Author: Chris Boyd

Christian pro-life activists have their eyes on a record-high number of ballot measures, including state constitutional amendments.

For decades, pro-life advocates argued that overturning Roe v. Wade would enable each state to determine its own abortion policy. Abortion measures will appear on five state ballots on Election Day this year, the most in US history.

But the country got its first glimpse at post-Roe abortion referendums months before November 8. Back in August, Kansas became the first state to vote on abortion rights, rejecting a ballot measure declaring the state constitution “does not require government funding of abortion and does not create or secure a right to abortion.”

Activists saw the outcome, fueled by record turnout from young women, as a sign of enthusiasm from pro-choice voters. Last week, Pew Research Forum released its latest polls, which show that Democratic voters are nearly twice as likely as Republicans to consider abortion a very important issue (55% to 29%).

Soon, voters in Michigan, California, Vermont, Montana, and Kentucky will also vote on the issue of abortion rights without a federal abortion law in place.

“My hope is that the Kansas amendment’s failure can serve as a reminder that the deliberate and thoughtful work of the pro-life movement must continue as we change one heart at a time, state by state,” Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission president Brent Leatherwood said in August.

While some states could bolster the legal rights of the unborn and infants born alive at any stage of development, voters in other states could codify a woman’s right to reproductive choice in the state constitution and allow abortion at any stage of pregnancy.

Christian pro-life advocates warn the proposed changes up for vote in Michigan and California go far beyond the right to an …

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A New Testament “scholar on fire,” he believed Scripture was an encounter with God.

Gordon Fee once told his students on the first day of a New Testament class at Wheaton College that they would—someday—come across a headline saying “Gordon Fee Is Dead.”

“Do not believe it!” he said, standing atop a desk. “He is singing with his Lord and his king.”

Then, instead of handing out the syllabus like a normal professor, he led the class in Charles Wesley’s hymn, “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.”

Fee, a widely influential New Testament teacher who believed that reading the Bible, teaching the Bible, and interpreting the Bible should bring people into an encounter with a living God, described himself as a “scholar on fire.” He died on Tuesday at the age of 88—although, as those who encountered him in the classroom or in his many books know, that’s not how he would have described it.

Fee co-wrote How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth with Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary colleague Douglas Stuart in the early 1980s. The book is now in its fourth edition and has sold around 1 million copies, becoming for many the standard text on the best way to approach Scripture. Fee also wrote a widely used handbook on biblical interpretation, several well-regarded commentaries on New Testament epistles, and groundbreaking academic research on the place of the Holy Spirit in the life and work of the Apostle Paul.

“If you had asked Paul to define what a Christian is,” Fee once told CT, “he would not have said, ‘A Christian is a person who believes X and Y doctrines about Christ,’ but ‘A Christian is a person who walks in the Spirit, who knows Christ.’”

In the same way, Fee argued that studying …

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The editor of “Voices of Lament” on how public injustice demands public sorrow.

In the fall of 2019, author and speaker Natasha Sistrunk Robinson moved to Alabama with her husband and daughter. When the pandemic hit in early 2020, she found herself doubly isolated in a new location.

After reading the book of Jeremiah, a particular passage “really jumped out at me,” says Robinson. It was 9:17–21, “where God tells the prophet Jeremiah to call the wailing women to wail until they are exhausted from crying so much. They’re wailing because the men have been taken out of the public square, and the children have been taken out of the streets, and ‘death has climbed in through our windows.’”

The story seemed very relevant to the moment. “Death was a thief climbing into our windows too,” says Robinson. “It was all around us, with the reality of the pandemic on top of all the racial injustice of that year.”

Inspired by the Old Testament model of lament, she started working on a book titled Voices of Lament (Baker Publishing Group, 2022), which features 29 women of color writing on themes of longing, injustice, and suffering.

Robinson, who now lives in North Carolina with her husband and daughter, hosts the podcast A Sojourner’s Truth and runs T3 Leadership Solutions and Leadership LINKS. She is currently a doctoral candidate in urban leadership ministry through a joint program between North Park and Fuller Theological Seminaries.

CT spoke recently with Robinson about her latest book and the community of women who contributed to it.

During the summer of 2020, you were reading through Jeremiah and the Psalms and thinking about lament and injustice. Tell us more about that journey.

As a Black woman, I was thinking about all the ways that our …

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A former beauty queen is a part of the widespread resistance taking a stand against the brutal military regime.

Angel Lamung had been in the public spotlight since she was a teenager. In Myanmar, she won beauty pageants, appeared in commercials, acted in movies, and sang pop songs.

But last year, when news anchors read her name on the nightly broadcast and the state-run paper printed her photo alongside other popular celebrities’, the coverage was different.

The government had put her on a wanted list.

After the military overthrew the democratically elected leadership in Myanmar (also called Burma) in a coup in February 2021, the then-23-year-old Christian was among the crowd who took to the streets and social media in protest. It changed her career forever.

