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Jordan church got hundreds of thousands of dollars in international Christian aid, but little to no oversight.

A 23-year-old refugee from Syria was surprised when an aid worker told her that he had a special fund to help her. The Jordanian Christian said he could provide her with more than the mattress, coat, cookstove, and gas bottles that the others got from the local Christian and Missionary Alliance church. Maybe a washing machine. Or even a flat-screen TV.

When he came to her home after midnight with a special delivery, she understood the man wanted something in return.

“He touched my hand and tried to kiss me,” the woman said in an Arabic statement obtained by Christianity Today. “I pulled back. . . . After that, there was no help from the church.”

The Jordanian church’s refugee aid program was given hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for seven years by more than half a dozen international Christian aid agencies and scores of North American churches. Neither the churches nor the aid organizations appear to have ever checked to see whether their local partner had any policies to protect vulnerable women against sexual exploitation. The church did not have a reporting mechanism for abuse complaints, unless refugees wanted to go to the pastor of the church, who is the brother of the accused man.

“Leaders at the church had been hearing this for years. Pastors did nothing for years,” an American Christian woman who has worked in the area for more than a decade told CT. She spoke on the condition that her identity be concealed because she works for a Christian organization that hopes to continue partnering with the church.

“It got to be common knowledge amongst the Syrians. They would say, ‘If you want help from the church, send your young, pretty girls,’” she said. …

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America’s departure and the Taliban’s ascent is forcing Christians out of the country.

Earlier this year, President Joe Biden announced that after close to 20 years, the United States would be withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan. Last week, as the military began its exit, the Taliban was ready and within days had seized control of the country. The ascent sparked widespread fear and led to thousands arriving at the airport only to find their flights out of the country had been canceled. Some even grabbed a hold of an aircraft in desperation.

Biden defended the decision, arguing that Afghanistan’s leaders “gave up and fled the country.” He also said: “The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight. If anything, the developments in the past week reinforced ending that US military involvement Afghanistan now was the right decision.”

He did concede: “The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.” As the government fell, it was not clear if the US had done anything to protect those who had worked with the military as translators. Plans to resettle Afghans as refugees seemed to be formulated in real time. The rights of women and girls, which were suppressed under the Taliban’s previous time in power, also appeared in jeopardy. And the lives of Christians, who according to official numbers only make up a miniscule number of the country’s nearly 40 million people, seem in peril as well.

David Paiman is an Afghan pastor and evangelist. You can follow his ministry here.

Paiman joined global media manager Morgan Lee and news editor Daniel Silliman to discuss how he converted from Islam to Christianity, the withdrawal’s consequences for the church in Afghanistan, and how we can best support the country and people during …

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After almost two decades, Joshua Harris left ministry battered and exhausted. A few years later, he left the faith altogether. In this bonus episode of the podcast, we try to understand why.

Love it or hate it, if you grew up in a youth group after 1997, you probably had to reckon with Joshua Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye, his treatise on dating and courtship. The book sold millions and made him, in Collin Hansen’s terms, an “evangelical boy wonder.”

At 29 years old he became the lead pastor of a Maryland megachurch and a rising star in Sovereign Grace Ministries. But when that movement was torn apart by controversy, conflict, and accusations of a systemic cover-up of child abuse, he found himself reeling, unsure of his calling and convictions. He left ministry in 2015, and in 2019, he announced that he no longer identified as a Christian.

In this bonus episode of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, we’ll explore Josh’s story as a contemporary of Mark Driscoll, someone who was his polar opposite in temperament, and whose struggles in ministry led to a divergent outcome. We’ll talk about faith, doubt, and celebrity, and discuss how Christians might think about their own doubts and deconstruction, recognizing them as a normal part of the Christian life.

Subscriptions to CT are one of the best ways to support this kind of journalism. If you want to help us continue doing this kind of work, consider joining today at orderct.com/marshill.

The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill is a production of Christianity Today

Executive Producer: Erik Petrik

Produced, written, and edited by Mike Cosper

Associate Producer: Joy Beth Smith

Music and sound design by Kate Siefker and Mike Cosper

Mixed by Mike Cosper.

Our theme song is “Sticks and Stones” by King’s Kaleidescope.

The closing song is “Spirit (Keep On)” by Jeremy Casella

Graphic Design by Bryan Todd

Social Media by Nicole …

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Q&A with SBC minister Dana Moore on the power of prayer in a state death chamber.

John Henry Ramirez is scheduled to die on September 8. The state of Texas will execute him by lethal injection for the 2004 murder of 45-year-old convenience store clerk Pablo Castro. Ramirez was convicted of stabbing Castro 29 times in the process of stealing $1.25 to buy drugs. Now, 17 years later, he will be put to death for his crime.

