Though few see either candidate in the 2024 race as particularly religious, more than two-thirds of white evangelicals believe Donald Trump comes to their defense.

Despite the increasing buzz around Christian nationalism from candidates on the stump or on social media, Pew found that most Americans (54%)—and most Christians—have not heard of the term at all.

“Even those who think the United States should be a Christian nation and the Bible should have a great deal of influence on the law, most of them are reluctant to say that they have a favorable view of Christian nationalism. So there seems to be some negative stigma with the term,” Michael Rotolo, lead author of the report, said.

While a plurality of Americans (44%) believe the government should promote Christian moral values, …

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I understand frustration with media negativity. But bad news may be God’s invitation to work alongside him.

On a church mission trip in 2004, 65-year-old Ramon Billhimer looked out a bus window in Uganda and saw a little girl taking dirty, stagnant water from a muddy ditch. The water was for a garden, Ramon assumed, or maybe livestock. She snapped a picture and offhandedly commented to her translator that the children sure went a long way to get water for their animals.

“Oh, that’s not for animals, Ramon,” the translator replied. “That’s her family’s drinking water.”

Ramon had already noticed, while visiting rural churches, how sick many Ugandan children were. She’d assumed they all had malaria, but soon learned at least half were chronically ill with dysentery and other consequences of drinking dirty water. The sight out the bus window became a turning point in Ramon’s life—the little girl with her jug, a burning bush.

For the rest of her time in Uganda, Ramon cried herself to sleep. A few days after the bus conversation, while visiting a Ugandan hospital, she met a little girl hooked up to IVs and lying quietly in bed. Ramon tried to engage the child and told her she’d come back to visit. A few days later, she made good on her promise, but the girl was gone. She was dead from dysentery.

As Ramon has told the story over the years, she went out into the hallway of the hospital and screamed, “God! Why don’t you do something!”

And she heard a response: Why don’t you?

So she did. She started by explaining to her husband, Bob, why she felt compelled—in the stage of life American society says should be devoted to rest and relaxation—to provide clean water to people nearly 9,000 miles away from their home in Midland, …

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An experienced evangelical educator sees challenges ahead—but opportunities too.

Of the approximately 900 religiously affiliated colleges in the United States, over 200 maintain some sort of evangelical identity. In his memoir Academically Speaking: Lessons from a Life in Christian Higher Education, seasoned educator Rick Ostrander recounts his vocational journey while offering reflections on evangelical higher education. Nathan Finn, executive director of the Institute for Transformational Leadership at North Greenville University, spoke with Ostrander about the challenges and opportunities facing evangelical colleges.

You are still in the middle of your career in Christian higher education. Why write this memoir now?

I wanted to write about two topics. One is the world of Christian higher education, which I want both insiders and outsiders to better understand. The other is the importance of trusting God amid uncertainty. I have spent my entire adult life in Christian higher education, working in a variety of contexts. But there have also been some unexpected and even unwanted twists and turns. I’ve learned throughout that God is faithful and I can trust him.

Mark Noll published his seminal book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind 30 years ago. What, in your view, is the current state of the evangelical mind?

There were two fronts Noll and others wanted to address. One was advancing Christian voices within the academy. We have seen progress in the number of Christian academics, including tenured professors in non-Christian institutions.

I see less progress, though, on the second front: cultivating an evangelical mind in local churches. Evangelicalism is marked by an inherent populism, which can work against scholarly voices. And political polarization seems to have magnified these anti-intellectual …

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The latest influencer movement wants to “bring back” a narrow vision of biblical womanhood with pretty pictures, long dresses, and homemade bread.

Let’s bring back beauty,” begins the caption of a viral reel on Instagram.

The clip features Christian influencer Katie Calabrese in an airy long dress followed by a montage of images: flowers on an open Bible, a clothesline full of linen neutrals, a clean stairwell with wooden floors and shiplap walls, a faceless woman standing in front of a bowl of dough while holding a baby.

The caption lists other things she wants to bring back: “ladies who know how to whip up a delicious meal for unexpected guests,” going to church, having big families, and “loving your husband and singing his praises in front of others.”

Calabrese belongs to a cohort of online “tradwife” influencers, whose personas are built on the revival of various “traditional” expressions of femininity, marriage, homemaking, and family life. The thrust of their callback message rings familiar to those who grew up in fundamentalist Christian circles, though it’s uniquely packaged for Instagram and TikTok, where tradwife posts have grown substantially since 2020.

Tradwife content is unabashedly ahistorical, drawing on ideas and imagery from across time periods. Some tradwives build their brand with a 1950s June Cleaver persona, wearing lipstick and an A-line dress to do housework. Others evoke imagined versions of Little House on the Prairie: long dresses, rustic homemade bread, and rural homesteads. Some posts borrow painted images of Victorian households or Regency-era social gatherings.

Unlike other influencers who create content about homeschooling or homesteading, a tradwife influencer makes faithfulness to some aspect of “traditional” womanhood a central tenet of their online brand and …

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