German Homeschoolers Face Deportation After 15 Years in the US

The Christian family says their status has been revoked without warning.

A Christian family who fled Germany to be able to homeschool their seven children say they now face deportation, 15 years after arriving in the United States and fighting for asylum.

The Romeikes celebrated what their supporters called “an incredible victory that can only be credited to our Almighty God” in 2014, when they were allowed to remain in the US after years of court appeals. Their lawyer said the decision meant the family could “stay without worries in the future.”

Yet earlier this month, Tennessee residents Uwe and Hannelore Romeike said they learned their deferred action status had been revoked during a check-in with immigration officials. They said their family was directed to obtain German passports and to prepare to self-deport by October 11, with no prior warning or explanation for the change.

The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), an evangelical group that backed the Romeikes when they came to the US, has launched a campaign asking the government to reinstate their deferred action status.

Their four oldest children are now adults, and two have married Americans. The Romeikes continue to homeschool their three youngest, including two daughters born in the US.

“Deportation to Germany will fracture these families, while exposing the Romeikes to renewed persecution in Germany, where homeschooling is still illegal in almost every case,” said HSLDA.

In Bissingen, located outside of Stuttgart, Germany, the Romeikes decided to educate their children at home because they opposed public school curricula (including “sex education, evolution, and fairy tales”) on religious grounds.

Homeschooling is not legal in the country, though enforcement on the ban can vary by …

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AI Has No Place in the Pulpit

Technology can serve the church. But it can’t replace the good, frustrating, endless work of ministry.

What should ministers do about artificial intelligence? Over the last year or so, we’ve been inundated with breathless stories about ChatGPT and similar programs that eerily mimic, equal, or surpass the voice, language, and powers of the human mind.

Some of us have had fun with them (“Please write a Shakespearean sonnet in celebration of the San Antonio Spurs”); some of us are already seeing them used in the workplace. Those of us who teach young people have been scrambling to rewrite assignments, since AI is basically a perfect cheating machine.

But what about churches? And what about the church’s leaders?

Some have argued that AI is like other technology, a neutral tool that can be used for either good or ill. If the end served is the mission of Christ, then the means of AI is not only justified; it’s a no-brainer.

Moreover, though their footprint is expanding, well-funded, large-staffed megachurches aren’t representative of the average congregation, neither here in the States nor around the world. Most churches are small and under-resourced, their pastors exhausted and stretched thin. As Christian communities continue to crawl out from beneath COVID-19’s long shadow, surely relieving the pressure from ministers’ packed schedules and overflowing commitments is a worthy goal.

And if AI can do that, as a young Taiwanese pastor recently argued in an article reprinted at CT, then why say no to this time-saving, labor-saving technology? It’s not as though ministers forsake other digital tools. They have email and smartphones and Google Calendar. They don’t ride a horse and buggy to the office.

Above all, suppose AI could eliminate the bulk of a …

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Rosaria Butterfield Issues Five Battle Cries for the Church Militant

There is much to admire in her views on church and community, but also much to find troubling in her new polemic.

If Rosaria Butterfield’s courage “waned and waxed” in writing Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age, as she reports in her acknowledgements section, you wouldn’t know it from the text. Her tone is urgent and earnest, and she conceives of her work as a charge by a “church militant” against a powerful enemy who is sure to lose the war, but is now winning many battles.

Butterfield’s aim, as her title indicates, is to identify five norms that are both false and ascendant in contemporary American culture. Her positions will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with her personal history, as detailed in her previous books about her conversion and Christian hospitality.

But though Five Lies covers some of the same territory, it is less memoir and more direct assault. In her tour of the front lines of the culture war, Butterfield makes a compelling case for a high view of biblical and ecclesial authority, and she not only commends but models repentance. Alongside these and other merits, however, Five Lies offers some questionable views on the Bible’s connection to Jesus, the faith of Christians who depart from Butterfield’s conclusions, and the extent to which major institutions are committed to undermining Christian values.

The five lies

“God’s will,” according to a remark Butterfield cites from John Calvin, “is that Christ’s kingdom should be encompassed with many enemies, his design being to keep us in a state of constant warfare.” Her primary audience is Christian women, and she wants them to join her fight.

Thus, contra the advice of fellow Christians like Rod Dreher in The Benedict Option, it isn’t “sufficient to leave well enough …

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Culture War Is Not Spiritual Warfare

Our ideological opponents are not the enemy.

Someone who grew up in a more liberal religious tradition than mine once told me the sermons in his church were always boring, especially on Easter Sunday. “That was the day the pastor had to deal with the Resurrection,” a doctrine about which he was at best squeamish and at worst skeptical. “We would have to wait to see what metaphor the Resurrection turned out to be—one year it was restarting one’s life afresh, another would be the importance of recycling, or whatever.” A secularized account of the Resurrection does indeed lack the punch of the real thing (and that’s the least of its problems).

We evangelical Christians aren’t likely to secularize our beliefs about the Resurrection, but we are well on our way to secularizing something else: spiritual warfare.

