Transubstantiate

Americans can now independently resettle those fleeing war and persecution. Christian resettlement agencies are largely on board.

Last year, Mark and Jackie Sawyer cosigned a lease for a couple they’d known for a short time—because the couple had recently arrived from a refugee camp overseas.

The Sawyers didn’t realize the headaches and the friendship that would come with joining a group of friends from their Washington, DC, church to sponsor the resettlement of Afghan refugees. They ended up raising $30,000 for the couple, who were expecting their first baby, and staying in relationship with them beyond the initial three-month resettlement period.

This week the pilot program the Sawyers took part in has officially launched through the US State Department, allowing individuals—rather than resettlement agencies alone—to commit to sponsor a refugee for resettlement.

Through Welcome Corps, groups of at least five Americans can apply to sponsor a refugee together and commit to raising at least $2,275 per refugee. For 90 days they would help refugees transition by securing housing, finding jobs, and enrolling children in school.

“You don’t have to have it all figured out,” said Sawyer. “It’s certainly not easy, but it’s probably more doable than you think.”

Refugee resettlement typically goes through nine nonprofit resettlement agencies. These groups, mostly faith-based organizations such as the evangelical agency World Relief, contract with the government to assist and support refugees through their first months in the United States—then often extend the help longer term through the groups’ own funding.

The agencies have been hit by the steep decline in refugee admittances to the US over the past severalyears, but they have decades of experience in this work and are preparing …

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Just like being “born again,” the symbol of baptism is a way of life, not a repetitive ritual.

Since I was baptized at the age of eight by my pastor father, I haven’t really lingered on the meaning of baptism as part of my devotional life.

It was a one-time event that marked a spiritual milestone in my life, and over time, I’ve lost some connection to that moment. I considered the significance of baptism as a church ordinance or sacrament only much later when watching other people get baptized.

As a pastor in a faith tradition that practices baptism for believers, I am having an increased number of conversations with people who wonder about their baptisms. I am not alone. The uncertainty of COVID-19 seems to have only multiplied these questions. In their confusion, many sincere believers feel the need to get baptized again to recapture the feeling of being cleansed through the work of Christ.

If we couple the cultural moment with the beginning of a new year when people are considering a deeper commitment to God, this longing increases.

I have talked with many who share this angst. It can lead to some real confusion. Many wonder whether these feelings undermine the legitimacy of their baptism experiences or even their salvation.

In reality, the amount of time since you were baptized doesn’t diminish its significance, and there is no biblical evidence that any genuine believer needs to get baptized more than once. In my own Southern Baptist tradition, a “rededication” of faith does not warrant rebaptism.

However, as a symbol of new birth into eternal life with Christ, I believe the significance of baptism should play a more prominent role in our devotional lives. We can recall the feeling of being baptized without returning to the water by embracing the spiritual exercise of ongoing submersion. …

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Latest report on Christian persecution finds Nigeria and Sub-Saharan Africa the epicenter of jihadist violence, while China leads effort to redefine religious rights.

More than 5,600 Christians were killed for their faith last year. More than 2,100 churches were attacked or closed.

More than 124,000 Christians were forcibly displaced from their homes because of their faith, and almost 15,000 became refugees.

Sub-Saharan Africa—the epicenter of global Christianity—is now also the epicenter of violence against Christians, as Islamist extremism has spread well beyond Nigeria.

And North Korea is back at No. 1, according to the 2023 World Watch List (WWL), the latest annual accounting from Open Doors of the top 50 countries where it is most dangerous and difficult to be a Christian.

The concerning tallies of martyrdoms and church attacks are actually lower than in last year’s report. But Open Doors emphasizes they are “an absolute minimum figure,” and is quick to note the data decline does not suggest real improvements in religious freedom.

For example, the reduction in church closures was “due in large part” to Chinese officials having closed almost 7,000 churches over the prior two years. And the drop of Afghanistan from No. 1 last year to No. 9 this year “offers little cheer” because it’s driven by how most Afghan Christians “went deep into hiding or fled overseas” after the Taliban’s takeover.

Overall, and same as last year, 360 million Christians live in nations with high levels of persecution or discrimination. That’s 1 in 7 Christians worldwide, including 1 in 5 believers in Africa, 2 in 5 in Asia, and 1 in 15 in Latin America.

And for only the third time in three decades of tracking, all 50 nations scored high enough to register “very high” persecution levels on Open Doors’ matrix of more …

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Clint Clifton coached Christians to multiply and fulfill the Great Commission.

Church planter Clint Clifton died in a plane crash in North Georgia on January 12. He was 43.