The new regime responded swiftly with escalating violence to quell demonstrators and harsh criminal penalties for those who voiced opposition, especially public figures. Lamung was among 20 celebrities charged under a new law outlawing dissenters. By the United Nations’ count, 1,500 people were killed in demonstrations and more than 10,000 were “unlawfully detained” in the first year after the coup.

Lamung managed to escape last spring, fleeing to the United States as a refugee. From the safety of a spare bedroom in a family friend’s house on the East Coast, she fundraises for humanitarian aid and speaks out in support of the largest civil disobedience movement in Myanmar’s history.

“I would rather leave everything that I love than give in to the dictatorship,” Lamung remarked in a clip on her YouTube channel.

Back in Myanmar, the government froze Lamung’s bank accounts and she faces arrest if she returns. Her friends and fellow activists send dispatches from the Thai and Indian borders, where they’re waiting to flee to safety, …

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Festival of Lights marking the Hindu new year brings invitations to Jesus followers in India, Nepal, and neighboring nations.

Rivaling the scale of Thanksgiving or Christmas in the United States, Diwali has become India’s biggest holiday season.

The Festival of Lights (also known as Deepavali) marks the start of the Hindu New Year and is the faith’s most important festival, celebrated for five days by more than a billion people in India—not only by Hindus but also by Jains, Sikhs, and some Buddhists—as well as across the Hindu diaspora.

The festival symbolizes for its devotees the triumph of good over evil, light over darkness, and knowledge over ignorance. Diwali is marked by feasts, lighting clay lamps outside the house to banish evil spirits, decorative lights, prayers, family gatherings, exchanging gifts, burning firecrackers, and doing charity, besides worshiping at homes or visiting temples.

Each year the holiday falls on different dates in the Hindu lunar calendar determined by the position of the moon, usually between October and November. This year, the festival is observed from October 22–26 with Diwali falling on October 24.

CT interviewed Christian leaders in the majority Hindu nations of India and Nepal—as well as neighboring Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Pakistan—in order to better understand what South Asian followers of Jesus do during the festival, whether they think Christians should join in Diwali celebrations, and whether churches conduct outreach to Hindus during the holiday.

India — Anil Kant, pastor, gospel singer-songwriter, and executive director of Trinity Sounds, Mumbai:

We as Christians celebrate only Jesus, so we do not celebrate Diwali in our homes. But we connect and engage with Hindu friends during Diwali. We live in a community with different religions and orientations and …

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Churches across the country are reclaiming theological education to make it available to everyone.

For years, Caleb Bartel wanted to deepen his understanding of the Bible and theology.

“There’s really not a way to get that from just a Sunday morning sermon or just Sunday school,” said Bartel, who attends Central Church in College Station, Texas. “You can grow on your own, absolutely, but you’re not getting seminary-level teaching.”

Bartel never felt called to become a pastor. He’s a home remodeler and a married father of five, which makes seminary impractical. But the 33-year-old is now getting the chance to study theology thanks to a program at his church.

Congregations across the country are implementing in-house theology programs, designed to engage members like Bartel who aren’t pursuing professional ministry but still want to study theology, church history, and the Bible. Some programs, like Central’s, are designed to replicate formal theological education, just without the seminary setting or the tuition bill—which can easily run up to $16,000 per year. Others aim to be more accessible.

That’s the kind of thing Tyler Johnson at Redemption Church in Phoenix started doing 20 years ago. He wanted to make the gospel understood and applicable among people who might never read the Bible in Greek or know how to pronounce exegesis. Along with fellow church planters, he launched a one-year theology program called Surge, open to anyone who would commit to about a school year’s worth of weekly meetings.

“It just feels like a lot of the deeper theological stuff gets outsourced to Bible schools,” he said. The church planters wondered, “Could we do this inside, at communal levels, at tables?”

The church planters started with a list of books …

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In a world of fear and turmoil, the story of Noah brings baptismal hope.

A few weeks ago, a commentator identified what he believes to be the dominant mindset of our time. He calls it “ark head,” borrowing from the biblical account of Noah and the flood.

“Ark head,” argues Venkatesh Rao, happens when we give up on solving our big global problems and look instead for an “ark” in which to ride out the storms of this age of anxiety.

Rao points to the numbness with which most people see the “snowballing global problems and crises we’re hurtling towards,” whether the prospect of a nuclear World War III, another global pandemic, or a collapsing economy. He speculates that even news of an alien invasion would be greeted with a What can you do about it? sort of bored acceptance. This, he writes, is a coping mechanism for people in a new dark age.

The point of an ark, after all, is to “survive a cataclysmic flood while preserving as much of everything you care about as possible,” Rao writes.

For some in the tech sector, the ark could be cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, or the metaverse. Others seem to be scaling down to their narrow subcultures of work or interest or personal life.

“If you can retreat within it, and either tune out or delusionally recode the rest of reality, it works as an ark,” Rao says.

