“Sorry, I have like ten Telegram messages coming in at the same time,” said Chann, executive secretary on the committee planning the celebration, which local believers expect will be the country’s biggest Christian event ever.

The Cambodia Gospel Centennial Celebration is a two-day festival in Phnom Penh commemorating the arrival of the country’s first Protestant missionaries in 1923. Chann and fellow Christian leaders have spent over two years planning the event.

During the final week of preparation, they have stayed in almost constant contact to ensure that every detail is perfect and the celebration’s vision statement is fulfilled: that Cambodia would become “the aroma of Christ in Asia and around the world.”

A large open-air exhibition area with an elaborate layout will welcome those who make the journey to the capital’s Diamond Island district, with zones for exhibitions, concerts and dances, children’s activities, food, and prayer. The main stage area is large enough to accommodate the 10,000-plus attendees who are expected each evening.

While there have been sizable Christian gatherings in Cambodia in the past, many have primarily been led and funded by organizations from abroad. For example, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association held a rally in Cambodia in 2019, the organization’s first event in the Southeast Asian nation.

But this time, the driving force has been Cambodian believers themselves, including Evangelical Fellowship of Cambodia. Only three of the 18 members of the executive committee are foreigners, and about three-fourths of the $228,000 that has been raised for the celebration has come from inside the country.

Christians from all classes have given their money and time to make the celebration a reality, says Mara Kong, a pastor at New Life Fellowship in Phnom Penh who leads the executive committee. Some have contributed as little as 25 cents because that’s all they can afford, but they still want to support the effort.

“They give because they believe it’s time for the gospel to shine in this nation,” Kong said. “I’ve never seen unity in the body of Christ [in Cambodia] like this before. A lot of people have been praying for Cambodia and dreaming to see … Cambodian people have an encounter with [God]. The prayers have worked.”

Unlikely momentum

There is data to support the sense of progress felt by leaders on the ground. According to the World Christian Database, Cambodia’s Christian population grew more than any country in Southeast Asia from 2000 to 2015; by 2020, almost 3 percent of its population was Christian.

Though a smaller percentage than in several nearby nations, it is a remarkable figure considering that there were nearly no Cambodian Protestants at two points in the last century.

When two American missionary couples from the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) arrived in Phnom Penh in 1923 to plant churches and translate the Bible into the Khmer language, they had little foundation to build on. French colonial leadership forbade Protestant missionaries from entering the country before that.

At the time, the small Roman Catholic presence in the country, dating back to the 16th century, was largely disconnected from broader Cambodian society. Efforts by foreign Protestant Bible societies to translate the Scriptures into Khmer stalled decades earlier. Only the Gospel of Luke and Acts were completed, and the French colonial government opposed the distribution of the translation.

A hundred years ago, the CMA missionaries were able to secure permission for their work and began to see slow but meaningful progress. From these humble beginnings, the Protestant and independent Christian communities increased gradually over the next 40 years, before experiencing a surprising jolt of more rapid growth. All North American Protestant missionaries were expelled from Cambodia in 1965 amid rising anti-Western sentiment, and many feared that the nascent churches they left behind would fade away.

“As it turns out, exactly the opposite happened,” said Briana Wong, an expert on Cambodian Christianity who teaches at Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa. “Protestantism actually exploded between 1965 and 1970 (the year that the North American Protestants returned) and continued growing until 1975.”

That growth stopped abruptly in 1975 when the brutal Khmer Rouge regime came to power. Supposedly working to create an agrarian and egalitarian society, the Khmer Rouge terrorized Cambodians with forced relocations, violence, and murder.

“During the Khmer Rouge time, everything from your farm or your field or in your house … belonged to the government,” said pastor Mara Kong, remembering the fear and anguish his family endured. “To pick your fruit, you had to ask the government. To kill your own chicken to feed your family, you had to ask the government.”

His father, who survived, was almost executed when soldiers didn’t realize he had secured permission to cook his own chicken to feed his wife, who was ill. Kong lost 21 relatives to the Khmer Rouge.In the end, approximately 2 million Cambodians died during the regime, including almost all the nation’s Christians.

A miraculous rebirth

After the end of Khmer Rouge rule in 1979, Cambodian Christianity began to be birthed a second time. The few surviving believers started rebuilding their spiritual communities in Cambodia and the heavily populated refugee camps at the border.

