Transubstantiate

It’s one thing to tell the city that you’re there for its good. It’s another to show it.

Six weeks after Stu Davis left his job as pastor at one of Colorado Springs’s largest churches in 2013, most of his kitchen appliances broke. Then his car broke. When his employee health insurance ran out, all three of his children had to make separate visits to the hospital.

“There were definitely times when I was angry at the Lord,” Davis said. “It was just a super, super hard season.”

Those trials made Davis think differently about the role of the church in his city. He had helped build a large youth program at Woodmen Valley Chapel, an ambitious multiyear missions project to Swaziland, and, if he was being honest, a big platform for himself. But he hadn’t really focused on the problems of people struggling in Colorado Springs.

The experience changed him. He says the trials “dislodged” him. Now, Davis serves as the executive director of COSILoveYou, a Christian nonprofit that connects nearly 100 local churches to address suffering and promote flourishing in Colorado Springs.

In some ways, Davis’s story is the story of evangelicalism in Colorado Springs, the city of 464,000 that celebrates its 150th birthday this July. Evangelicals were really successful in the city starting in the 1980s, earning it the title of the “evangelical Vatican” as Colorado Springs became a platform for high-profile Christian leaders. Then there were some broken appliances—some dislodging—and the city’s evangelicals rediscovered the importance of caring for their local community.

“The majority of local churches that would describe themselves as evangelical churches have started to step back or dial back,” Davis said, “and focused a lot more on either …

Continue reading…

Meet the women and men who make their faith a priority as they compete in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

The Opening Ceremonies have just commenced, but the 2020 Tokyo Games already feel weird. The Japanese government made a last-minute decision to bar spectators, and a number of athletes had to drop out after testing positive for COVID-19 or quarantine after being exposed to those who have tested positive.

Like their fellow Olympians, Christian athletes have made sacrifices, worked through mental health crises, and pushed themselves to their physical limits to make it to the Games. But they’ve been able to do so with the conviction of where their ultimate identity rests. Many have also used their platform to share about God’s work in their life and to give back in response to what they’ve achieved. Here’s 14 athletes currently in Tokyo from around the world.

Lucas Lautaro Guzman, Taekwondo (Argentina)

@lucastkd94

In 2012, Sebastián Crismanich became the first Argentine to win a taekwondo gold medal at the Olympics. Lucas Lautaro Guzman hopes to become the second.

In 2019, he won a bronze medal at the 2019 World Taekwondo Championships in the men’s flyweight category. His achievement came just three months after his mother passed away from a brief battle with breast cancer. Though losing her has been hard, Guzman deepened his faith and today says he has much to be thankful for.

Just before the start of the Olympics, Guzman celebrated his 27th birthday in Kazakhstan. In a caption accompanying his “last photo as a 26-year-old,” he wrote, “I don’t feel I deserve all that I am experiencing. … I cannot ask God for anything more, because he gives me so much that I am more than complete and full. Regardless of all the external [success] that I am receiving, I must confess that …

Continue reading…

Christian athletes testify to the gospel in competition and beyond.

“I believe God made me for a purpose. But he also made me fast,” Eric Liddell wrote in a letter to his sister Jenny before competing as a sprinter for Great Britain in the 1924 Summer Olympics.

The 1981 film Chariots of Fire (for my money, the best sports movie ever made) follows the lives of the devoutly Christian Liddell and his Jewish teammate Harold Abrahams at the Paris Games, and actor Ian Charleson, playing Liddell, intones these lines over the film’s sublime final race scene.

Liddell wins the gold medal in the 400 meters, a race that the 100-meter specialist had never run at an international competition. The son of Scottish missionaries, Liddell refused to compete in the 100 meters, which was won by his friend Abrahams, because the opening heats had been scheduled for a Sunday.

Liddell’s decision to remember the Sabbath and forgo the 100-meter competition transformed this national hero into a role model for Christians around the world. This man of remarkable talents was willing to pass up his best shot at athletic glory for the opportunity to properly honor his Lord and Savior.

Certainly, many Christians had competed in the previous modern Olympiads, but none took such a public or principled stand for his faith. Following his Olympic triumph, Liddell returned to China, where he had been born during his parents’ mission in the country. He spent much of the rest of his life in China, serving the poor and teaching the gospel.

During World War II—the last time the Olympics were called off—Liddell was taken prisoner by Japanese forces and devoted the last two years of his life to ministering to his fellow inmates at the Weixian Internment Camp in Shandong Province. He died just a few …

Continue reading…

The suburban DC megachurch’s recent scuffle over race and politics is symptomatic of a broader evangelical rift.

The Washington-area megachurch led by best-selling author David Platt has affirmed three new elders—but only after a public tussle over politics, race, and alleged liberal drift, plus a lawsuit filed by dissenters.

