Transubstantiate

“Unless Jesus returns we face a catastrophic future.”

Sometimes, late at night, when her kids have gone to bed and Eleanor Getson is doing the dishes, she is hit with an almost crippling fear.

“Glaciers melting. Islands of plastic in the Pacific Ocean. Forest fires wiping out millennia of history,” said Getson, a 40-year-old evangelical living in Bradford, England, with her husband and two boys. “I can’t stop scrolling through stories about climate change. … It’s too much to think about, and I get this anxiety about what my children will suffer because of us.”

That’s why Getson was delighted to hear the news that the Church of England, which she grew up in, has made the momentous decision to divest from fossil fuels. Last month, the Anglican Church Commissioners and Pensions Board announced its decision to pull all financial investments from gas and oil companies because of the way burning fossil fuels is driving climate change.

Pressure on the Church of England to divest from fossil fuel companies has been building for several years, as an increasing number of clergy, bishops, and dioceses have made divestment commitments and called for fossil-free pension schemes.

Among them have been evangelicals bringing their own distinctive arguments and motivations to the campaign. For years, evangelically inclined organizations like Operation Noah, Tearfund, United Society Partners in the Gospel (USPG) and Christian Aid have been calling for the Church of England to fully divest from fossil fuel companies

Ruth Valerio, director of advocacy and influencing at Tearfund, a Christian relief and development organization based in the UK, told CT that the church has a huge role in calling on policies and practices that do not harm the natural world, …

Continue reading…

How God pursued me even when I was certain I’d already found truth.

On a warm summer’s day in 1991, I sat in Amaravati Buddhist Monastery, a temple north of London, my heart full of confusion and inner turmoil. I had begun seriously to doubt my faith.

It didn’t make sense. I thought I had found the truth in Buddhism and had given up everything necessary to become a Buddhist nun seven years earlier. In the temple led by American monk Ajahn Sumedho, life was strict and disciplined, involving many ascetic practices designed to simplify daily existence and help us detach from earthly things. Our lives were based around meditation practice; we were celibate, slept little, and ate only one meal a day. I was known for my strong faith in Buddhism, and had not ever really doubted the purpose of living by its teachings.

Until now.

Suddenly I found myself, with my shaven head and robe, spontaneously rushing down to the traditional Anglican church in the nearby village. “I’ve got to talk to somebody, I’ve got to understand what’s happening to me,” I thought.

Upon entering, I looked around anxiously for the priest. “Could you pray for me, please?” I asked when I spotted him. “I’m very confused.” Unfazed, he graciously guided me to the Holy Communion rail and asked me to kneel. He laid his hands on my shoulders and prayed. As he did so, I broke down sobbing uncontrollably.

As the tears abated, the priest’s compassionate eyes met mine, and he said, “We need to talk.” We agreed to meet the following week.

After being prayed for, I felt a great release of the emotions and conflict deep inside of me. I was expectant that this man of God might be able to help me. How things had changed from my certainty about Buddhism to barely …

Continue reading…

The biblical story of Naboth’s vineyard teaches non-indigenous Christians like me how God views the injustice that made Melbourne.

As an increasing number of Australians realize, our nation was founded on the legal lie that the continent was terra nullius, “nobody’s land.” The truth is that Aboriginal people had been living on the lands now called Australia for at least 65,000 years by the time the first Europeans arrived. However, since British law said no one was here, most settlers didn’t bother making treaties.

One exception was John Batman, who was born in Australia to a convict father and a free mother who had paid passage to keep the family together. After encountering challenges trying to access a land grant in other regions, Batman staked out land near Merri Creek, otherwise known as the home of the Wurundjeri nation, and signed a treaty with them that exchanged handkerchiefs, flour, and other supplies for most of what is now Melbourne.

Even if their signatures weren’t faked, the most the Wurundjeri people possibly agreed to was temporary hospitality. They considered the land as something they belonged to, not as a possession that could be sold as under English law.

In the end, it didn’t matter. In 1835 the governor responded to Batman’s treaty with a letter in the king’s name: The treaty was invalid because the land already belonged to the crown. Within a few years, most of the indigenous inhabitants in that region were either killed or forcibly displaced far from their ancestral home.

While the themes in this story show up across Australia’s history, this is the particular story of the land on which I live and work. I first learned about it while preparing to preach on 1 Kings 21 at a church near Merri Creek where the treaty was signed. I don’t often like to compare myself with biblical …

Continue reading…

Our view of the end times should affect our politics. But how?

For decades, the dominant evangelical perspective on the end times has been a premillennial, dispensationalist eschatology. As shown in the Left Behind series, this view says the end is nigh and the world—politics included—will grow increasingly wicked and catastrophic until the end comes. Therefore, as Jesus tells his disciples, we should “keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come” (Matt. 24:42).