Clifton trained, coached, and encouraged an untold number of church planters and was considered “a genius, with an encyclopedic knowledge of church dynamics,” according to Trevin Wax, vice president of research and resource development for the Southern Baptist North American Mission Board (NAMB). Clifton specialized in the pragmatic aspects of church planting as NAMB’s senior director of research, he wrote three widely used handbooks, and he hosted the podcast New Churches.

Clifton described himself as a practical person who was motivated by the gospel to do impractical things. He said when he felt beaten down by the “hard truth” of how difficult it is to start healthy churches, he would return to Jesus’ command in Matthew 29:19 to go and make disciples.

“What I couldn’t get away from was the stark reality of the Great Commission,” Clifton said in 2021. “No matter your size or your budget or your power, every church has a responsibility to enact and take action on the Great Commission.”

He planted his first church in northern Virginia at age 26. Nine months later—before the congregation was considered stable—the church planted another church. Pillar Church went on to start another and another, every year for the next 15 years.

Clifton was at the NAMB headquarters in Alpharetta, Georgia, last week to talk about training, equipping, and sending out more church planters around the United States. His private plane crashed on the way home.

Flight records show he took off from the Cherokee County Airport in Canton, Georgia, and planned to fly his 1971 Piper PA-28-180 …

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Chosen by Geethanjali Tupps, CT Global books editor.

Reading the Gospel of John through Palestinian Eyes

Yohanna Katanacho

Palestinian theologian Yohanna Katanacho describes Jesus as “shaped by first-century Judaism” but also as one who “redefined” much of what it meant to be Jewish. Katanacho’s commentary on John unpacks the implications of Jesus inhabiting this identity when it comes to understanding the Israeli-Palestinian crisis and the salvation of the world.

African Hermeneutics

Elizabeth Mburu

Kenyan New Testament scholar Elizabeth Mburu encourages African Christians and those ministering in an African context to explore Hebrew poetic parallelism and Paul’s letters through symbols rooted in her culture. She imagines four legs of a stool as the foundations for biblical interpretation: a text’s parallels to the African context, its theological context, its literary context, and its historical and cultural context.

The Wayfarer : Perspectives on Forced Migration and Transformational Community Development

Barnabé Anzuruni Msabah

A refugee himself, Barnabé Anzuruni Msabah believes that forced migration is a central theme of Scripture. He’s interested in how it has tested and refined people’s faith and how Jesus models for his followers how to care for the marginalized. His descriptions of the current struggles of refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi remind readers of the urgency of his message.

Enabling Hearts: A Primer for Disability-Inclusive Churches

Edited by Leow Wen Pin

Singaporean Christian disability activist Leow Wen Pin edits this anthology of essays that challenge churches to consider whether their physical spaces, legal policies, and language from the pulpit truly welcome …

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In the ongoing tension between religious liberty and LGBT rights, the Department of Education and CCCU win one victory.

A federal judge in Oregon on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit challenging religious exemptions under Title IX. The decision comes as a win for Christian colleges that had joined the US Department of Education (DOE) in defending the exemptions in areas where their theological convictions on LGBT issues conflicted with the anti-discrimination law.

A group of 44 current and former students at religious schools filed a class-action suit arguing that the religious exemptions were incompatible with LGBT rights, and that LGBT individuals were exposed to “unsafe conditions” at religious schools. The lawsuit alleged that through the exemptions, LGBT discrimination was effectively “endorsed by the federal government.”

The students challenging the exemptions were from 31 schools, 22 of which were part of the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU), including Baylor University, Oklahoma Christian University, Moody Bible Institute, and Fuller Theological Seminary. The CCCU joined the lawsuit, Hunter vs. US Department of Education, on the side of the DOE in May 2021.

Though the CCCU advocates a sexual ethic of marriage between a man and a woman, the CCCU in court filings denied that its schools “abuse or provide unsafe conditions to thousands of LGBTQ+ students, or injure them mind, body, or soul, but rather seek to minister, support, and care for them physically, emotionally, socially, and spiritually.”

In the case documentation, LGBT students stated how they had been mistreated at religious schools, in some cases including conversion therapy. The judge acknowledged those accounts but did not find a legal basis for abolishing the federal exemption.

“Plaintiffs have failed to demonstrate …

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New voices, resources, and studies focus on wives’ experiences in the bedroom.

Juli Slattery, a clinical psychologist with a background in Christian ministry, has spent the past decade teaching couples to “reclaim God’s design for sexuality.”

She felt led to start her organization, Authentic Intimacy, after encountering so many evangelical women struggling with sexual brokenness and distorted expectations around marital sex, often stemming from what they were taught in churches.

“Growing up in the church, many times I heard sex talked about from men, and I heard it talked about from women, but I realized that my husband and other men had never heard it talked about from women,” she said. “I do think women need to be a part of this conversation, but not just teaching women—also teaching men.”