The conflict at McLean Bible Church is significant not only because of the congregation’s size and influence—with several thousand attendees and a prominent place in the DC church landscape—but also because the incident marks the latest salvo in an ongoing clash within American evangelicalism.

After new elder nominees failed to be elected for the first time in the church’s history, Platt told the congregation in a sermon in early July that “a small group of people inside and outside this church coordinated a divisive effort to use disinformation in order to persuade others to vote these men down as part of a broader effort to take control of this church.”

At a June 30 meeting, nominees Chuck Hollingsworth, Jim Burris, and Ken Tucker had failed to receive a clear 75 percent majority, the margin required for elder election. The total was either just above or just below 75 percent, depending on whether provisional ballots were counted, so a second vote was held July 18, at which all three nominees received at least 78 percent of the vote.

The weeks between the two votes were tumultuous. Platt said in his July 4 sermon that people told voting members, in person and by email, that the elders up for nomination would have sold the church’s Tysons location to build a mosque, with proceeds going to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).

Online posts on blogs, Facebook, and email charged Platt with pushing critical race theory, revising biblical teaching on sexuality, and aligning …

Continue reading…

United more than ever across denominations, many evangelicals want “homeland and life” over “homeland or death.”

A few days after Hurricane Elsa swept across the center of Cuba, Christians of all denominations joined in a nationwide day of prayer and fasting for their country on Wednesday, July 7. The call was made after months of increasing tension on the island amid severe scarcity of food and medicine and as the number of COVID-19 infections began to rise precipitously and the once-lauded health system threatened to collapse. Church leaders of all denominations reported that they were increasingly under surveillance and had been interrogated and threatened.

Four days later, on Sunday, July 11 in a town outside Havana, people spilled into the streets and marched peacefully and enthusiastically, calling for freedom and chanting “Patria y Vida” (“Homeland and Life,” the title of a hit song released by pro-democracy Cuban hip hop artists earlier this year and a twist on the Cuban Communist Party slogan “Homeland or Death”). They shouted in unison, “We are not afraid!” The demonstration was recorded and shared live via social media by participants and onlookers and, within hours, similar protests involving thousands of people sprang up in cities and towns across the island.

The spontaneity and magnitude of the protests, the likes of which have not been seen in Cuba since the triumph of the revolution in 1959, caught the government off guard. President Miguel Díaz-Canel went on television and made an explicit call to violence, telling the population that he was giving an order to combat and called for true revolutionaries to go into the streets and reclaim them by force. The military, police, and state security agents, both in uniform and plainclothes, flooded into the streets, beating …

Continue reading…

Myal Greene is optimistic about resuming robust refugee resettlement programs under the Biden administration.

A veteran World Relief staff member who developed models for church partnerships and expanded the ministry’s programming abroad will take over this year as its new president and CEO.

The appointment of Myal Greene follows a challenging season for the organization, the humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals and a leading refugee resettlement agency.

“We’re certainly going through a season of challenges related to the refugee resettlement program and the COVID crisis that have put strains on the organization—on our operations, resources, and opportunities to carry out our programs and our ministry,” Greene said, “but I’m really encouraged by the resilience and commitment of our staff and volunteers, who faithfully serve no matter the circumstances.”

World Relief had shut down eight of its 27 national offices due to yearly cuts in refugee admissions and resettlement funding under the Trump administration’s restrictive policies. In the past few months, World Relief began ramping up their resources and rebuilding infrastructure under President Biden. Ministry leaders were also among the advocates holding the Biden administration accountable to his promise to raise the refugee ceiling after the move was delayed by months.

Greene is scheduled to take on his new role shortly before the next fiscal year begins in September. His predecessors, Scott Arbeiter and Tim Breene, announced their retirement in February.

Beyond resettling refugees domestically, World Relief also runs a number of international initiatives which continue to serve vulnerable populations in underserved countries in the midst of the worldwide COVID-19 crisis. In his previous role as senior vice …

Continue reading…

We must find new ways to live faithfully in places that have changed.

If you’ve moved lately (or have tried to), you’ll know that there’s a shortage of available properties pushing prices to an all-time high. Many would-be buyers, including first-time buyers, have been priced out of the market and stuck in places they’d rather not be—and, in some cases, places they no longer recognize.
It’s been nine years now since my husband and I bought our first home. After a decade of moving from place to place, we returned to his native Virginia to minister in a rural community. We were drawn by both providence and desire, and the home we bought came to represent these things for us.
We quickly made it our own, replacing the orange carpet in the basement and updating the wood-grained paneling. We planted fruit trees and put in gardens. Then, fences and hedgerows. We renovated bathrooms and again replaced the flooring when the drains failed and the basement flooded, all while sinking our roots deeper and deeper into the surrounding community.
Then the earthquakes hit.
Not literally earthquakes, but interpersonal and vocational ones. After eight years, we transitioned out of the ministry that had brought us here. Our children moved on from the elementary school that sits a stone’s throw from our house, and we found ourselves feeling displaced despite living at the same address.
Soon enough, our private tremors were encircled by global ones. COVID-19 hit, and we, along with our neighbors, found ourselves locked in our homes. Schools and churches closed and the library, too—our points of shared community were lost. Of course, we checked on each other, but, at first, we didn’t know whether our presence was more threat than benefit.
“I fell …

Continue reading…

Our “culture of transience” has far-reaching social and economic costs—and some that are harder to quantify.

