Transubstantiate

Many evangelicals celebrate their freedom of religion in the Muslim-majority nation. Orthodox and Catholics urge: Go slow.

Emil Panahov has a vision.

“I want to see 96 percent of Azerbaijanis confess their faith in Christ, and revival often began when the king became a believer,” he said. “But our God is the president of presidents, so the government does not rule over me.”

He has a long way to go.

Panahov, founder of the Vineyard church in Muslim-majority Azerbaijan, arrives at his target by inverting his homeland’s estimated proportion of Christians: 4 percent. Most of these are Russian Orthodox, holdovers from when the Caucasus nation of 10 million was part of the Soviet Union.

But the Azerbaijan Bible Society estimates that 20,000 Azeris have become evangelicals, most within the past two decades. And the government—despite being panned for widespread human rights violations in politics—has earned local plaudits for its level of religious freedom, especially toward Christians and Jews.

Panahov’s own story supports his optimism. But is it wise? Orthodox, Catholic, and Presbyterian leaders offer a word of caution.

From an Azeri Muslim family with a communist father, in 1989 Panahov came to faith at the age of 12 through a local Russian Baptist church. But as he grew interested in the arts and dancing, the conservative Christian community could not accept such worldly activity.

Panahov fell away from the faith as he performed professionally around the world—until in 2007 he tore his meniscus. Doctors in Turkey, where he lived at the time, told him he would never dance again.

It was then he recalled Jesus—whom he said spoke a word of healing to him. But through his Turkish pastor, God also gave him a commission: Return to Azerbaijan, and share what God has done for you.

Panahov was reluctant, …

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In the breadbasket of Europe, ministries bring loaves for hungry bodies and spiritual nourishment for the soul.

For Ukraine, Europe, bread is a way of life. Ukraine’s flag—now displayed around the world in solidarity—proclaims the nation’s agricultural heritage, with the yellow representing wheat fields and the blue representing the sky above.

“Bread is very important in our culture, but Jesus has said that we do not live by bread alone,” said pastor Fedir Raychynets, the head of the theology department at Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary (UETS). “There is something invisible, something intangible, something that is beyond just physical bread.”

As the war continues, pastors and churches across Ukraine are working to bring people both the bread they need to feed their bodies and the bread they need for their souls.

Inspired by the line in Isaiah 58:7 about sharing bread with the hungry and housing the poor, BREADtrust is one of several ministries helping get loaves into the hands of Ukrainians.

The UK-based charity funds local pastors who have remained in the country to continue to serve. They’re able to purchase bread, other food, and supplies for neighbors in need.

“There are those that feel deeply committed and called to where they are,” said BREADtrust project coordinator Phil Downward. One pastor and his family stayed until their apartment building was bombed and they had no choice but to leave. “That takes a level of faithfulness and courage that is utterly remarkable.”

Some ministries continue to bake the bread they distribute. In the days after the war broke out, a Dutch outreach through Oekraïne Zending, located outside Kyiv in Brovary, wanted to rally enough bakers to continue baking bread 24/7. They pass out loaves to hospitals and the …

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Christians in Lviv work and pray for victory as they face their nation’s crisis head-on.

First they had to get a car.

As the threat of a Russian invasion grew on the horizon, some shrugged it off, thinking it unlikely. But Vika Aharkova, who ministered alongside her husband Vasyl among the 20,000 international students in Kharkiv, near the Russian border, “kind of knew it was going to happen,” she said.

It’s easy to delay when crisis is coming. It’s easy to think of the many plausible reasons the worst won’t happen. They were still praying for peace. But they also knew they needed to be prepared.

They needed a car.

“If we know there is going to be a war, we need to buy a vehicle,” Vika said. “So we can evacuate fast.”

Vika and Vasyl appealed to supporters for funds to buy a car, and two days later, funds in hand, Vasyl traveled to Lviv, in western Ukraine, to purchase the vehicle. He immediately drove back to Kharkiv—a 14-hour journey.

The invasion started eight days later, at 5 a.m. on February 24. At 5:30, Vika and Vasyl were in the car, each carrying just a single backpack.

By the time they left the city, they had five more people, with five more backpacks: Vasyl’s sister, a couple from their church, an elder’s teenage daughter, and a student from the medical university.

No one took any extra luggage, but they did make room for a cat.

They would drive nonstop to Lviv—this time a 36-hour journey. Many people from all over the country have fled to Lviv now. In the West, near the Polish border, it’s more secure.

Here many churches, and many evangelicals like the Aharkovs, have turned to face the crisis head-on.