Some outside the church incorrectly see spiritual warfare as a recent innovation, traced back to C. Peter Wagner and the Fuller Seminary church growth classes of the 1970s (thus tying it to the New Apostolic Reformation) or to Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness and other novels of the 1980s.

But the concept of spiritual warfare has been firmly established in every era and wing of the Christian church, back even earlier than Saint Anthony wrestling demons in the desert, all the way to the New Testament itself.

There’s no absence of spiritual warfare talk from Christians these days. But listen closely to it and you’ll notice something: Rarely is this language of warfare directed toward evil spirits. Instead, it’s usually employed to describe ideological opposition toward fellow human beings. “This is spiritual warfare!” we hear as the lead-in to a call to arms about some political or …

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The Cost of Creativity: Bonhoeffer Set Aside Ethics For Art. Did He Choose Well?

The theologian set aside his nearly finished magnum opus while in prison, investing instead in creative writing.

“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

“A Christian’s secular vocation receives new recognition from the gospel only to the extent that it is carried on while following Jesus.”

You may have heard these calls to a radical Christian life before, as well as other quotations from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer is one of the most-quoted Christian theologians of the last 100 years, inspiring generations of believers. What you may not have heard is that Bonhoeffer spent his final months in Tegel Prison creating art.

Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Gestapo at his parents’ home in Charlottenburg, Germany, in April 1943. He had broken many German laws by helping Jewish neighbors and by using his position as a government intelligence officer to evade service in the Nazi army. Bonhoeffer was jailed until October 1944 at Tegel Prison north of Berlin in relative comfort, allowing him the time and space to read and write prolifically for most of his imprisonment.

After his participation in the now-famous Hitler assassination plot was exposed, Bonhoeffer was convicted of new crimes and was moved from Tegel to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, then to Buchenwald concentration camp, and finally to Flossenbürg, where he was hanged with six others on April 9, 1945, just one month before Germany’s surrender to the Allied forces. Bonhoeffer’s short life came to a premature end.

A question haunts us: Did Bonhoeffer waste the last months of his life in prison by spending time on creative writing instead of finishing his best book, the much-anticipated Ethics? The Bible invites us to “number our days” (Ps. 90:12) and warns, “You are a mist that appears for a little while and then …

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Eating Bitterness: My Culture Helps Me Persevere. The Bible Helps Me Hope.

Both talk about endurance in suffering, but only Scripture encourages me to boast in my weakness.

I was a bridesmaid at a friend’s wedding this summer. The night before the big day, I ransacked my kitchen to concoct a welcome drink for the groom and his groomsmen. As I stirred oyster sauce, vinegar, ketchup, lemon juice, honey, ginger, matcha powder, and Sichuan pepper together in a big bowl, I forced myself to taste the unpleasant-looking mixture and realized that one flavor was lacking: bitterness.

This welcome drink was part of a Chinese wedding custom we call “door games” or “gatecrashing,” where bridesmaids give the groom and his groomsmen a series of challenges before the groom can meet his beloved face to face. The tradition arises from the belief that the bride is a precious daughter whose family will not let her be taken easily. (To be clear, this custom is performed with good-humored intent.)

In the game suan tian ku la (酸 甜 苦 辣), the bridesmaids serve the groom and groomsmen food or drinks in four specific flavors—sour, sweet, bitter, spicy—to signify the various difficulties and challenges that the new couple will face in the future. (Typically, these flavors are consumed separately rather than mixed together, but we were short on time.) If the groom and groomsmen are able to imbibe everything, no matter how horrid-tasting, it’s a sign that the new couple will be able to stomach anything that comes their way.

But bitterness isn’t just one component in a Chinese wedding tradition. It’s a flavor that’s permeated our cultural consciousness and way of life through the words chi ku (吃苦), which translates to “eat bitterness.” This term has a deeper symbolic meaning than consuming bitter gourd or herbs like mugwort, though; it primarily refers …

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PEPFAR Fight Worries African Christian Leaders

Those in the countries where the HIV/AIDS program has saved millions of lives feel sidelined by the American debate.

African Christians who have long worked against HIV/AIDS either in health facilities or in church ministry are anxiously watching the current AIDS fight in Congress, which will have direct effects on their programs on the ground.

The September 30 deadline is approaching to reauthorize the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a US-funded HIV/AIDS program that is currently supporting 20 million patients on treatment, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa. US pro-life groups are opposing the five-year reauthorization on the grounds that the Biden administration has “hijacked” the program to provide and promote abortions as well as loosen African abortion laws. African faith-based providers say they have seen no evidence of that.

“We assure the United States Congress that the claim that PEPFAR supports or promotes abortion is to us strange, unfounded, and unfortunate,” wrote a group of 350 African church leaders, mostly evangelicals as well as some Catholics, in a Sept. 15 letter to Congress. “We would like to reassure you and the American public that we have seen no evidence that this is something that has ever happened.”