Many of us like the idea of living a countercultural life. We want to be fish swimming against the current, not sheep in a crowd. But cultures are hard to identify, let alone counter. In her new book, Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind, journalist Grace Olmstead shows us an American culture of transience we may not have noticed or even understood to be problematic. It turns out that swimming against the current might look exactly like staying in one place.

In the book, we see that the choice to stay and put down roots may be not only the most countercultural life choice available to many of us, but the choice with the greatest potential for healing so much of what ails us, as individuals and as a nation. In this deeply personal study of a small Idaho farming community, Olmstead argues that a culture of transience “almost always results in extraction and exploitation of the places left behind,” and that this isn’t only a problem for those who are stuck or who choose to stay “behind.”

This is a book about places, but it is also a book about limitations and dependence. We need one another, and we need roots. We also need limits, and the fewer limits we have, the greater our need for discernment amidst a consumerist culture of almost endless choice. As Olmstead notes, “we move to places that will offer us something: to places that fit the consumptive cadences of our time, not to places that might ask something of us.” Uprooted is a persuasive call to dig in, give back, and perhaps even move back.

The need for rootedness

Since leaving the rural Idaho town her family has called home for generations to attend college in Virginia, Olmstead has, paradoxically, …

Continue reading…

Kazakhstan pledges improvements at 2021 IRF Summit in Washington DC, following footsteps of neighboring Uzbekistan.

Now two of “the five ’Stans” are becoming bigger fans of—or, as Gen Z would say, “stanning” for—religious freedom.

“In Kazakhstan, all denominations can freely follow their religion,” said Yerzhan Nukezhanov, chairman of the Central Asian nation’s committee for religious affairs, “and we will continue to create all necessary conditions for religious freedom.”

Speaking at the 2021 International Religious Freedom (IRF) Summit in Washington, DC, Nukezhanov signed a memorandum of understanding with Wade Kusack, head of the Love Your Neighbor Community. It sets a three-year roadmap that will train local imams, priests, and pastors in dialogue, culminating in the establishment of religious freedom roundtables in nine Kazakh cities.

“It is a front door approach in openness and transparency with the government,” Kusack told CT. “Mutual trust is built one relationship at a time.”

An ethnic Belarusian, Kusack is also the senior fellow for Central Asia at the Institute for Global Engagement (IGE), the American NGO which helped shepherd Uzbekistan’s efforts to improve its IRF standing. In 2018, top Uzbek officials pledged reforms at the first Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom, convened by the US State Department.

Later that year, the State Department removed Uzbekistan from its list of Countries of Particular Concern (CPC) for the first time since 2005. Downgraded to Special Watch List status, by 2020 the nation had made enough progress to be delisted altogether.

Recent developments in Kazakhstan were hailed as a “proof of concept” for the engagement model of IRF advocacy. Not listed as a CPC by the State Department, the …

Continue reading…

With a denominational split delayed, some are willing to pay big to exit now.

Caught in a decades-long battle over LGBT issues, with a proposed denominational split delayed again by the pandemic, dozens of conservative and progressive churches are leaving the United Methodist Church (UMC) without a tidy exit plan.

Two years ago, factions in the United Methodist Church (UMC) agreed on a plan for splitting the denomination with conservative churches keeping their property as they leave. But the UMC has twice postponed its General Conference and won ’t meet until August 2022 to vote on the proposal, called the “Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace Through Separation.”

A United Methodist News review of US annual conference reports and publicly available journals found that the 54 conferences—regional UMC governing bodies—approved at least 51 disaffiliations in 2020. Annual conference reports for 2021 show that the annual conferences have approved 38 disaffiliations so far in 2021.

Though the disaffiliations represent a sliver of the more than 31,000 United Methodist churches nationwide, they show that some churches are willing to take the hard way out of the UMC.

“For us, we felt the Lord was leading us to go. As far as the protocol is concerned, it ’s something that is up in the air,” said Alvin Talkington, a member of the disaffiliation team at Boyce Church, a 100-member congregation in Ohio that left the denomination last fall.

The decision to leave came after years of frustration with the East Ohio Conference for not valuing the church’s conservative doctrinal stance on issues such as homosexuality and not finding conservative ministers to serve the church.

“Out of the last ten pastors, there might have been three or four who fit our doctrine,” …

Continue reading…