Yet for Christian nationalists, rejecting an imminent apocalypse is a logical move. Among the “most important tasks for the Christian Nationalist is overcoming the idea that the world is going to end very soon,” Andrew Torba and Andrew Isker argue in their self-published book, Christian Nationalism.

That might come as a surprise to the average American evangelical, to whom Torba and Isker seem to be writing. But if God is helping evangelicals “take dominion in His name,” it doesn’t make sense for the world to end at any moment, they argue. Accepting an “eschatology of defeat” in which God raptures Christians away from advancing evil discourages effective political organizing. To win, Torba and Isker advise, Christians need a theology with room for victory.

Until the early 1800s, an optimistic, postmillennial eschatology—that believed in a golden age preceding Christ’s return—was the majority American perspective, as historians like Daniel Hummel, author of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, have documented.

After the horrors of the Civil War, however, that positive narrative of history fell out of favor, and Western hopes for historical progress further declined following World War I. Premillennialism’s catastrophic …

Continue reading…

The city some dismiss as “The Swamp” is fertile ground for evangelicals.

The District Church could be a Baptist church. The lead pastor, after all, grew up as a Southern Baptist missionary kid and still has a lot of ties to that denomination.

It could also be Anglican, with the way it leans into liturgy and the church calendar. Or a social justice church, with its focus on the inequality so visible in Washington, DC, or charismatic, with its emphasis on prayer and sensitivity to the Spirit.

Instead, the church is a little bit of all these things. It is nondenominational, pulling together different Christian streams to minister effectively to the young white professionals who have moved to work in the capital, as well as the upwardly mobile Nigerians and South Koreans who’ve emigrated to the seat of the United States government.

“The strength of being nondenominational is there are fewer barriers,” said Aaron Graham, who planted the church with his wife, Amy, 13 years ago. “It allows you to lead with a brand that is more city-focused and seeker-focused. We respond to the questions people are asking. ‘Do you believe in God? Do you believe in the Bible? Do you believe God is at work in the world today?’”

Nondenominational churches like The District Church have been multiplying across America, according to the 2020 US Religion Census. Their numbers today dwarf the mainline churches that once dominated American public life. There are six times more nondenominational churches than there are Episcopal congregations, and five times more than Presbyterian Church (USA). If nondenominational were a denomination, it would even be larger than the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest denomination in the US.

The popular image of these churches skews suburban. People …

Continue reading…

Decades ago, converts thought the country would be a refuge from the caste system. Today, they risk criminal charges and remain largely relegated to sanitation jobs.

Two Christian Pakistani teenagers, one 18 and another 14, were arrested in their homes in Lahore in May 2023 on charges of blasphemy after a policeman claimed he heard them being disrespectful of the Prophet Muhammad.

Among Muslim-majority countries, Pakistan has the strictest blasphemy laws. People jailed under these laws risk a sentence of life in prison and worse still, even death. Christians and other religious minorities make up a mere 4 percent of Pakistan’s population, but they account for about half of blasphemy charges.

As if navigating blasphemy laws weren’t hardship enough, Christians who live in major cities like Lahore are often relegated to poorly paid and hazardous jobs like sanitation work. The nation of Pakistan was created 76 years ago but during this time the lives of its Christian citizens have grown ever more difficult.

As a scholar of world religions, I have studied how the evolution of a hardline version of Islam in Pakistan has come to shape this country’s national identity and contributed to the persecution of its Christian minority.

Hindu converts to Christianity

Many Christians in Pakistan trace their religious affiliation to the activities of missionary societies during the 19th and early 20th centuries in the Punjab region of what was then British-ruled India.

Early evangelization efforts by both the British and Americans in Hindu-majority India focused on upper-caste Hindus. The evangelizers assumed that these elites would use their influence to convert members of the lower castes. However, this approach led to few converts.

The caste system is a tiered socioeconomic system that consigns people to a particular group, or caste. In Hinduism, this system is part of its religious worldview. …

Continue reading…

Rebekah Naylor, 79, is stepping down from International Mission Board.

The first time she retired, in 2002, Dr. Rebekah Naylor, a longtime missionary surgeon, came home to Texas after 35 years in India to care for her mother, who was ailing.

Along with doing that, she joined the faculty at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, where she taught surgery for eight years. She later became a consultant for Southern Baptist global relief and development work, taught at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and helped her church start a health clinic in Fort Worth, Texas.

This fall, the 79-year-old Naylor will retire again, stepping down from her role at the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board, where she’s helped promote medical missions around the world.

Now, for the first time in 50 years, she plans to take a proper break.

Not bad for someone who, as a teenager, never wanted to leave home and who was overwhelmed when she felt God’s calling on her life.

“Even going to college seemed like a mountain to me,” said Naylor in a recent interview, looking back over her career. “So how could I be a medical missionary?”

