Transubstantiate

Pastors, leaders, and members pray and volunteer in the city’s communities amid a surge of COVID-19.

It had been a week since the beginning of the lockdown. The day after he joined the neighborhood volunteer team, pastor Xue of GB Church received a white one-piece protective suit, a pair of shoe covers, a pair of gloves, and a face mask. (Xue and others throughout this piece have been given pseudonyms for their own safety. So have the church names.)

After 8:30 p.m. that day, he was responsible for collecting the garbage placed in the doorways of 72 homes on the 16th to 27th floors of the building. It took him about an hour to move nearly 150 kilograms of trash. The following day, the 150 bottles of alcohol and thousands of masks he ordered through online group purchase rapidly met the demand, and the community volunteers quickly became acquainted with him.

When they saw him at a community meeting, the local aunties and uncles immediately switched from Shanghainese to Mandarin with a strong Shanghai accent in their chatting to ensure unhindered communication. Xue’s newly added WeChat friends are all neighbors in the community. Neighbors are no longer an abstract concept or a group of people in the administrative or geographic sense, but people of all types, with their own temperaments.

In another area of the city, morning prayer meetings at the CL Church had seen a significant increase in attendance since the lockdown. While the city’s early risers were busy ordering groceries on their mobile apps, more than 20 Christians and seekers began online worship.

“With 15 minutes of Bible sharing and 15 minutes of prayer every morning, we encourage people to pray first after they wake up and before they do anything else. As Martin Luther said, if you wait till you finish everything else and then pray, you are actually …

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The number of full-time students at the evangelical seminary has dropped 44 percent in 20 years.

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) has cut nearly $1 million in spending, hoping to head off financial disaster as the seminary’s enrollment numbers decline.

President Nicholas Perrin told faculty and staff on Thursday that the suburban Chicago seminary has to make some “pretty fundamental changes in how we go about our business plan and mission.”

Trinity International University (TIU)—which includes an undergraduate school with two campuses, a graduate school, and a law school, in addition to the influential evangelical seminary—is concluding the first part of a three-phase process of “creating efficiencies.”

The first phase is focused on the seminary. It includes “reshaping the personnel” so that TEDS can carry out its mission “in a revenue-effective way,” Perrin said in a recording obtained by CT.

TEDS, never a big school, has long had an outsized influence on evangelicalism. The seminary made a name for itself in the defense of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy and served as the birthplace for Sojourners magazine. It was the institutional home for theologians D. A. Carson, Wayne Grudem, Clark H. Pinnock, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Bruce Ware, and has produced scholars such as Scot McKnight, Douglas Moo, Mark Noll, and David F. Wells.

What happens at the Deerfield, Illinois, school reverberates in evangelical institutions across the country.

Last week, the seminary eliminated at least seven faculty positions. A spokesman for the school declined to give exact numbers. Multiple professors, speaking on the condition that they not be named in this article because they are not authorized to speak for TEDS, said two faculty members have taken early retirement, three …

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Pastors weigh in on the critical formulation of the sacrament.

A Catholic priest resigned in February after learning that 20 years of baptisms were invalid because he said, “We baptize you” instead of “I baptize you.”

We asked a range of evangelical ministers about the importance of baptismal words.

Yes, but …

I believe the “formulation of the words” used during baptism is important. The words should not convey something false about God or teach something inaccurate regarding the meaning of baptism. However, I don’t believe saying, “We baptize you” rather than “I baptize you” invalidates 20 years of baptism. Of course, as a Baptist, I also don’t believe pedobaptism is the proper application of baptism. Even so, God judges our hearts.

As a pastor, I affirm the significance of how clergy leads a sacrament. The words, the context, and even the posture of those who gather for the sacrament have significance. But we must never forget that the sacrament of baptism is the action of God.

I do believe that for the sake of the unity of the church and the teaching of the flock, those administering sacrament should strive to be as faithful to the universal formularies as possible. When we depart, I am hopeful God’s grace covers our stutters and feeble understandings.

