Transubstantiate

Duterte tried a hardline policy. Marcos is prioritizing rehab. Christians point to Jesus.

While running for office last year, Philippines president Ferdinand “Bong Bong” Marcos Jr. promised to seek a new path to curb illegal drugs: Catch the “big fish” and rehabilitate drug users.

“Let’s educate the younger ones,” Marcos said in a Taglish interview. “And those who are already involved [or already addicted], we should treat them. … We’re trying to formulate … the best way for the rehabilitation.”

It’s a starkly different approach from his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, who outraged Filipinos and the international community with his brutal war on drugs, giving police blanket authority to kill anyone found using or dealing drugs.

During Duterte’s six-year presidential term, government data reported around 6,000 drug-related killings. Human rights groups, however, peg the number much higher, estimating that up to 30,000 people were killed.

“I will never, never apologize for the deaths,” Duterte said in January 2022. “Kill me, jail me, I will never apologize.”

Since taking office, Marcos has established more than 100 community-based drug rehab centers that provide drug users with temporary shelter and reintegrate them into society. Today there are nearly 500 of these centers, called Balay Silangan Reformation Centers, in the Philippines.

However, during the first year of Marcos’s presidency, the number of drug-related killings actually increased from the last year of Duterte’s term, according to a recent report by the Dahas Project at the University of the Philippines’ Third World Studies Center. They counted 342 killings from Marcos’s inauguration in July 2022 until June 2023, 40 more …

Continue reading…

Jesus could end this crisis. His followers almost certainly can’t.

The way to resolve the Israel-Hamas war is very simple, journalist Matt Yglesias recently explained. We could do it in just five steps:

It’s great, right? I love it! Only—well, that third step seems a little tricky.

And that’s the point, as Yglesias wrote at greater length on Substack. Obviously, the five-step plan is a joke. But it gets at something that so much commentary on this subject seems to miss—certainly in America, and probably elsewhere—which is that Israeli political leaders (to say nothing of the murderers in Hamas) are not ignorant of what we outside observers believe is the right and prudent way forward.

“They just disagree,” Yglesias notes, and they are unlikely to stop disagreeing, and we are unlikely to shift their thinking much, if at all. By “we,” I partly mean the US government, which, for all its power, is objectively limited in its capacity to shift the behavior of combatants who believe, quite rightly, they are in an existential fight. But I also mean you and me specifically—as well as our fellow Christians in America and around the world.

We cannot fix this crisis, no matter how faithful, factual, and fervent we are.

This bears saying, I think, for two reasons. One is our modern habit of “awareness,” as in, I am posting this article on Facebook because I want to raise awareness.

On many issues of great import, the reality is most of us can do very little to effect significant change. Sometimes we can give money to a relevant cause. Always we can pray (1 Thess. 5:17) and take care we do not sin in our hearts or our speech as we react to the news (Matt. 5:21–30). …

Continue reading…

Online pop psychology has a simple solution to every relationship problem. Love and prudence call us to something messier—and better.

Everyone on social media is asserting their boundaries. Everyone is cutting toxicity out of their life. Everyone is prioritizing their own healing journey and giving up on one-sided relationships. Everyone is disarming the narcissist, protecting their space, deleting that number, going no-contact. Or at least, it feels that way.

There is a mode of self-help, overwhelmingly generated and reinforced online, that I call the “dump them” school of thought. It solves every problem with an elegant, unified simplicity of which physicists can only dream: Just dump them. Whether it’s your mother failing to respect your child-rearing rules, your boyfriend who said something hurtful, or your friend who flaked on you twice in a row, you know what you need to do: Dump them. Cut them off.

“Dump them” conversations online are rarely about the church, but the church—universal, if not always a specific local congregation—is a highly dump-able target. The universal church is filled with sinners, and particular churches bring otherwise disparate people together in the work of governing a community and discussing profoundly sensitive and important topics; they often comprise a complex emotional landscape where quotidian frustrations mingle with histories of power abuses (or worse). It would be surprising if the “dump them” school of emotional hygiene had not made its way to the church.

It’s not difficult to see why this school of advice has gained traction. For one thing, it’s extremely well-suited to the internet, where we encounter the interpersonal problems of others at a far remove. Without being deeply embedded in the real-life context of the problem …

Continue reading…

Sauls spent a decade leading Christ Presbyterian Church and had been on leave since May.

Scott Sauls, an influential pastor and author, has resigned from the Nashville megachurch he had led for the past decade.

Members of Christ Presbyterian Church (CPC) voted to accept Sauls’s resignation during a congregational meeting on Sunday night.

Sauls had been on an indefinite leave of absence since May after apologizing for an unhealthy leadership style. A group of church leaders known as the session had asked the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) congregation to accept Sauls’s resignation.

In addressing the congregation, Sauls apologized to those he had hurt and said that he and his family would continue to serve Jesus.