If “flood geology” is the view advocated by some creationist groups to explain phenomena such as the Grand Canyon, I suppose one could call Rao’s thesis a kind of “flood psychology.”

His metaphor caught my attention because I’m currently teaching through Genesis 1–11 (which includes the Noah narrative) in a Sunday seminar at my church. I stopped to wonder if his metaphor might actually …

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Syriac-Aramean Christians, fewer in number than similarly suffering Armenians, assert their Ottoman-era plight deserves separate recognition.

In the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, evangelicals laid down their lives for their Lord. Living in Nusaybin, once home to the ancient theological school of Nisibis, they were among the firstfruits of the Sayfo (“sword”) martyrs.

Overall, modern estimates posit half a million deaths of Syriac-Aramean Christians at the hands of Turkish and Kurdish soldiers, concurrent with the Armenian genocide that claimed 1.5 million lives. Today this Christian community, still speaking the language of Jesus, seeks its own recognition.

In June 1915, the Muslim-majority city—now located on Turkey’s southeastern border with Syria—had about 100 Syrian Orthodox families, and an equal number belonging to other Christian sects. The Protestants were rounded up with Armenians and Chaldeans, marched to the front of town, and shot dead.

The Orthodox families were promised peace by the local leader, but 30 men fled and sought refuge in the rugged mountains. A monk, trusting authorities, led soldiers to their hideout seeking to reassure the frightened band.

According to reports, along the way they turned on the monk, demanding he convert to Islam. Upon his refusal, they cut off his hands, then feet, then head. Returning to Nusaybin, the soldiers assembled the remaining Christians, leading them out of town. In joyful procession the believers sang hymns of encouragement: Soon we will be with our Lord Jesus Christ.

Refusing conversion, one by one they were shot, and then dumped in a well.

In 1919, then-Syrian Orthodox Archbishop Aphrem Barsaum filed a report to the prime minister of Britain, after the Allied powers displaced the Ottomans. Similar massacres had been repeated in 335 other villages in the archbishop’s jurisdiction, …

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In the wake of “Dobbs,” federal prosecutors have filed more than a dozen federal indictments against protestors obstructing access to abortion clinics.

In the past month, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has indicted more than a dozen pro-life protestors across the country for obstructing access to abortion clinics.

Such prosecutions have been rare historically, with just a case or two annually for the past decade. But after the US Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade this summer, the DOJ announced a task force to pursue more enforcement against anyone obstructing access to abortion clinics. Many of those protestors facing charges are Christian.

The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE Act, prohibits obstruction of access to, threats toward, and destruction of clinic property. In these recent charges, protestors face up to 11 years in prison. Pro-life activists say the recent prosecutions seem politically motivated; some are now facing charges for incidents that date back more than a year.

An October 5 indictment of 11 protestors in Tennessee was about an abortion clinic blockade in March 2021. One case filed October 14 against a pro-life protestor concerned an incident from two years ago, when a group of protestors allegedly tied themselves with ropes and chains inside a clinic, blocking access.

Edward Mechmann, a former federal prosecutor who now is the director of public policy for the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, told CT it was “strange for the feds to go searching for old cases, especially for relatively minor crimes that would usually be dealt with by local prosecutors.”

Mechmann said he was surprised by “the heavy hand” in the blockade indictments. Though blockading a clinic is a violation of FACE, he thinks the DOJ could have pursued civil remedies without going straight to criminal prosecution.

“My suspicion is that a directive …

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Christian advocate: The uprising in Tehran coincides with the rising disillusionment with Islam and the growth of the underground church.

Growing up in a home with a Muslim father and a Christian mother, Iranian American Shirin Taber had a special appreciation for being able to choose what she believed. When she told her dad that she wished everyone back in Iran could have the same freedom, he—knowing the harsh reality of the regime—said it would never happen.

Since then, Taber has worked on the cause of international religious freedom, hoping to see the trajectory change in one of the most restrictive countries in the world. And with the current uprising of Iranian women and young people, the American advocate is more optimistic than ever.

In Iran, Generation Z—whose grandparents lived through the revolution—has become particularly emboldened, creative, and strategic, inspired by the impact of movements like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter.

“Millennials did their part, Gen X did their part, their parents, but this generation is very unique,” Taber said, referencing the viral impact of young activists, including the move to dye Tehran’s fountains blood-red. “Gen Z is no-nonsense. They’ll just go out tough. The girls, they’ll cut their hair, and they’ll jump on cars.”

Iranians eager for reform have held out hope that they could work within the Islamic government, but Taber believes the country has reached a tipping point.

It’s been a month of protests, spurred by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was arrested for not wearing her hijab properly. The viral videos of women cutting their hair symbolize longstanding grievances beyond dress code regulations to women’s unequal status in inheritance, marriage, custody, and travel.

The political pushback, Taber says, correlates with a …

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