“It was to a great extent Cambodian Christians themselves, many of whom had decided only recently to convert, who led Bible studies, carried out ministries of pastoral care, and preached to large crowds of their fellow refugees,” Wong said.

Navy Chann’s decision to follow Christ reflects this. After the Khmer Rouge gained power, she and her family fled on foot for four months, over mountains, through monsoons, and across fighting zones, to reach the Thai border. There they were fed by the Thai government and eventually settled in one of the United Nations’ refugee camps.

While they were living in the camp, some Cambodian friends who had recently become Christians shared the gospel with her. She accepted Christ in 1982, followed by her husband and other family members.

They moved to Canada after being granted refugee status in 1985 but returned to Cambodia 13 years later to serve with World Renew, a Christian relief and development organization. Chann and her husband still live in Cambodia, where they train and support pastors and their families.

“I’ve had a few close calls with death, but I think God has kept me alive for his purpose,” Chann said.

Cambodian Christians’ Government Endorsement Represents a ‘Modern-Day Miracle’

Bob Craft

Cambodian and Christian

Today, Christians are a more visible and accepted part of Cambodian society, including in civic life. There are now Christians serving in the government, and Cambodia’s Buddhist prime minister, Hun Sen, is scheduled to attend the Gospel Centennial’s opening ceremony. All of this would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago.

The denominationally diverse body of evangelicals that have come together for the Gospel Centennial Celebration reflect the variety of churches currently ministering across Cambodia, both in the larger cities and in rural villages.

Most congregations are Protestant or independent, with prominent groups including the CMA-affiliated Khmer Evangelical Church, the Foursquare Church of Cambodia, and indigenous church-planting associations like the Living Hope in Christ Church.

David Manfred, an American missionary who has served in Cambodia with the CMA since 1995, has noticed a shift in attitudes toward Christianity across Cambodian society.

“For decades, there has been a sense that to be a good Cambodian, you have to be Buddhist,” he said. “I think there is a growing sense that that is not necessarily true. You can be a Christian and be a good Cambodian too.”

Christian leaders hope that the celebration will continue to spread that conviction and combat lingering stereotypes, such as that Cambodian believers do not respect their elders or their culture. Pisit Heng, a worship leader and songwriter who is serving as the Gospel Centennial’s production director, made sure to include performances of traditional Khmer music and dancing in the event’s program in addition to contemporary-style praise and worship songs.

“To have our culture in our performances shows people that we still care about our traditions,” said Heng, who also serves as executive director of the Bible Society in Cambodia. “We can adapt our traditions; we’re not going to get rid of them.”

Social media has also been a useful tool for showing other Cambodians what their Christian compatriots are really like. Being able to glimpse worship services and prayer groups online has helped more people have an open mind toward churches.

Younger leaders like Heng, age 43, are uniquely equipped to take advantage of these opportunities, and their elders in the Cambodian church have purposefully retreated into an advisory and mentoring role.

A strong connection between the generations exists, but the decision makers are mostly middle-aged. Older leaders like pastor Barnabas Mam rejoice that after years of hard labor, they are able to coach emerging leaders and witness the churches growing and maturing.

“I wish that my mentors could have lived to see this with their own eyes,” Pastor Mam said, his voice breaking with emotion. “It’s so sad; they were all killed by the Khmer Rouge. They dreamed to see it, but I am so blessed to live and see it happen in front of me.”

James Thompson is an international campus minister and writer from the state of Georgia.

Cambodians Usher in a Miraculous Moment for Christianity

Kate Shellnutt in Phnom Penh

The post Born Again and Again: Cambodian Evangelicals Celebrate 100 Years appeared first on Christianity Today.

Whether he’s preaching at the interdenominational congregation that he founded four decades ago in Marburg, writing devotionals and books about church history, lecturing on intercultural theology, or chairing a meeting of the German branch of the Lausanne Movement, the theologian and linguist’s life revolves around God’s Word.

He might be best known among Germany’s evangelicals for Das Buch (“The Book”), his popular Bible translation in modern German. The New Testament was first released in 2009, and a new version including the Psalms was published in 2014. Earlier this year came the third edition, this time with the addition of Proverbs.

Werner, age 65, discovered an affinity for languages at an early age. As an adolescent, he was already studying Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Arabic and several African languages followed later. A year as an exchange student in the United States helped perfect his English. His familiarity with these and other languages combined with his love of Scripture made the role of Bible translator a natural fit. He is currently working with a team to translate the Bible into a North African language.

