Transubstantiate

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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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The novel and Netflix show explore scriptural themes of light and dark—and the cosmic reign of Christ.

My wife and I spent our honeymoon in St. Lucia, an island known for its two iconic mountains that rise from the Caribbean like majestic guardians. At breakfast one morning, with the mountains behind us, I remember asking my wife, “Do you think people who live here ever get tired of looking at them?”

Twenty years later, I’d answer my own question: yes. The grind of life acts like melatonin. We all grow sleepy toward creation and toward our Creator. And sleepy people, at best, miss much of what God has for us in this life. At worst, we can become so oblivious that we perpetuate great evil without realizing what we are doing.

Yet God has a way of using both beauty and tragedy like smelling salts, awakening us to realities we’d otherwise suppress or ignore. The beauty of a newborn or the shock of war can remind us to look around, to remember that there is more to life than the little we usually notice.

One practice that helps to keep my eyes open to the reality of God and his world is to reread my favorite novel nearly every year since it was published. The book is All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr’s World War II story, which won a Pulitzer Prize and was adapted as a four-part Netflix miniseries that premiered this past Friday.

I’m still working through the series myself. So far, there are some changes from the book—mostly, I assume, for concision. But as I talk with friends who also love the book and are watching the series, they report enjoying the acting and the attempt to bring such a powerful, sprawling story to a big-budget production.

Doerr’s tale centers on Marie-Laure, a blind French girl hiding from German invaders, and Werner, a young man in the Hitler Youth. They’re …

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New research shows most ministers under 34 saw job responsibilities change and worried about their mental health.

Michael Prevett spent his first few months in ministry measuring out the distance between chairs.

The 33-year-old discipleship pastor says that, to a lot of his peers, going into ministry at all “sounds a little crazy.” But it was even worse in January 2021 when he left his job as a project manager at a construction company and joined the staff at Seven Mile Road Church in Melrose, Massachusetts, just north of Boston.

The pandemic seemed to have put everything important on pause.

“The most difficult thing was the sense of waiting,” he told CT. “It felt like for me, I got an extended time to work on the boat instead of just working in the boat.”

An extensive new study on the long-term impact of COVID-19 on the church from ChurchSalary, which is ministry of Christianity Today, and Arbor Research found that younger ministers were hit especially hard by the pandemic.

Nearly 60 percent of those under 34 took on new responsibilities during the pandemic. About half of those also saw their titles change. That took a toll.

The younger a pastor was when COVID-19 hit, the study found, the more likely the pastor was to consider quitting. Only 14 percent of those between 45 and 54 had serious thoughts about leaving ministry. But 22 percent of pastors between the ages of 35 and 44, 29 percent between 25 and 34, and 37 percent between 18 and 24 thought about it a lot.

Younger pastors also worried about the impact the pandemic was having on them personally. More than 60 percent of those under the age of 35 said they were moderately to severely concerned about their mental health.

Many of them spent the pandemic grappling with how to help their churches adapt to the continually changing situation and sometimes …

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She championed both abolition and women’s rights. And she wasn’t afraid to challenge advocates of either cause.

In the most recent issue of The Atlantic, historian Clint Smith examines the life of an escaped slave named Josiah Henson. He asks, “Why weren’t American students being taught about Henson when they learned about [Harriet] Tubman, or assigned his autobiography alongside Frederick Douglass?”

The answer, according to Smith, is the moral complexity of Henson, a former plantation overseer turned abolitionist. “Not every enslaved person was Frederick Douglass,” he writes. “Not every enslaved person was Harriet Tubman. And even those two individuals, as celebrated as they are, were not the morally unadulterated characters that we sometimes make them out to be. Which is to say, they were human.”

I had a similar thought as I read Nancy Koester’s We Will Be Free: The Life and Faith of Sojourner Truth, a religious biography of a woman sometimes overshadowed by Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass in the pantheon of escaped slaves who helped free others from bondage. Truth’s story does not fit the conventional mold of a runaway slave. (In fact, she claimed she did not “run” away from her enslaver—she walked.) Nor did she always agree with Tubman and Douglass on issues of moral reform. Nor was she immune to some of the extreme religious views (and cults) that arose in her unique New York context.

Yet Truth was one of the most extraordinary Americans to ever live. Her complexity is precisely why she has so much to offer us today.

Salvation and reform

As we might expect from someone who renamed herself Sojourner Truth (she was born Isabella Baumfree), her life was a journey. As Koester explains, “For the rest of her life” after becoming a Christian, “Sojourner …

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Former pastor of Gaza Baptist Church—stuck in Egypt since start of the war—scrambles to evacuate wife and children as they struggle to survive at St. Porphyrius Orthodox Church.