When that happens, Ramirez would like to have his pastor lay hands on him. He filed suit in federal court last week claiming he has a religious right to have Dana Moore, senior pastor of Second Baptist Church in Corpus Christi, Texas, touch him while he dies.

According to Ramirez’s lawyer, Seth Kretzer, the prison’s current policy allows doctors and guards to touch an inmate during execution, but does not allow spiritual touch. Kretzer argues that this “burdens Mr. Ramirez’s free exercise of his Christian faith at his exact time of death, when most Christians believe they will either ascend to heaven or descend to hell—in other words, when religious instruction and practice is most needed.”

CT reached out to the Southern Baptist pastor to ask about the importance of the laying on of hands, ministering on death row, and what he thinks people should know about Ramirez.

Why is touching someone or laying hands on them important to you as a Baptist pastor?

When I pray with people, I put a hand on them. When I go to the hospital, I hold the person’s hand. It’s what we do. It’s how we do things.

Just last week we had a fellowship, and I looked over, and one of the church ladies was praying for another one. And the one standing, she put her hands on the lady who was seated, on her shoulders, and she was praying over her.

I don’t think it’s …

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A debate over “untethered empathy” underscores how departing leaders, including John Piper’s successor, approached hot-button issues like race and abuse.

This was supposed to be a landmark year for Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, as the historic congregation, best known for John Piper’s 33-year tenure as pastor, marked its 150th anniversary.

Bethlehem College and Seminary (BCS)—which grew from the church’s lay training institute to an accredited program—also has reason to celebrate. This fall, the school will inaugurate its second president, 10 years after its first graduating class.

Ahead of the commemorations, though, the community finds itself in the midst of what current leaders have called “a confusing and challenging time” and “a hard and difficult season in the life of our church.” Three pastors and a staff member resigned from the downtown campus of Bethlehem Baptist Church in recent months, alongside dozens of lay members. Another four faculty and staff left the college and seminary in the past year.

Some of the faces that appear in the compilation video of “150 God’s Grace at Bethlehem” no longer belong to the multisite Twin Cities church—most prominently Jason Meyer, Piper’s successor and Bethlehem’s pastor for preaching and vision. Members who spent 10, 20, or even 30 years worshiping and serving there, who expected they would be part of Bethlehem for the rest of their lives, said goodbye to their spiritual home.

“Bethlehem was the plan until we were going to be in Jesus’ arms. We can’t even think about what’s next,” said Debby Pickering, whose family left when her husband, Bryan, resigned his position as pastor. While he was trying to work for resolution, she didn’t know where to go with her own frustration and anxiety. “Nothing in …

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As the world debates the US withdrawal, 15 leaders reflect on how they are applying their faith to understand how to best advocate for justice in the aftermath.

It will be hard to forget the images of Afghans mobbing outgoing aircraft, some clinging on to planes with their bare hands, in their desperation to leave their country following the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul.

President Joe Biden’s follow-through on former President Donald Trump’s planned withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban’s prompt takeover, and the seeming lack of coordination and planning to evacuate translators and others at risk of persecution have sparked intense outrage and sadness worldwide.

Christians both inside and outside the United States disagree on what the US government and military should have done. But they are trying to apply their faith to help them understand how to best advocate for justice in the aftermath.

CT surveyed 15 leaders on what they are lamenting about the American withdrawal and Taliban takeover; how they’re praying for Afghanistan’s future; what they think American Christians can learn from the war; how they see the long-term impact on the mission field; and whether the decades of investment by Americans troops and foreign Christian workers were worthwhile or wasted.

Click to navigate through the following questions:

• What do you lament the most about the American withdrawal and the Taliban takeover?
• How are you praying for Afghanistan’s future?
• How should American Christians reflect on this war?
• If the US entered an unwise war to begin with, was it best to stop and fully withdraw, as a sign of repentance?
• What type of longterm impact do you think this will have on the mission field in Afghanistan and surrounding region?
• To what extent were the decades of investment by American forces and foreign Christian workers worth it or all for naught?
• Anything else?

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World Relief joins five fellow refugee resettlement groups in lamenting the “devastating” impact of problems with the State Department’s Special Immigrant Visa process.

As most Americans absorbed the shock of the Taliban’s full takeover of Afghanistan over the weekend, officials at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service followed the rapidly deteriorating situation with resignation, knowing it could have gone differently.

In May, leaders at LIRS, one of several faith-based agencies contracted with the US government to resettle refugees in the United States, sent a letter to the Biden administration requesting it remove Afghan civilians (and their families) who have worked with the US before its planned troop withdrawal.

Anyone familiar with the “bureaucratic maze” that is the country’s Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) process knew the State Department visa office wouldn’t be agile enough to respond to the urgent need for evacuations, said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of LIRS.

“We’ve been screaming from the rooftops for months now that we need to get these allies to Guam or another US territory,” Vignarajah said.

The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment from RNS.