This new version of Das Buch comes almost exactly 500 years after Martin Luther published his first Bible translation, known as the Septembertestament. While there was much fanfare a few years ago to mark the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, Werner laments that this milestone has gone largely unnoticed.

“You heard almost nothing about the [Septembertestament anniversary], neither in the churches nor in the news,” he said.

The Christus-Treff congregation founder hopes that his translation gives readers a fresh chance to engage with the Bible, even when more traditional translations are sometimes overlooked. He spoke with CT about the latest Das Buch edition, his other translation projects, and how rendering a verse in a new way can help readers understand the Bible more deeply.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Before we talk about translating Scripture, I’d like to ask you about reading Scripture. What was the first version of the Bible that you really engaged with?

Illustration by Christianity Today

When I was in first grade, my mother would have me read to her from a German children’s Bible while she ironed clothes. Later, there was another Bible for older children that I also read. When I was 13, I tried to read the whole Luther translation, but I gave up at some point.

The first Bible that I read all the way through was called The Way: The Living Bible. I spent a year in Seattle when I was 16 as an exchange student, and during that time I read both The Way and the King James Version. So, before I read the entire Bible in German, I had read both a modern translation and the Authorized Version in English.

Speaking of English translations, I understand that Eugene Peterson’s The Message helped inspire you to start working on Das Buch.

Indirectly, yes. I had heard about The Message and had received a copy at some point, although I must admit that I didn’t read the whole thing. In 2007, a friend from Australia came to visit. During our time together, he brought up The Message and asked if it could be translated into German. I told him that it wasn’t possible. It’s a good translation, but Peterson is so idiomatic and steeped in American culture that a direct translation into German just wouldn’t work. I explained that someone would have to do something similar, just in German. Then he said, “Well, why don’t you do that?” I said, “Okay, why not?” and started that very night.

A few days later was the Frankfurt book fair. By then, I had a preliminary translation of the first four chapters of Matthew. I showed it to a publisher friend of mine who was at that time leading the Stiftung Christliche Medien [a German Christian media foundation]. He and some of his colleagues looked at it and decided that it was different enough from other modern German translations to have its own flavor and sound. So he said, “Yeah, let’s do it.”

Das Buch is, like The Message , a dynamic-equivalence translation, right?

Yes, but my translation is actually more literal than Peterson’s. Much more literal. I didn’t feel free to go too far away from the text. People tell me that Das Buch is very readable and that unchurched people can understand it easily. I tried to replace or at least alternate some of the heavily religious terminology that may be prone to misunderstanding with a dynamic equivalent. But there are some parts where I was even more literal than Martin Luther. So it’s sort of in between [dynamic-equivalence and a more literal translation].

Once you started working, how quickly did you make progress? What were the biggest challenges?

Well, we had a Christian youth festival in Bremen where I was the chairman, and we wanted to give the Gospel of John to every participant. Somehow the board agreed to use my version of John, which wasn’t ready yet, so I was under a little bit of pressure. I basically prepublished John for that festival in 2008. I did the rest of the New Testament in about a year. Whenever I had some time—for example, while traveling or even if I was sitting with my wife watching television—I would work on it.

I translated directly from the Greek. I’m very old fashioned, so I didn’t use any of the fancy Bible translation gear that is around today. I just put the Greek text into a Word document and worked from that. During that time, I did not read any German versions. That way I wouldn’t pre-impregnate my mind with a possible German rendering. Instead, I would occasionally look at translations in cognate languages. Versions in Dutch, Norwegian, English, and even non-Germanic languages like French, Spanish, or Italian would often give me ideas for a new way to render a verse in German. I wanted to make sure that it would have its own unique sound.

Why was it important to you to present biblical concepts in new, sometimes surprising, ways? For example, in some verses “kingdom of God” (Gottes Reich) is instead rendered “God’s new reality” (neue Wirklichkeit Gottes).

The word surprising is actually the answer. I wanted to surprise people and make them think. Maybe I’ve gone too far here or there; I don’t know. In fact, I’ve backtracked in new editions on some of these expressions. [However,] I’m aware that my Bible translation is not the only one in German. Anyone who is really interested in studying in depth will probably have another version at their disposal so that they can compare. My goal is for a new phrasing to have a surprising effect that helps people better understand the exciting content of this life-changing book.