But once she makes up her mind—especially about something she believes God wants her to do—almost nothing stands in her way. That combination of faith and tenacity has served her well. Following that call to missions, Naylor, the daughter of a Baptist preacher turned beloved seminary president, graduated from Baylor University, then went to medical school at Vanderbilt, where she was told that women were not welcome in surgery.

But a missionary surgeon in Thailand, whom she met while visiting that country as a medical student, believed in her. While the faculty at the medical school thought her …

Continue reading…

Nigerian American Christian Yemi Mobolade went from pastor and community organizer to city leadership.

Yemi Mobolade moved to Colorado Springs to start a church. Thirteen years later, he became the city’s mayor.

Even though his position isn’t a pastoral one, his faith is central to his platform, as well as his experience in local ministries, nonprofits, businesses, and economic development. Mobolade ran a campaign on hope and optimism, taking his core values from Micah 6:8: “Do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God.”

“I want to disrupt and confuse this whole experience we call politics,” Mobolade said. “I want to call God’s people back to doing it well.”

A Nigerian American, Mobolade was sworn in last month as Colorado Springs’ first Black and first immigrant mayor, telling residents, “As your mayor, I pledge to live courageously, lead with empathy, and remain humble. As your mayor, I pledge to lead by example and create a city government that is transparent, accessible, and proactive. As your mayor, I will work tirelessly to ensure our city government represents the aspiration and needs of its residents.”

His new position builds on years of community involvement and unity-building in Colorado’s second-biggest city.

He also quoted Chris Tomlin’s “God of this City,” saying, “Greater things are yet to come, greater things are still to be done in this city.”

Before he landed in the evangelical hub that’s home to Focus on the Family, the Navigators, Young Life, and Biblica, Mobolade grew up in a family of faith in Nigeria. Both his parents were pastors, and he came to know the Lord at a young age.

“I am really proud of the work that they did with …

Continue reading…

My worries for my child’s physical health shouldn’t surpass my concern for his spiritual well-being.

The past few years have seen groundbreaking advances in biotechnology—particularly in the areas of human cell therapy and gene editing.

In March, experts gathered for the third global conference to discuss the ethical dilemmas involved in their work—less than five years after a Chinese geneticist announced he had performed “gene surgery” to prevent a set of twins from inheriting their father’s HIV disease. Currently, related research on screening embryos for polygenic disease, including type 1 diabetes, is hotly debated.

Some are concerned this capacity could someday lead to a kind of “techno-eugenics” and “designer babies,” where prospective parents could pick and choose their future child’s genetic traits—or simply edit out their child’s genetic disorders to set up for the best life possible.

As a mother with type 1 diabetes (T1D), I understand the underlying impulse to protect my child, even as I know he was created in God’s image. I live in a constant state of awareness and worry that my son might develop my own chronic illness.

Type 1 diabetes is a life-altering autoimmune disease with no cure. The most current research on its cause points to a strong genetic factor—complex and polygenic—which increases the risk of diabetes in children whose parents have T1D. In my own family, I was diagnosed 14 years after my sister, cementing the genetic link behind what felt like an otherwise random diagnosis. Today, if my son developed T1D, that link would be obvious: He inherited it from me.

Knowing my child’s inherited risk of T1D, I pray against it daily, asking the Lord to keep my toddler healthy. I’m eager to do anything that might …

Continue reading…

Phrases like “rejoice in the Lord” and “to live is Christ” in Mandarin reveal the wisdom of Paul’s exhortations.

As I was growing up in Malaysia, my parents would send me to Mandarin lessons after school. Despite their best efforts, I was particularly resistant to learning Chinese. Consequently, most Mandarin lessons went in one ear and out the other, particularly the ones about chengyu (成语).

The four-character idioms called chengyu are a popular way in Mandarin to state a meaning, moral, or teaching. Part of their appeal lies in their ability to express powerful ideas in a concise, proverbial manner.

In theory, each chengyu I labored to remember should have pressed the collective wisdom of our ancestors into my reluctant heart. But it was a lost cause. After all, how could a child reared on American cartoons and comics possibly value esoteric phrases like meng mu san qian (孟母三迁), which extols how Chinese philosopher Mencius’s mother moved to different neighborhoods three times to improve her child’s chances of success? My family’s move abroad when I was 10 years old ended further hopes of progress.

Now, pastoring a Chinese church in New Zealand and rediscovering my mother tongue as an adult, I still struggle to memorize chengyu. But when my virtual Mandarin-language teacher, who is based in China, brings up these idioms, his eyes brim with excitement as he shares not only their vernacular use but also their fascinating backstories.

Chengyu sum up stories, principles, or lessons from Chinese history. Some retell humorous folktales as proverbs for daily life. Others connect China’s 3,500-year-old written history, including pre-Qin dynasty writings like Confucian poetry classic Shijing (诗经), to our present-day hopes and anxieties.

Both ancient and modern chengyu are used in written conversations and taught in classes …

Continue reading…