They urged the passage of the five-year reauthorization, saying that without it, “our people will be left in fear of the future.” The signers included pastors, heads of evangelical networks, and medical directors of Christian hospitals.

Congress has reauthorized PEPFAR every five years since former president George W. Bush began the program in 2003, but this year, reauthorization appears unlikely by the deadline. This week more domestic pro-life groups announced their opposition to a multi-year reauthorization.

PEPFAR will keep its currently appropriated …

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Evangelical Colleges Celebrate Best-Ever Enrollment Numbers

Students impacted by pandemic isolation seem drawn to Christian communities and education.

Eleven evangelical college and universities have announced record enrollment this fall—which is a record for breaking records, as far as anyone in Christian higher education remembers.

Asbury University saw enrollment jump 20 percent, while East Texas Baptist University’s student population climbed above 1,800, the highest in the school’s 111-year history. Abilene Christian University has more than 1,000 incoming freshmen, and Cedarville University is celebrating an increase of 374 students for a total incoming class of 1,017. Grace College, marking its 75th anniversary in Winona Lake, Indiana, grew by 465 new undergraduates, and Taylor University, also in Indiana, added 606 students to its rolls.

Concordia University, St. Paul, beat its previous record by 218 students. Lipscolm University welcomed more than 700 first-time freshmen. Dordt University’s enrollment climbed to 1,911 students and Samford University’s incoming class is 11 percent larger than last year’s, continuing a decade and a half of growth. Ouachita Baptist University had a 14 percent increase in undergraduates and now has a total of 1,581 undergraduates on its campus in Arkansas.

Overall enrollment numbers at schools affiliated with the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities are not yet available. But several other evangelical schools have also reported strong numbers, including Wheaton College, which surpassed its enrollment goal by about 50 students after a few difficult years.

College presidents and vice presidents who spoke to CT say prospective students are drawn to the community at small Christian schools. The incoming class suffered through the social isolation imposed on them through the pandemic in high school …

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Unable to Find Ultimate Truth in Zen Buddhism, I Turned to Jesus

I thought I needed to try harder at meditation. What I really needed was the Holy Spirit to enlighten me.

I’ve always wanted to be spiritual, but I have trouble believing things,” I said, smiling nervously at the robe-clad Zen Buddhism teacher. We were sitting together in a small room for a one-on-one conversation about my Zen meditation practice.

He chuckled. “So, I guess Zen is perfect for you.”

The year was 2011, and I was 36 years old. I had been practicing Zen Buddhism for three years and had traveled to Kentucky to attend my first meditation retreat, a weekend event held at a Zen center near Lexington. The retreat schedule was tough. We sat in meditation from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., broken up by short periods of walking meditation, meals, and chores. Everything was to be done in silence.

Zen was the latest chapter in my lifelong spiritual quest. That quest had begun during my teenage years, when I realized that my Hindu ancestry—passed down by Indian immigrant parents—need not dictate my own faith. As I became aware of alternative belief systems, I realized that I was an agnostic: I honestly didn’t know what to believe. So I dropped the Hindu label and committed to discovering for myself the ultimate truth.

Growing up in Houston, I learned the basics of Christianity through friends and neighbors. I also spent part of my childhood in the United Kingdom, where Christian prayer, hymns, and sermons were part of regular school activities. My Hindu parents always spoke respectfully about Christian beliefs. They would go (and encourage me to go) to church with friends when invited.

But it wasn’t until I got to college that I came to know Jesus through my evangelical Christian friends. I observed how their faith gave them peace and strength during difficult times. And every time I heard about …

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How to Handle Toxic Friendships

3 tools to help us develop empathy.

Eight years ago, my younger brother, Timothy D. Kim, was murdered. Tim and I didn’t always get along or agree on everything; we were very different. But Tim had so many good qualities. We shared lots of laughs and love. My heart grieves whenever I hear that siblings are no longer on speaking terms.

Even within nuclear families, we are divided over every topic under the sun—politics, science, immigration, gender, race, climate—to the point where we no longer speak to each other. Is any disagreement important enough to “cut off” our flesh and blood? Similarly, can we dismiss friends so easily on account of disagreements, as is the trend today? Aren’t treasured relationships with our family members and friends worth fighting for?

Over the past year, I’ve begun to see a Christian psychologist and psychiatrist about longstanding traumas and related mental health concerns.

One afternoon, my psychologist and I were bemoaning today’s society. He observed something so simple yet notoriously difficult for people to embrace: “God never intended for us to agree on everything. A basic human ethic is that people can have different opinions.”

People will disagree and are expected to disagree with each other. Why, then, is it so difficult to overlook differing opinions and remain civil toward one another? On nonessential issues, why can’t we disagree and still be friendly? Why are we so fearful of “the other”?

Why do we so nonchalantly dismiss or end relationships within the family of God—whose spiritual blood we share? Whether the debate is over women in pastoral leadership, Christian nationalism, or racism, vitriolic conflicts lead to relational malaise and …

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