When you look at the Greek word basileia, which is usually translated as “kingdom” in English or “Reich” in German, it’s actually a more dynamic concept than either of those words convey. When you hear “Gottes Reich,” it sounds like a country. But that’s not what is meant. It’s the expanding reality of God’s authority over this world and over our lives. That’s what I’m trying to communicate.

This latest edition includes Proverbs, in addition to the New Testament and the Psalms. You’ve said that Proverbs was especially tricky to translate into German. Why is that?

I found translating the Psalms challenging, but Proverbs even more so. Proverbs employs a condensed and finely honed poetic language, and Hebrew itself is a very [concise] language. It’s tricky to translate in a way that is both clear in today’s context and true to the poetic beauty of the original.

Another challenge is that the concepts in Proverbs come from a rural environment in ancient Israel. I had to decide whether I would take them as they are or transfer the underlying image into something that is more recognizable today. Ultimately, I felt that changing the illustrations would stray too far from the original text. Even so, you sometimes have to add a little additional information or at least make it into a full German sentence for it to make sense. [Translating directly word for word] doesn’t work. I tried to be concise, poetic, and to follow the flow of the Hebrew language while still making it understandable. That was a big challenge.

Das Buch has readers in the Landeskirchen (regional mainline churches supported by church taxes) as well as in the Freikirchen (independent churches supported by donations). These two groups of German Christians can have very different cultures. Why do you think your translation bridges that gap?

I’m a member of the Landeskirche. There is a strong evangelical wing within that church, and those would be the Bible-reading people. People know me in that part of the body of Christ because that’s where I belong. In the free churches, they mostly know me because I was involved in some nationwide [evangelism] functions over several decades. Those who would consider themselves broadly evangelical, meaning Bible-interested, Bible-reading Christians, might be interested in my translation just to see how it can inspire them in their personal Bible reading.

You used the word evangelical, which in German would be evangelikal. American Christians sometimes get confused about the difference between that word and the similar term evangelisch. What’s the difference?

Evangelisch actually just means “Protestant,” while evangelikal has more or less the same meaning that evangelical has in the United States or Great Britain. That term only came to Germany in the 1960s. People are still debating whether that is a helpful term, especially because of its connection to a certain kind of evangelicalism that part of the church in America seems to adhere to that is foreign to us. It conjures up images of a political stance, which is not what the word evangelical was originally supposed to mean.

German Christians used the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation in 2017 as an opportunity to promote Bible reading and engagement. Five years later, how do you evaluate those efforts?

There were many encouraging examples of people becoming more interested in the Bible. As a whole, however, I would almost say that the Landeskirche in Germany missed a chance. There was a narrative saying that the main point of reformation was the discovery of individual freedom. And, of course, that is true; Luther said that the individual stands with his or her conscience before God. But where do they stand? On the authority of the Bible. That’s what Luther meant. He didn’t just mean abstract freedom in an Enlightenment sense, but that’s what it was made out to be in a lot of the official presentations.

Language study and translation work has taken you to Africa many times over the past several decades. What can Christians in the West learn from their fellow believers in Africa and other Majority World contexts about engaging with the Bible?

Our post-Enlightenment worldview in the West tends to cut out the miraculous. In Africa and other non-Western contexts, the reality of the spirit world is much more of a given, and it’s much closer to everyday life. In some missiological thinking, one speaks of “the [excluded] middle.” The Western mind acknowledges the natural realm that can be explained by science, and then there may or may not be some sort of abstract higher being. In between there is nothing. For someone from the Majority World, the reality of dreams, visions, spirit beings, curses, possessions, and so forth is so much more real and taken for granted. Because the Bible comes from a situation where there was a very similar worldview, it speaks so much more directly [to people outside the West].

In 1998, you wrote an essay for Christianity Today about the spiritual climate in post–Cold War Europe. You expressed a hope that despite the challenges that churches and ministries were facing, “the fruit they are producing is real and will last.” Do you still have the same perspective over two decades later?

I think I would still adhere to that. I’ve just come from a meeting in Bavaria that was run by a coalition of evangelists from the United Kingdom. They invited young people from all over Europe who are interested in evangelism. There were people from Iceland, Albania, Georgia, Spain, Italy … I was very encouraged. Yes, we’re not so strong, but we’re there.

Additionally, the new reality is the many migrants that live in Europe. There is a strong spiritual movement among them. For example, at a Berlin Landeskirche on any given Sunday morning, you might have 10 or 20 mostly elderly Germans sitting in the church service at 10 o’clock, and then the same church building will be packed with Africans for a service in the afternoon.