Trapped in Gaza, Janet Maher has not had a shower for two weeks. She feeds her three children one meal a day, often no more than bread and cheese.

Her cousin perished from damage caused by an Israeli missile, shielding his seven- and five-year-old boys from the collapsing wall at St. Porphyrius Orthodox Church. The two families had been sheltering together, and the younger boy was friends with her son in kindergarten.

But amid the horrors of life under siege, perhaps the worst is this: Janet’s husband is trapped in Egypt.

“I feel like Moses’ mother and sister after they put him in the bulrushes,” said Hanna Maher, former pastor of Gaza Baptist Church. “All I can do is watch from afar.”

Born in Sohag in Upper Egypt, Maher pastored the evangelical congregation from 2012–2020. Single upon arrival, he married Janet, daughter of an Orthodox father and Baptist mother, during his first year of service in Gaza. Though he was called to “the hard places,” ministry was taxing—as was navigating the permissions for complicated entry and exit procedures under Israeli occupation.

Since 2007, Israel and Egypt have imposed a blockade on the 140-square-mile coastal strip.

Every family vacation to Egypt began with the feeling that he should never return to Gaza. But until 2020, each trip ended with Maher’s renewed sense of commitment to mission. That year, he accepted the pastorate at the Presbyterian church in Beni Suef, 90 miles south of Cairo, and Janet—who had always desired to stay close to her extended family—felt at peace.

Maher did not. Three years later, with Janet’s blessing to renew his calling, he resigned from his position, and last May the family returned …

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The fallout of the Israel-Hamas war at US universities, including antisemitic attacks, is roiling the Ivy Leagues especially.

Across the country, college campus tensions over the Israel-Hamas war are high, and students connected to the war’s fallout—especially Jewish students facing more threats on campus now—report struggling with sadness, fear, and anger. Campus ministry leaders say they are trying to find small ways to be friends to those students who are suffering or afraid.

Like at many Ivy League schools in recent weeks, the Jewish group Hillel at the University of Pennsylvania has upped security. It now has an armed guard inside and outside, and a police squad car sits in front of the building, according to one of Hillel’s leaders.

Penn Hillel was already on edge before the October 7 terror attacks in Israel. In late September, a rabbi was arriving for morning services at Hillel’s building before security had arrived, and an individual pushed in and began throwing chairs and overturning trash cans and yelling antisemitic slurs, according to officials.

Since the attacks in Israel, Jewish students have had “troublesome things” shouted at them, Rachel Saifer Goldman, the director of operations for Penn Hillel, told CT. She said people have ripped down flyers for the Israeli hostages on campus, and there have been instances of antisemitic graffiti. Penn has a relatively large Jewish population, making up about 16 percent of its students.

Cory Lotspeich, a campus minister with Christian Union Martus at Penn, reached out to Hillel after the October 7 attacks and offered condolences. He and Saifer Goldman talked, and she invited him to bring his students over for a dinner on a Thursday evening.

“Just to be with our students and hang out,” Saifer Goldman said. “We’re incredibly grateful. …

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How he purged the voices in my head telling me I was worthless.

I grew up in a loving middle-class family in Lubbock, Texas, a farming and ranching community famous for raising cotton, corn, peanuts, and cattle.

As a five-year-old, I experienced a severe trauma while walking to school with a classmate after eating lunch together in my home. Stopping by my friend’s house to say hello to her mom, we were shocked at her mother lying motionless on her bed. She was dead. Several years later, my best friend in fourth grade died of cancer. Because of these tragic events, I carried an unhealthy fear of death into my young adulthood.

At some point between ages nine and ten, I began experimenting with pot and alcohol. Serious Texas-style partying followed in high school. On weekends teenagers hopped into pickup trucks and drove along back roads to homes, barns, and fields away from town. We drank and laughed, danced to country music, and got high on cocaine.

Schoolwork was a breeze. Even with partying, I earned high grades and honors. I ran cross country and was active in the chess, math, and science clubs. Yet I was insecure, standing at just over five feet tall and weighing no more than 100 pounds. Alcohol and drugs made me feel powerful and fearless.

Big dreams filled my 17-year-old mind as I stepped into my dorm room at Angelo State University (ASU) in San Angelo, Texas, where I was enrolled on a pre-med scholarship. I imagined a bright future helping people as a caring ob-gyn physician. It never happened.

Vanishing hopes

During my first ASU semester, I joined the uncontrolled world of sororities and fraternities. I drank hard liquor daily and did ecstasy and LSD. The new freedom away from home and the cool social life excited me.

For a few hours at a time, ecstasy provided feelings of euphoria, …

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