Transubstantiate

Formerly Nyack College, the school was in bad financial shape for several years. The loss of accreditation earlier this week forced a reckoning.

Alliance University, a 140-year-old Christian & Missionary Alliance (CMA) school in New York City, will close on August 31 after years of financial struggles.

Known for much of its history as Nyack College, Alliance is the latest casualty in the financial crisis in Christian higher education . At least 18 Christian colleges have closed since the pandemic. But Alliance is also unique among US evangelical schools as one of the most ethnically diverse, with a student population that this year was 34 percent Latino, 30 percent Black, 11 percent international, and 9 percent Asian.

The parent denomination of the school, the CMA, began in New York City in 1880, and Alliance was founded not long after as an educational institution for missionaries and those in ministry. Alliance graduates like pastor A. R. Bernard lead many New York churches.

The CMA provided significant financial support to the school when it was in trouble in recent years. It is considering continuing the programs of Alliance Theological Seminary, which is part of the university.

The school’s board voted on Thursday night to shut down Alliance University’s operations, and school leadership informed staff, faculty, and students on Friday and began layoffs. Alumni, even knowing the financial straits of the school, used the same word over and over in interviews: “shock.”

“This is very sad,” said Chris Smith, who graduated in 2010, worked on staff at the school in various capacities, and served on the school’s alumni board. “The texts, calls, FaceTimes, DMs [direct messages] I’m getting is a lot.”

“They had something so special,” said alumna Heather Beers-Dimitriadis. “That school changed …

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Ruling: Colorado can’t “force all manner of artists, speechwriters, and others whose services involve speech to speak what they do not believe.”

The US Supreme Court delivered a First Amendment victory Friday to a Christian designer who objects to creating custom websites for same-sex weddings.

The high court ruled in a 6–3 opinion the state of Colorado would violate the free-speech rights of Lorie Smith by requiring her to design a website for a ceremony that conflicts with her conscience. The decision provided an important legal win for the rights of Christians and other faith adherents in a series of cases involving the intersection of religious freedom and same-sex marriage.

In the majority opinion, Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch said the state “seeks to force an individual to speak in ways that align with its views but defy her conscience about a matter of major significance.”

As the Supreme Court “has long held, the opportunity to think for ourselves and to express those thoughts freely is among our most cherished liberties and part of what keeps our Republic strong,” he wrote. “The First Amendment envisions the United States as a rich and complex place where all persons are free to think and speak as they wish, not as the government demands.”

The high court’s decision broke along ideological/political lines. Nominees by Republican presidents made up the majority, while justices nominated by Democrats were in dissent. Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joined Gorsuch in the majority. Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.

The head of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) applauded the justices’ action.

“If the government can compel an individual …

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After 16 years and plenty of controversy, the Philippine Bible Society completes its Pinoy Version.

When the Philippines Bible Society (PBS) first released the New Testament translated into Taglish—a mix of Tagalog and English used by urban dwellers in the Philippines—five years ago, Filipino Christians were in an uproar on social media. Many decried it as irreverent or blasphemous to translate the Word of God into a colloquial language more commonly seen on the Internet or heard at the supermarket.

So Anicia del Corro, a PBS translation consultant who spearheaded the project, started holding talks, giving interviews, and writing articles outlining how her team conducted research and painstakingly translated the New Testament from the original Greek. She stressed that the Bible’s target audience was Gen Z and milennials in Metro Manila, a region made up of 16 cities and 13 million people.

In contrast, when PBS launched the entire Bible translated into Taglish earlier this month called Ang Bible Pinoy Version, Del Corro felt relieved that the burden was no longer on her to do the explaining: At a launch party attended by nearly 500 people, pastors and leaders shared their personal experience using and preaching from the Pinoy Version. Jayson Genanda, pastor of Malaya House Church, said that when he leads a Bible study he makes sure to look at the Taglish translation to get the meaning of a passage.

“The users themselves are the ones promoting it,” Del Corro said. “They know people who can’t understand the Word in other translations can use Ang Bible Pinoy Version.” (Ang mean “the” in Tagalog and Pinoy is an informal term referring to the Philippines or Filipinos.)

Ang Bible Pinoy Version, which took 16 years to complete, is the first completed Bible translation in …

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The humble pastor made the Word easy to understand for modern Japanese and sought to heal the “bitter enmity” with Korea.

Reiji Oyama, the translator of the Modern Japanese Bible and one of the founders of the Japan Evangelical Association, died on May 16 at the age of 96 in Tokyo.

He started translating the Bible in 1960, beginning with the letter to Philemon and moving on to publishing the entire New Testament in Japanese in 1978. In Japanese, it was known as Gendaijin no Seisho or “Bible for Modern Man.” But Oyama preferred using this English title: “The Understandable Bible.”