James Thompson is an international campus minister and writer from the state of Georgia.

How Do You Translate ‘Filled with the Holy Spirit’?

Jost Zetzsche

Why German Evangelicals Are Praising God in English

Ken Chitwood

The post German Bible Translator Introduces Readers to ‘God’s New Reality’ appeared first on Christianity Today.

Today’s Guest:

Nicole Martin serves Christianity Today as chief impact officer after serving on its board of directors. Nicole oversees three major strategic initiatives that are shaping the future of CT including the Global Initiative, the Big Tent Initiative, and the Next Gen Initiative.

Book Lists:

David Zahl:

• Fully Alive – Elizabeth Oldfield
• The Bright Sword – Lev Grossman

Erik Petrik:

• Lives of Girls and Women – Alice Munro
• All the Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy
• The Beginning of Wisdom – Leon R. Cass
• 1 Peter: Baker Exegetical Commentary – Karen H. Jobes
• The Work of Art – Adam Moss

Leslie Thompson:

• The Irrational Season – Madeleine L’Engle
• Gentle and Lowly – Dane Ortlund
• What Is Life Worth? – Kenneth R. Feinberg
• The Complete Stories – Flannery O’Connor

Mike Cosper:

• You Like It Darker – Stephen King
• The Age of Grievance – Frank Bruni

Nicole Martin:

• The Lagos Wife – Vanessa Walters
• The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store – James McBride

Russell Moore:

• When the Clock Broke – John Ganz
• Dæmonomania (The Aegypt Cycle Book 3) – John Crowley
• Mariner – Malcolm Guite

“The Bulletin” is a production of Christianity Today Producer: Clarissa Moll Associate Producer: Leslie Thompson Editing and Mix: TJ Hester Music: Dan Phelps Executive Producers: Erik Petrik and Mike Cosper Senior Producer: Matt Stevens

The post Broken Halos appeared first on Christianity Today.

In this episode Heather also addresses National Adoption month with Herbie Newell, president and executive director of Lifeline Children’s Services, the largest evangelical adoption agency in the country. Herbie has a special burden for vulnerable children, and he shares with us how Christians can obey God’s call in James 1:27: “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”

Guest Bio Dorcas Cheng-Tozun is an award-winning writer, editor, and speaker. She is a former Inc.com columnist whose work has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Christianity Today, Image journal, the Unreasonable blog, The Entrepreneurial Leader, and dozens of other publications in the US and Asia. She currently serves as editorial director of the nonprofit Pax, which promotes peace and justice in the 21st century.

Dorcas’s work with various nonprofits, social enterprises, and faith-based organizations has given her opportunities to engage with a broad range of social issues toward solutions in the areas of homelessness, affordable housing, energy access, youth leadership, HIV/AIDS, and international development. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her social entrepreneur husband and two young sons. Her most recent book is Social Justice for the Sensitive Soul: How to Change the World in Quiet Ways.

Host Bio Heather Thompson Day is an associate professor of communication at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan. She is the author of eight books, including I’ll See You Tomorrow and It’s Not Your Turn. Reach out to Heather on X, the app formerly known as Twitter, at @HeatherTDay and on Instagram @heatherthompsonday. Get Heather’s weekly inspirational email delivered to your inbox every Friday night at 7 p.m. EST. Sign up now at: www.heatherthompsonday.com/links.

“Viral Jesus” is a production of Christianity Today Host and creator: Heather Thompson Day Executive Producer: Ed Gilbreath Producer: Loren Joseph Mix Engineer: Alex Carter Director of CT Podcasts: Mike Cosper

The post Dorcas Cheng-Tozun: Social Justice for the Sensitive Soul appeared first on Christianity Today.

D. E. Hoste: A Prince with God

Phyllis Thompson (Author)

Kingsley Press

220 pages

$12.99

This is not, however, because Hoste lacked achievements and contributions to the mission in China. He was instrumental to CIM’s development not only in terms of organization and mission mobilization but also in the indigenous principles that encouraged Chinese churches to self-grow and rely less on Western missionaries, as well as in dealing with the difficult Boxer Rebellion aftermath with grace and “the power of gentleness,” as former CT editor in chief David Neff put it.