Step onto the grounds of the Central Baptist Church, for example, and the place is abuzz. Parked in front is a bus that will take …

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After churches change hands in Nagorno-Karabakh, can Armenian and Azeri Christians reconcile faster than their governments?

Ibrahim Baghirov died as an infant. His mother, Mary, had read in the Gospels about Jesus and Lazarus, so she prayed for God to raise her child from the dead. He did, she says. Doctors in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, confirmed the miracle to her, which also confirmed her fledgling faith as a Muslim-background Christian.

Two decades later, Baghirov is an emerging preacher in the church that meets in the family’s home.

But in September 2020, as Azerbaijan launched what would become a 44-day war against neighboring Armenia, Mary’s faith faltered. Having once trusted God where medicine failed, she hastily made her son an appointment for an unnecessary surgery in hopes of keeping him from conscription. He gently rebuked her.

“I will go wherever God takes me,” said Baghirov, now 26 years old. “There are ways to keep me here, but there will be no blessing in that.”

He deployed within weeks to the front lines in the snowcapped peaks of Nagorno-Karabakh, a swath of land about the size of Delaware that is encircled by present-day Azerbaijan and has been contested for centuries.

Along the way, Baghirov said he received a word from God: None of his fellow soldiers would die, and he would be their minister. His country is predominantly Muslim, and several of his comrades shunned him after his pocket New Testament fell from his backpack. Others asked questions, though, and became friends.

Azerbaijan, with a reputation as one of the most secular countries in the Muslim world, is tolerant of its long-established Christian minority community. But its long-standing animosities toward Christian Armenia are a different story.

The two countries’ generations-old dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh—a majority-Armenian …

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The debate about the “second sex” brings us back to biology, humility, and Genesis 1.

Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson made waves last week with her refusal to provide a definition for the word woman. Responding to Senator Marsha Blackburn, Jackson sidestepped the question, stating, “I’m not a biologist.” Senator Ted Cruz returned to the line of inquiry by asking who Jackson would include in a gender-based discrimination lawsuit. Jackson again deferred, citing the fact that such cases are currently making their way through the lower courts.

Conservatives quickly memed Jackson, portraying her refusal to answer the question as clear indication of progressive nonsense. After all, anyone should be able to define what a woman is. The only problem with this, of course, is that we’ve struggled to define what a woman is for thousands of years.

Whether it was the ancient Greeks who saw woman as a “mutilated male” or church fathers who did not believe women were made in the image of God as men were, the record of history shows people not quite knowing what to make of women. Even within our own country’s past, women have struggled to gain those “inalienable rights” that are ostensibly the birthright of every human being and “endowed by their Creator.”

In her 1947 essay “The Human-Not-Quite-Human,” Christian apologist and scholar Dorothy Sayers reflects on the inadequacy of our working definitions of woman:

The first task, when undertaking the study of any phenomenon, is to observe its most obvious feature. … It is here that most students of the “Woman Question” have failed, and the Church more lamentably than most, and with less excuse. … No matter what arguments are used, the discussion is vitiated from …

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She sang through betrayal, divorce, and death.

LaShun Pace sang of God’s power. With a voice that could hold an angelic note or drop down to a sinner’s growl, she declared the Lord’s victory on a revival circuit in the 1970s, on the Billboard charts in the 1990s, and on TikTok in the 2020s. She sang of a God revealed in times of trouble—belting it out, even as she went through her own unbearable suffering.

Pace, a founding member of the Anointed Pace Sisters and a solo gospel singer with eight studio albums, died on March 21 at age 60.

She was remembered as the voice of the Black church experience, one of “the greatest singers to ever touch this planet,” and a gospel music legend.

“My mother was a genuine, authentic woman of God,” daughter Aarion Rhodes told an Atlanta TV news station. “She sang the Word of God. She preached the Word of God. But more importantly she lived it.”

Tarrian LaShun Pace was born on September 6, 1961, in Poole Creek, Atlanta, a Black community that would disappear almost without a trace with the expansion of the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Her father, Murphy, worked as a carpenter. Her mother, Bettie Ann, cleaned classrooms at a school. Both parents were active ministers in the Church of God in Christ (COGIC).

Pace was the fifth of 10 children. She had one brother, Murphy III, called M.J., and eight sisters: Duranice, Phyllis, June, Melonda, Dejuaii, Leslie, Latrice, and Lydia.

When the large and growing household started to get out of control and some of the older children started to get in trouble, Bettie Ann prayed for help. She felt God tell her to gather the children to sing.