He believed most people don’t read the Bible because they think it is too difficult. The difficulty is not the Bible itself, though, but how it has been translated, Oyama said. He argued that most Japanese versions of Scripture strove for faithfulness to the biblical text but, unfortunately, disregarded cultural differences.

Oyama believed that it was important that the meaning of the biblical text, as revealed to its original audience, should be equally clear in the Japanese language. As a result, his translations were often paraphrases rather than word-for-word translations.

“My father showed me the honest, humble faith of a child every day,” his daughter Megumi Okano said at his funeral. “I can see the faith of a humble little child who accepts what is taught by the Bible and believes that it is true.”

Reiji Oyama was born in Tokyo on January 15, 1927. His father, Tōji, was a manager at the Mitsukoshi department store and later opened a used bookstore, while his mother, Ikuko, was a housewife. When World War II began, Oyama became a high school cadet in the Japanese Imperial Army Accounting Academy, which trained elite officers in college-level courses, martial arts, and horsemanship.

After the war, Oyama entered Waseda …

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No less than her martyred husband, she could be inspiring and frustrating all at once.

Elisabeth Elliot was one of the most extraordinary and controversial evangelicals of the post–World War II era. Anyone even marginally affiliated with the American missionary community knows the stirring and tragic story of Elisabeth and her first husband, Jim Elliot, who was killed in Ecuador by Waorani tribesmen in 1956.

Perhaps even more remarkably, Elisabeth Elliot and Rachel Saint (whose brother Nate also died in the attack) went to live among the Waorani in 1958. Before returning to the US, Elliot had become one of the best-known evangelicals in America, with coverage of Jim Elliot’s death and of her endurance on the mission field appearing in major national outlets like Life magazine.

Lucy S. R. Austen’s Elisabeth Elliot: A Life is a biography worthy of its subject, diving deep into Elliot’s vast body of correspondence and other writings to present an exceptionally detailed and sometimes conflicted portrait. About three-quarters of the book covers Elliot’s story up to 1963, when she returned to the US from South America. By that time, Elliot was a bestselling author whose now-classic books Through Gates of Splendor (1957) and Shadow of the Almighty: The Life and Testament of Jim Elliot (1958) were fast becoming standard reading among evangelicals.

Biographers of figures like Elliot always grapple with finding the right tone. Some Christian authors choose a hagiographical approach, presenting their subjects in a holy, inspirational light. In recent years, growing numbers of iconoclastic authors—especially academics—have gone to the other extreme, reviling once-revered evangelical figures and judging them irredeemable due to their complicity in various sins.

Austen happily inhabits …

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Evangelicals in medicine won’t be subjected to the contested federal requirement that faced years of legal backlash.

The Biden administration will not appeal an Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals decision from December 2022 that blocked the so-called transgender mandate.

The mandate was an attempt by the Biden administration to define sex to include “gender identity” for the purposes of Health and Human Services (HHS) regulations. Critics say the rule would have required doctors, clinics, and hospitals to perform procedures to which they object and insurance companies to pay for such procedures.

The Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) president Brent Leatherwood welcomed the news.

“The Biden administration’s decision to back down from the transgender mandate marks a significant victory in safeguarding the rights of medical professionals to operate in a manner consistent with their deepest held beliefs,” Leatherwood said in written comments.

“This is an important development we should take note of because it not only represents a win for conscience rights but also furthers efforts to shield vulnerable individuals who should never become pawns in the sexual revolution.”

The rule was first introduced in 2016 during the Obama administration’s implementation of a portion of the Affordable Care Act.

According to the ERLC, the 2016 HHS rule required doctors to perform gender-transition procedures for any child referred by a mental health professional, even if the doctor believed the treatment or hormone therapy could harm the child.’

Becket, a religious liberty law group, has shepherded lawsuits filed by medical groups opposed to the rule, as those suits have made their way through the courts.

“After multiple defeats in court, …

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Our ambition should take a back seat to our conscience.

The late pastor Eugene Peterson, in a letter to his son, also a pastor, wrote that the primary problem for the Christian leader is to take responsibility not just for the ends but also for the “ways and means” by which we guide people to pursue those ends. “The devil’s three temptations of Jesus all had to do with ways and means,” he wrote. “Every one of the devil’s goals was excellent. The devil had an unsurpassed vision statement. But the ways and means were incompatible with the ends.”

As Peterson put it, the discipleship that Jesus calls us to is one “both personally and corporately conducted in which the insides and outsides are continuous. A life in which we are as careful and attentive to the how as to the what.”

This is because, Peterson counseled, “if we are going to live the Jesus life, we simply have to do it the Jesus way—he is, after all, the Way as well as the Truth and Life.” There are no emergency escape clauses from the way of the Cross.