“We had hoped to continue forward and help with CPC,” Sauls told the congregation during the meeting, according to The Tennessean, which first reported the news of Sauls’s resignation. “But we now believe the most merciful thing to do is step aside so the church can seek new leadership and we can seek the Lord’s will for whatever comes next as well.”

The church declined to comment on news of Sauls’s resignation.

Sauls’s tenure at the church began with great promise and was marked by growth. A protege of the late Tim Keller, Sauls promoted a Christianity marked by kindness and grace, rather than culture war politics, in books like A Gentle Answer: Our “Secret Weapon” in an Age of Us Against Them, Befriend, and Irresistible Faith.

Sauls admitted earlier this year that he had been harsh with church staff and used the power of the pulpit as a weapon against those who disagreed with him.

“I verbalized insensitive and verbal criticism of others’ work,” he said in an apology to the congregation earlier this year. “I’ve …

Continue reading…

This sounds counterintuitive. But there are biblical and cultural reasons for believing it.

We talk about enemies less than we used to.

It may not feel that way. The amount of infighting, mudslinging, name-calling, and downright nastiness in public discourse today, including within the church, is both tragic and self-defeating. Slander and snark have been normalized in many circles. So thinking and talking about enemies in these fractious and divided times might sound like the last thing we need.

Yet the opposite is true for two reasons. The first is biblical: The Scriptures talk about enemies with robust clarity and remarkable frequency, including in ways we are explicitly urged to imitate. The second reason is cultural: Confusion about who exactly God’s enemies are, and how the church should respond to them, makes Christians more likely to attack one another, not less.

Take the biblical argument first. There are around 400 references to an “enemy” or “enemies” in Scripture. (By way of comparison, that’s about twice as often as the words gracious and grace appear.) Admittedly, plenty of these examples relate to political or military opponents of Israel that no longer exist. But some refer to those who love the world, hate the Cross, and hate the church (James 4:4; Phil. 3:18; Rev. 11:5, 12).

Many references concern the work of the Messiah himself, who will “possess the gate of his enemies” (Gen. 22:17, ESV), and who—in the biblical text that’s quoted most frequently by Jesus and in the whole New Testament—will sit at God’s right hand until his enemies are made into a “footstool” (Ps. 110:1). Apparently, crushing the head of his enemies is a central feature of what Christ came to do. It is the subject of the …

Continue reading…

More than 300 Christian families have been affected, says a local pastor.

Nepali Christians are mourning the loss of many of their own after a series of devastating earthquakes in early November.

On Friday, November 3, a 5.6-magnitude earthquake rocked the mountainous Nepali villages of Jajarkot and Rukum West just before midnight, burying people under layers of rubble as they slept. A subsequent earthquake occurred on Monday, November 6, this time measuring 5.2 magnitude.

Many rural churches planted in the districts of West Rukum, Jajarkot, and Kalikot were “flattened,” Hanok Tamang, chairman of the National Churches Fellowship of Nepal, told CT. “It is true [that] many pastors, leaders, and Christians have died.”

Nepal’s current population is 31 million and is divided into seven states and 77 districts. The earthquake-hit areas are located in the midwestern region of the country.

The overall estimated death toll is more than 150 people so far, including more than 80 children, according to the non-governmental organization Save The Children. Villagers have taken to sleeping outdoors in freezing conditions for fear of continuing aftershocks, but also because their homes have been destroyed.

The 2023 earthquakes are the “deadliest” occurrence since the devastating 2015 quake near the city of Kathmandu when believers were attending church on a Saturday, as Sunday is a work day. “Many Christians were buried while they were worshiping on Sabbath and died,” the president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Nepal, Umesh Pokharel, told Adventist Review at the time.

Nepal’s Christians make up between 1 to 3 percent of the population, and Protestants were disproportionately affected in the 2015 disaster, said one Catholic leader.

Preliminary reports …

Continue reading…

An inquiry at Alan Scott’s former church found evidence of manipulation, narcissism, and spiritual abuse.

Vineyard USA is calling on a breakaway congregation to launch a “thorough, independent investigation” into allegations of misconduct, narcissism, and spiritual abuse.

“We pray for those who were hurt, harmed, mistreated, or in any way negatively impacted by their time under the leadership of Alan Scott,” the denomination’s statement says. National leadership is pleading with “current and former board members” at the Anaheim, California, church to “fulfill their legal and spiritual responsibilities.”

Scott has not publicly responded and did not reply to CT’s request for comment.

His Southern California church was founded by the late charismatic leader John Wimber and has long been seen as the “mother church” of the movement. Scott and his wife Kathryn took over Vineyard Anaheim in 2018 and then unexpectedly led the congregation out of the denomination in 2022. There was little explanation, beyond the claim they were following the leading of the Holy Spirit.

“We don’t really understand why,” Scott said in a sermon at the time. “We don’t always know what’s on the other side of obedience.”