“And so she did,” Pace later wrote in her memoir. “God moved through her …

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With their overlapping views with conservative Catholics, not having a seat on the bench may not matter much.

With the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson last month, the US Supreme Court could get its first Black female and first nondenominational Protestant justice.

Six of the current Supreme Court justices are Catholic (Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, Sonia Sotomayor, and Clarence Thomas), and with Stephen Breyer’s retirement, Elena Kagan will be the only Jewish justice. In response to a question during her confirmation hearings on Tuesday, Jackson described her faith as “Protestant” and then added “nondenominational.”

When Judge Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to the US Supreme Court in 2017, he ended a seven-year stretch when no Protestants sat on the nation’s highest court for the first time in history. Of the 115 justices appointed to the Supreme Court since 1789, the overwhelming majority have been Protestants, but none have identified as nondenominational or evangelical.

“Since the rise of politically active evangelicals in the 1970s, not a single evangelical has served on the Supreme Court,” Dan Crane, Frederick Paul Furth Sr. professor of law at University of Michigan, told Christianity Today. “It’s not that they don’t care about the court, but they haven’t served on the court.”

The high court’s decisions on abortion and school prayer helped galvanize the Religious Right, but conservatives have focused more on outcomes than the identities behind the bench.

“Activism is usually mentioned as one core distinctive of being an evangelical, but we oppose it on the bench,” CT observed in 2006. “Is this why there are so few top-level evangelical judges?”

The lack of evangelicals on the Supreme …

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Third culture kids are struggling with a crisis of care in the church, statistics and experts say.

“How are you doing?” my professor asks me as I enter the empty classroom.
“They’re bombing my city” is all I can say.
“Oh no,” they mutter.
They remember where I’m from.
— A portion of a poem by Abigail de Vuyst, age 18, American missionary kid from Ukraine

American missionary kid and college freshman Abigail de Vuyst already missed her lifelong home of Ukraine while figuring out college classes in Michigan. Now she spends her days worrying about her friends. Are they safe in their cellars? Will they be able to get out?

“It’s hard just sitting and watching everything happen,” she said.

Home is a complex concept for missionary kids (MKs)—whose citizenship is in one country and whose upbringing is in another. The MK’s world, even in the best of circumstances, is “shifting sand,” said MK advocate and author Michele Phoenix. And now?

“We’re wrecked,” said Annie Wiltse, a teacher at the international school in Ukraine that de Vuyst used to attend. She and her students had just 24 hours to pack for their evacuation. “This is … in some cases the only home that they have ever known.”

Records aren’t available for the number of kids living with their missionary parents in other countries, but World Christian Database’s 2020 figures show there were an estimated 6,000 Christian missionaries in Ukraine and 425,000 foreign missionaries around the world.

Some American missionary kids, feeling powerless, are stuck in the United States because of COVID-19 restrictions, others are waiting in Kansas for an unknown amount of time because of kidnappings in Haiti, and many kids who make the transition …

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Middle Eastern and European evangelicals assess the vastly different continental response and the Bible’s teachings toward the stranger.

As Ukraine continues to be battered by Russia, Syrian refugees know what to pray for better than most.

“This is what happened to us,” said refugee students at the Together for the Family center in Zahle, Lebanon. “We don’t want it to happen to others.”

Born in Homs, Syria, to a Baptist pastor, Izdihar Kassis married a Lebanese man and then founded the center in 2006. She shifted her ministry to care for “her people” when the Syrian civil war started in 2011. About 50 traumatized teenagers find counseling there every year, and 300 have graduated from the center’s vocational programs.

As the refugees discussed the “horrible” situation in Europe during the weekly chapel service, Kassis suggested intercession. The 40 children and 30 Syrian staff and volunteers bowed their heads.

But one child wanted to be sure the Ukrainians would know of their solidarity. He went outside into the cold and snow of the Bekaa Valley, where most of Lebanon’s 1.5 million Syrian refugees take shelter.

His sign proclaimed, “Praying for peace.”

Since the invasion, about 4 million of Ukraine’s population of 43 million have become refugees. Another 6.5 million are internally displaced.

Yet 11 years since its civil war, most of Syria’s 6.8 million refugees—out of a population of 20 million—still live in limbo. Europe largely shut its doors, certainly in comparison to its warm welcome of those fleeing Russian aggression.

Many have taken offense.

“There is the perennial double standard and selective outrage of global news media, Western governments (and, sadly, even Western Churches) when it comes to reporting on wars, conflicts and the plight of refugees,” …

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