Not exactly

The words definitely matter, but the precise formulation can’t be determinative, otherwise we would all need to use the Greek or Galilean dialect of Aramaic that Jesus spoke. Wonderfully, Pentecost sanctified the use of every language to speak words of grace! This doesn’t open the door to a sort of paraphrasing that obscures meaning, but it does open the door to a wideness of ways by which grace may be “exhibited and conferred.” …

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There are no easy answers to the spiritual’s convicting questions.

I’m standing in the big house at a plantation in Nashville. It’s an impressive structure. Big white pillars. A long, wide porch is dotted with wooden rocking chairs—all of them filled now with tourists like us, people waiting for a tour guide to walk them around the grounds and recount the day-to-day life of a slaveholding family’s massive operation—all 5,400 acres run by 136 enslaved Black men, women, and children.

Still, inside the grand house, a tourist’s hand goes up and a wearying question gets asked. “But weren’t some slave owners good?” The room grows quiet. I pull my little grandchildren closer. But the tourist persists: “Didn’t they take good care of their slaves? After all, they’d invested in them.”

I’ve heard such questions before—perhaps we all have. Still, I stifle a groan. To feel better perhaps, some still yield to the common impulse to look away from horror, to sanitize history. To diminish the reality of evil.

But were you there?

Piercing Questions

This year, Passion Week will likely find our same tone-deaf singing of one of Christianity’s most boldly convicting songs. Most of us may sing it—with its piercing questions—without a lick of context or historical reflection. Sadly, some may sing, too, without deep pondering of the visceral realities of the Cross.

Yet it’s at the Cross, when we dare to look, that we see Jesus most needing us to be fully there. Except for his mother, Mary, and a few other faithful, stalwart women—who stayed during his entire ordeal—Christ comes to history’s most pivotal moment joined only by mocking Roman soldiers and two convicted thieves.

Just days before, …

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Though American churches are trying out the art of making pysanka, Ukrainian Christians say it is not a religious tradition.

To do the ancient Ukrainian practice of pysanky, you need a strong, smooth egg and a lot of patience.

North American churches are taking up the delicate egg decorating art form, dating back thousands of years, as a way of showing solidarity with and raising money for war-torn Ukraine ahead of Easter.

A number of Episcopal churches in the United States have hosted pysanky events as a “form of prayer” for Ukraine. A Catholic community in Ontario, Canada, said it would begin doing pysanky on Sunday afternoons as “a contemplative activity offered for our suffering world.” A church in Connecticut planned an afternoon decorating pysanka eggs (pysanka is the singular form of pysanky) combined with a prayer vigil.

Several American churches have interpreted the Ukrainian cultural practice spiritually: that it has the power to keep evil at bay, or that the egg symbolizes new life and Christ’s resurrection, or that it is a “Lenten tradition.”

But according to Ukrainian Christians, the art of pysanky does not have spiritual significance on its own. It is a pre-Christian cultural practice from the region.

Joan Brander, a Ukrainian Canadian pysanky artist who has written books on the art form, told CT she considers the tradition purely Ukrainian with no religious connotation.

Zlata Zubenko, a Ukrainian American and a Christian, also considers the art of pysanky as more of a folk tradition and a symbol of Ukrainian national identity.

Some Ukrainian sources noted that the cultural practice is more associated with Orthodox Easter traditions.

Pastor Michael Cherenkov, who grew up in Ukraine and now pastors a Baptist church in Washington state, said evangelicals don’t usually make pysanka eggs as a religious …

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He preached a nonreligious Christianity that emphasized authenticity, creativity, and the leading of the Holy Spirit.

Gerald Coates, a church leader who envisioned a new way of doing church, free from formality and the trappings of tradition, has died at 78.

Coates was influential in spreading charismatic renewal in the United Kingdom and helped develop the house church movement into the British New Church Movement. Through his preaching, prophesying, and provocations, he pushed Christians to be more creative, be more receptive to the Holy Spirit, and understand themselves more as pioneers than settlers.