Some former members of the church, which is now called Dwelling Place, have sued for fraud, claiming Scott misrepresented his relationship to the Vineyard in an attempt to seize control of $62 million of church assets. The building is debt free and sits on more than five acres zoned for commercial use in Orange County.

Scott also may have been reacting to efforts to reorganize the Vineyard to provide more oversight and accountability. National director Jay Pathak, who took over in January 2022, had dinner with the Scotts to tell them …

Continue reading…

He plays Minecraft and talks church history on YouTube—and he’s organizing a new mainline reformation.

It’s October 31 in Denver. Snow is falling. A cutting wind makes the air feel much colder than it is. But nothing will stop Jake Boston, a Gen Z Episcopalian, from celebrating the holiday.

No, not Halloween—Reformation Day, when Protestants remember Martin Luther’s courageous choice to post his 95 Theses critiquing the Catholic church and launching the Reformation. Jake is reenacting that old story by tramping through the Colorado snow from mainline church to mainline church—60 in total—to post his own theses on their doors.

The lists, tailored to the seven American mainline denominations, critique their drift from orthodoxy into theological liberalism, challenging them to reaffirm the Resurrection, the divinity of Jesus, the authority of the Bible, and much more besides.

And Jake was not alone. A group of 1,000 Gen Z mainliners committed to their historic denominations—part of a grassroots group called Operation Reconquista—were working across the country to do the exact same thing. By the end of Reformation Day, they claim, they’d mailed, emailed, or physically posted their 95 theses to every mainline church in the United States, all without funding or a full-time organizer.

When I first heard about this operation, I admit I was both intrigued and worried. On the one hand, the past year has seen a surprising number of Gen Z–led spiritual renewals, most famously the Asbury revival. Maybe this was a similarly hopeful development?

On the other hand, their branding use of sordid military history was reminiscent of the “manosphere,” a highly online movement capturing the imagination of many young conservative men. (“Reconquista” is a nod to the Christian reconquest …

Continue reading…

Amid rising persecution to Christians in the world, here are some stories that can guide your intercessions.

Christians around the world are praying for their 360 million brothers and sisters in Christ who live in countries with high levels of persecution and discrimination, as part of the International Days of Prayer for the Persecuted Church, which fall on Sundays November 5 and 12.

One in 7 Christians worldwide—including 1 in 5 believers in Africa, 2 in 5 in Asia, and 1 in 15 in Latin America—suffer greatly for their faith, according to the 2023 World Watch List (WWL). That’s up from 260 million in the 2020 report.

Among believers who live under threat of violence, in Latin America, Colombian Christians are most at risk, followed by Mexican. In Asia, Pakistan ranks first, closely followed by India and Myanmar, while Nigeria ranks first in Africa and worldwide.

The hardship affecting the greatest number of Christians is displacement, with 124,310 Christians forced to leave their homes or go into hiding for faith-related reasons, in addition to 14,997 Christians who were forced to leave their countries.

While persecution is on the rise, however, the number of Christians coming to the United States from countries on WWL dropped from 32,248 in 2016 to 9,528 in 2022—a decline of 70 percent.

In 2021, President Biden set the refugee ceiling at 15,000 before raising it to 62,500 after faith groups protested. This past year, the ceiling was set at 125,000—however, the US resettled only about 60,000 refugees in fiscal year 2023.

At CT, we seek to report on the news affecting the global church and share stories of how God is at work in the world. As the body of Christ cries out in pain, we can cry out to the Lord on their behalf. We can extend …

Continue reading…

As faithful Twitter users drop the platform, writers, leaders, and ministries adapt to a new social landscape.

Scrolling through our Twitter X feeds over the last several weeks, we’ve seen familiar Christian names, from David French to Sam Allberry, signing off the platform. Many more are wondering aloud whether they want to stay much longer.

“Yet another person I really enjoy following left this platform yesterday,” tweeted Bible teacher Beth Moore, who’s amassed almost 1 million followers on the site. “I may not last long on here either. Shoot, I could close my account tomorrow.”

Since its acquisition by business mogul Elon Musk last year, the microblogging platform has changed more than its name. Its original verification system for journalists and public figures is gone, replaced by blue checkmarks (and a host of other perks, including “prioritized rankings”) for paid subscribers. In October, the platform stripped headlines from articles and announced that new users might need to start paying $1 a month in an attempt to combat bots.

For many loyal Twitter users, including Christians, these changes have made “the bird site” harder to navigate: less egalitarian and more pay-to-play, less a source of vetted news and interesting ideas and more a source of confusion.

In the last year, X has “hemorrhaged” users and advertisers. A Pew Research survey from May 2023 found that a majority of US users have taken a break from the platform in the past year; a quarter said they weren’t likely to use it in a year’s time. Those who’ve stuck around have seen engagement on their posts drop, while spam, trolling, and vitriol remain.

“I think the worse that Twitter becomes, in the sense of user experience, the more that raises the question ‘Why do …

Continue reading…