What seems to be popular in this moment is not so much a prosperity gospel as a depravity gospel. In this depravity gospel, appeals to character or moral norms are met not with appeals of “Not guilty!” but with dismissals of “Get real!”

Yet this depravity gospel tries to lure us in. It doesn’t matter if you get to it by adopting it outright, with glee at cruelty and vulgarity, or if it drives you to the kind of cynicism that doesn’t ever expect anything better.

That way lies nihilism. You will find yourself in situations, and you may be in one of those situations already, where you have a responsibility for holding an institution accountable. Maybe it’s simply …

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Spiritual abuse survivors who join a new congregation still need to heal from their hurt.

People are leaving the church today for numerous reasons—from spiritual or sexual abuse by leaders, church division, legalism, or hyper-politicization. A recent Barna survey found that two of the top sources of doubt for most believers are negative past experiences with a religious institution and the hypocrisy of religious people.

But not all who’ve had a bad experience with a faith community choose to leave church or Christianity altogether. Some remain in the congregation that wounded them, often held there by treasured relationships or a sense of loyalty to the institution. Others attempt to hit the reset button by starting afresh in a new church, denomination, or tradition.

In any case, those past wounds don’t disappear. In fact, new church experiences layered on top of old may exacerbate the pain for some of those who stay. Today’s pews are full of people who bear scars—or still-oozing wounds—from church hurt. We often talk about why people should stay in church, but sometimes that’s the wrong question. Instead, I think we need to talk more about how we stay in church.

I’ve had to answer this question for myself as a survivor of church hurt. I’m now attending a different congregation, but the journey to stay connected to the local church in the wake of the abuse hasn’t been easy.

I’m also learning from how others have navigated their relationship with the local church after being wounded by their brothers and sisters in Christ. And what I’ve found is that those who choose to stay connected to a local faith community despite their trauma have wise insights about trust, forgiveness, and discernment—which are valuable not just for those who’ve …

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Self-centered testimonies have been abused. But not sharing our story can be equally selfish.

I miss the word I.

Some have sworn off saying “I” because we’ve abused it. Instead of listening, we’ve spoken for others as if our personal experience is universal. The word I can be shamed and scrutinized: Who are you to center yourself? and What makes your personal anecdotes relevant or reliable? In other circles, Christians overreacted to the extreme of a hyper-individualistic faith by leaning toward a hyper-collectivized vision of religious belief.

Yet the reality is that healthy faith communities are made up of a diverse array of individuals who each have unique, distinct, and personal experiences of God. And perhaps what people crave most today is the language we often keep to ourselves—our stories of direct encounter with God.

Eugene Peterson says that the “language of personal intimacy and relationship” is “our primary language,” which we “use to express and develop our human condition.” Thus “we must become proficient” in “the speech of love and response and intimacy.”

While the language of information and motivation “are no less important in the life of faith,” he says, they become “thin and gaunt” if not embedded in personal language. Informative talk can be “reduced to list making,” while motivational talk can be “reduced to crass manipulations”—both of which keep us from actual shared life with God and one another.

While it might seem selfless to avoid using I, there’s a surprising kind of ego in never sharing our own experience. To withhold our own stories is to withhold intimacy and opportunities for deeper interpersonal connection. In fact, sharing our individual …

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Officials blame fighters targeting “ethnoreligious minorities as well as houses of worship and religious ceremonies.”

At least 450 Christians have died in a series of attacks on Christian villages in three northcentral Nigerian states since May, according to reports from religious freedom advocates.

Christian death tolls include at least 300 in several attacks in Plateau state spanning May 15–17, according to reports from Morning Star News (MSN) and CSW (Christian Solidarity Worldwide); more than 100 in attacks spanning May and June in Benue state, MSN and the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) reported; and 43 in Nasarawa state in mid-May, MSN reported.

Tens of thousands were displaced, according to MSN and CSW. Whole villages, dozens of church buildings and thousands of homes reportedly were destroyed. Grain was looted.

MSN quoted Christian leaders in blaming the attacks on militant Fulani herdsmen.

“As our people are fleeing, herders are occupying these areas and grazing freely on our farms,” MSN quoted a press statement signed by Samuel Door and Ephraim Zuai of the Shitile Development Association in Benue. “Though due to the fear of general insecurity it is difficult to move from village to village to gather exact statistics, hordes of lives have been horrendously eliminated in several villages across the land, such that the whole land is thrown into wailing and mourning.”

USCIRF referenced many of the attacks as ethnonationalist in a report it released June 9.

“Nigeria is home to a plethora of armed actors committing violence with dire implications for religious freedom. In several regions of the country assailants have targeted ethnoreligious minorities as well as houses of worship and religious ceremonies with violence,” USCIRF said in the report, “Ethnonationalism …

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