Pastors—oftentimes men—lead premarital counseling, and many have penned best-selling books on sex and marriage (such as Gary Thomas, Tim Keller, Matt Chandler, Francis Chan, and Paul David Tripp). While such books, designed for a general Christian audience, are sometimes written by a husband-and-wife team, books with a sole female author are usually targeted to female readers.

Slattery is among a wave of female leaders, including author Sheila Gregoire, who are shifting the evangelical conversation on sex and marriage by speaking out to both sexes.

Armed with new research on evangelical women’s health and sexuality, they are bringing women’s experiences and perspectives to the forefront, offering a course correction to what they see as incomplete or harmful teachings on sex.

In her survey of 20,000 evangelical women, Gregoire found that 20 percent of them reported experiencing marital rape. She also found that Christian women experience twice the …

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Our Christian institutions can’t rebuild credibility if we hide our failings.

This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

“People don’t trust their leaders anymore,” the man said to me. “I think The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill is the problem.”

He was referring to the documentary podcast series by my colleague Mike Cosper. I said, “I actually agree with you, as long as we take the italics out of that statement.” The problem is the situation that led to the rise and fall of Mars Hill and other incidents like it—not those who told the story about what happened.

This man’s lament is not unreasonable. Who among us is not exhausted by the constant revelations of scandals and abuses and griftings and cover-ups within the church, especially its evangelical wing? In that weariness, some would say, “Why don’t we talk about all the good things the church does instead of the bad?” The problem with this approach is that it leaves us with no Good News left to tell.

“The church is glorious,” some might say. “Why don’t we show that glory instead of bashing the church by talking about all these bad things?” I agree that the church carries the glory of God and that we should make this known so the world might behold his glory. But the glory showing and the truth telling are one task, not two.

To the church at Corinth, the apostle Paul wrote extensively about glory, specifically referencing Moses’ encounter with the radiance of God’s glory on the mountain. It was a glory so brilliant that Moses put a veil over his face afterward so the people wouldn’t be overwhelmed by it. What we have now in the gospel, Paul argues, is even greater: “And we all, who with unveiled …

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Sin and crime are no different in God’s eyes—so why do we forgive one and not the other?

For most Christians, “legalism” is something to avoid—except when we’re talking about the law of the land.

Consider how we usually tell the story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1–11). This woman was obviously a sinner. She had broken God’s commandments. But when the scribes and Pharisees brought her to Jesus, he did not condemn her. Instead, he exposed the self-righteous hypocrisy of her accusers: “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

The moral of the story? Mercy triumphs over judgment.

True enough. But when we set aside our religious jargon for a moment, we find ourselves telling an even more surprising story—a story, it turns out, about crime and law enforcement.

I had read this passage countless times, but it was only while preparing to teach a course in prison that it occurred to me that this woman really had broken the law. Adultery may not be a crime in our world, but it was in first-century Judea—under both Jewish and Roman law. To put it in modern terms, the adulterous woman was a criminal and Jesus helped her evade punishment.

“Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone.” As I thought of my students in prison, Jesus’ words took on a new layer of meaning. The grace Jesus offered did not just challenge the legalism of her accusers. It also challenged my own attachment to the retributive logic of law and order. Here was a story of God’s boundless love for sinners, yes—but also a story of God’s redemptive grace for those we call criminals.

Just imagine replacing adultery with a different crime, one that violates our own laws, and notice how troubling …

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Ralph Ellison’s novel depicts the quest for personal dignity in a society determined to deny it.

“I am a man.” On February 12, 1968, over two hundred Black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, bore this revolutionary message written on signs and embodied in their protest against the work conditions that had led to the death of two fellow workers. The strike drew the support of Martin Luther King Jr., who would give the last days of his life to this cause. “You are here,” King proclaimed to those on strike, “to demand that Memphis will see the poor.” One of the sanitation workers described the motive and message years later: “We felt we would have to let the city know that because we were sanitation workers, we were human beings.”

Christianity is no stranger to the importance of “I am” statements. God’s self-disclosure declared him to be I am (Ex. 3:14). Through seven “I am” statements, John’s gospel explains who Jesus is, the eternal Word made flesh. There is, then, both theological origin and depth to the “I am a man” declaration of those workers. The declaration is a demand to be recognized and seen as fully human and made in God’s image.

The image of God is like a doctrinal diamond, refracting multiple truths about humanity. Yet much standard Protestant theological reflection does not account for the doctrinal elephant in the room: What does it mean to live as an image bearer when other image bearers try to limit your existence?

Read through a theological lens, the classics of Black literature, like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, can point us toward a rich and profound answer. Ellison’s attention to the embodied experience of invisibility pushes us into a deeper recognition that the imago Dei is a visceral …

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