“God will not be tied to 17th century language, 18th century hymns, 19th century buildings, and 20th century religious inflexibility,” he once declared. “God is changing his church. We are part of that change!”

Coates co-organized the first March for Jesus in London in 1987 and founded Pioneer, a network of churches that prioritize the presence of God and seek to be catalysts for Christian unity. Currently there are about 60 churches in the network.

“We will be forever grateful to Gerald for birthing Pioneer and creating a family for activists, creatives and those who didn’t always fit in mainstream or conventional church settings,” wrote Pioneer UK leader Ness Wilson and Pioneer international leader Billy Kennedy in a tribute to Coates.

They said that Coates “continued to live up to the name of the network he founded” to the end, “clearing the ground of unnecessary religious baggage and making a way for what God was doing.”

Kennedy described Coates as “part of a small group of dreamers and schemers … who set out to ‘restore the church’” and “preached a brand of non-religious Christianity that offended and delighted in equal measure.”

Evangelical …

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Whether it’s atheism in the classroom or high-pressure academic environments, parents struggle to find a space that best serves their children.

In his early teens, Huang Jian began to withdraw into himself. (Huang and others throughout this piece have been given pseudonyms for their own safety.) A once-happy child, the Chinese middle-schooler gradually became silent. Jian’s father, Huang Yuzhou, blamed the behavioral shift on school “trauma,” a high-pressure environment that sapped his will to learn and engage. Uncertain how to help, the family made a drastic decision: They would homeschool their son, an educational choice currently illegal in China.

“Many Christians, by faith, have decided to give their children a Christian education,” said Huang, a house church pastor in northern China. “They do this in order to prevent their children from losing their faith, and to give them a better education that is in line with spiritual growth.”

Chinese Christian parents raising their children to follow Christ in a society that opposes their beliefs must confront the question of how to educate and spiritually nurture the next generation without a blueprint. Chinese state school curriculum teaches that God does not exist and compares religious belief to foolish superstition. Many first-generation Chinese Christians struggle in discerning how to pass their faith to their children, especially as they face increasing religious restrictions.

Huang’s son has now graduated. His wife continues to homeschool their youngest child, who is in early elementary school. Huang himself is currently jailed on charges related to his own religious activities. He and his family were inspired to try homeschooling after they learned more about Christian education and hoped it could help their son through his mental health crisis.

“We were watching …

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Hate speech rises as evangelicals grow more prominent on social media, amid ongoing difficulties to train pastors and register churches.

Last year, Protestant Christians in Turkey suffered no physical attacks.

There were no reported violations of their freedom to share their faith.

And there was a sharp reduction in foreign missionaries denied residency.

But not all is well, according to the 2021 Human Rights Violation Report, issued March 18 by the nationally registered Association of Protestant Churches (APC).

Hate speech against Christians is increasing, fueled by social media.

Legal recognition as a church is limited to historic places of worship.

And missionaries are still needed, because it remains exceedingly difficult to formalize the training of Turkish pastors.

“Generally there is freedom of religion in our country,” stated the report. “But despite legal protections, there were still some basic problems.”

Efforts to unite Turkey’s evangelicals started in the mid-1990s, and the APC began publishing its yearly human rights reports in 2007. Today the association, officially registered in 2009, represents about 85 percent of Christians within Turkey’s 186 Protestant churches, according to general secretary Soner Tufan.

Only 119 are legal entities.

And of these, only 11 meet in historic church buildings. The great majority rent facilities following their establishment as a religious foundation or a church association. While generally left alone, they are not recognized by the state as formal places of worship and thus are denied free utilities and tax exemption.

And if they present themselves to the government in pursuit of such benefits, officials often warn they are not a church and threaten closure. Sometimes the authorities even try to recruit informants. And some Christians who have refused have lost their jobs.

Other Turkish …

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