The US began evacuating Afghans in the final stages of the SIV process about a month ago before canceling additional flights out of Kabul because of security concerns, according to Jenny Yang, senior vice president of advocacy and policy at World Relief, another one of the faith-based organizations that partners with the US government on refugee resettlement.

In June, most of those organizations—including LIRS, World Relief, Church World Service (CWS), the Episcopal Church (which resettles refugees through Episcopal Migration Ministries), and HIAS (founded as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society)—urged President Joe Biden to implement plans …

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US forces are withdrawing after 20 years, but the story of Christian aid work goes far beyond military conflict.

Our September issue went to press before the stunningly rapid fall of Afghanistan’s government. This month’s cover honors the history of faithful, unseen service in Afghanistan on the part of local believers and Christian aid workers. With US troops largely gone from the country and the Taliban now firmly in control, it’s easy to forget that the church was at work there long before America’s “forever war” began—and will remain at work there, in whatever form it takes, now that the war has ended.

Like so many, Arley Loewen knows exactly where he was when 9/11 happened. He was in Islamabad, Pakistan, working with Afghan refugees as an educator, and he had to evacuate the area for safety.

But as a foreign aid worker, there are also other dates he thinks about, memorializing other deaths. Those who spent time on humanitarian work in Afghanistan in the past 20 years get emotional remembering the Afghan and foreign friends, coworkers, and neighbors who died.

On March 27, 2003, a Red Cross engineer was executed by unknown gunmen.

On June 2, 2004, five Médecins Sans Frontières staff were killed on the road between Khair Khana and Qala-i-Naw.

On January 14, 2008, an attack on the Serena Hotel in Kabul killed six.

On July 24, 2014, two Finnish women with International Assistance Mission were shot and killed.

On October 3, 2015, a US airstrike hit a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital and killed 42.

On November 24, 2019, a roadside bomb killed a California man with the UN Development Program and wounded five others.

There are other dark dates, and Loewen, who currently lives in Manitoba and teaches Bible and Muslim-Christian relations at a small Christian college, regularly …

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Why this Christian scholar may be the most important person you don’t know.

Historian Andrew Walls—known for recentering contemporary Christian history in the Southern hemisphere and, along with the late Lamin Sanneh, promoting the voices of African, Latin American, and Asian Christians—has died at age 93. This profile, originally published in CT’s February 2007 issue, dove deep into the significance of his life’s work.

* * *

Andrew Walls was mildly incredulous when I phoned him in Aberdeen, Scotland, to ask for an interview. Of course he would gladly help me, he said in a restrained Scotch brogue, but was I sure I had the right person? He couldn’t understand why Christianity Today would want to write about him.

The reason is simple: Andrew Walls may be the most important person you don’t know. Most Americans and Europeans think of Christianity as a Western religion. Prominent leaders of the last 50 years, like Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, and Pope John Paul II, are known primarily for their influence in the West, though in fact each of them has played a significant role in wider, global Christianity. But the most important development for the church in the 20th and 21st centuries has not been in the West at all, but in the astonishing shift of Christianity’s center of gravity from the Western industrialized nations to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In a short time, Christianity has been transformed from a European religion to a global one.

Andrew Walls is the person to help us understand what this means. One of the first scholars to notice and study the shift, he combines exhaustive knowledge of the worldwide church with a deep historical and theological vision. Scholars who know his work (almost all published in obscure journals) speak of him with something like …

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The band reflects on 20 years of wrestling with spirituality and faith and making music.

There has never been a Christian band like mewithoutYou. Then again, there’s no such thing as a Christian band, and mewithoutYou doesn’t actually exist.

I mean, yes, there’s a group of men who have been playing music under this name for the last 20 years, who recently announced their intention to disband, and who will play the first two of a hoped-for series of farewell shows this weekend. Both live shows sold out in Philadelphia, their hometown, but are available via livestream on the web.

Ask the band’s singer, Aaron Weiss (whom critics are legally required to refer to as “enigmatic”) what the end of mewithoutYou means to him, and he’ll tell you, “We aren’t breaking up. We never were really a band. That’s not a real thing. We never existed to begin with, and yet we will continue to exist in another respect after our last show has been played.”

To him, “‘2001 to 2020, 21, 22’—it’s all totally arbitrary. To me it feels very artificial,” he said in an interview. “I don’t begrudge anyone if they would like to have a kind of a tombstone to give it a lifespan, but it’s a very arbitrary way of looking at whatever it is that we are.”

mewithoutYou came to prominence in the mid-2000s during what some call the golden age of Tooth and Nail records, the Seattle-based indie record label most closely associated with Christian independent rock for the last thirty years.

At first glance, the band was seemingly peers with other rising stars in the Christian screamo scene, like the bands Emery and Underoath, though its particular brand of fractured post-punk fronted by Weiss’s unhinged, spoken/screamed poetry made …

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