One of the most important and striking characteristics of Hoste was his prayer life—and related to that, his true humility before God and in his ministry. Hoste never sought fame or power. Instead, he was determined that his name and reputation would be subsumed under the desire to see Jesus get all the honor for everything. Hoste “lived to be forgotten” because he chose to be “hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3).

Talking to God

Dixon E. Hoste was born on July 23, 1861, four years before CIM’s founding. Both his father and his grandfather were military men. When Dixon was 17, he entered the Royal Military Academy. At 18, he received his commission as a lieutenant to serve in the Royal Artillery.

Three years later, in 1882, Dixon’s elder brother, William, invited him to attend a special meeting in Brighton where the speaker was the American evangelist D. L. Moody. Phyllis Thompson, author of D. E. Hoste: A Prince with God (the primary biographical source in this article), described the scene. When Moody prayed, Thompson wrote, Dixon felt that he “talked as though God was there, as though he knew him, as a man talks to a friend. He talked as though God could be depended upon to do his work in men’s hearts, right then and there.” Hoste was converted at the meeting. Moody’s prayer left a deep impression on him that shaped his own prayer life over the next 40 years.

It did not take long before Hoste came across Hudson Taylor’s little book China: Its Spiritual Need and Claims. Hoste was captured by Taylor’s call for missionaries to serve “four hundred millions of souls, ‘having no hope, and without God’” in China. Hoste wrote to the London office of the CIM in 1883 and offered himself to be a candidate.

However, the reference letter from the vicar of Sandown, Isle of Wight, W. T. Storrs, was not totally encouraging. On Hoste’s application form (in the OMF International archive) Storrs praised Hoste’s Christian character, calling him “a straightforward fellow, with much love and faith.” But he also characterized Hoste as naturally shy, a little impulsive, not able to teach well, not very enterprising, and not “naturally fitted” for missionary work—with a disclaimer of “but I may be mistaken.”

Though the clergyman’s assessment wasn’t very hopeful, Thompson writes, members of the London Council took note of the spiritual stature of this quiet young man. He was clearly humble and sincere and even in his youth demonstrated balanced judgment and foresight. Though he was not particularly strong, the doctor’s report that he was healthy assured the Council that he would be able to endure physical hardship and privation. In the end, he was accepted as a “probationer” to join the CIM.

As a young man, Hoste admitted his struggles in prayer. Like others, his mind tended to wander when he prayed. On one occasion, after he was already serving in China, he wrote to Hudson Taylor seeking his advice. Hudson Taylor wrote back to this young missionary with a reassuring note: “I have found more help in praying aloud, and praying while walking about—talking as to a present Lord—than in any other way. … I do not think that wandering in thought at all necessarily indicates a loss of spiritual life.”

With Taylor’s words of encouragement, Hoste developed a habit of walking while praying aloud that he continued even after he became the general director of CIM. Thompson said about Hoste: “Prayer to him was as natural as a child talking to a father whose perfect love had cast out all fear.”

Lowly in spirit

Hoste belonged to a group of British missionaries to China known as the “Cambridge Seven.” All seven bright young men were sent to China under the banner of the CIM. Among them, Stanley Smith was probably the most prominent, Thompson records. Smith, a star athlete in the university, was also a natural public speaker. Hoste, by contrast, was unassuming and quiet, feeling rather comfortable to be in the background. Besides, his thin, high-pitched voice and somewhat hesitant manner made his speech less effective. Both Smith and Hoste were sent to work under Pastor Hsi (Xi Shengmo) in Shanxi, a strong, charismatic Chinese leader who ran refuges for opium addicts.

About a year and a half after Hoste’s arrival in China, Smith asked him to join the work at a newly opened station in Hungtung, Shanxi, that Smith would lead. As they had been sent out to China at the same time, Hoste did not feel prepared to accept this arrangement. Subsequently, however, it was impressed on Hoste’s conscience that his refusal was due not to a pure desire for God’s will and glory but rather to an unwillingness to humble himself and take the low place. Hoste reflected on this matter prayerfully and recognized that Smith was better qualified than himself for the leadership. In the end, Hoste told Smith that he was prepared to accept his proposal.

Illustration by CT / Source Images: OMF International

In the ten years Hoste had worked under Pastor Hsi in Shanxi, he had recognized Hsi’s leadership. Steering under Hsi, who was known for his dominating personality and quick temper, required a great deal of patience and humility. Yet Hoste was willing to support Hsi and follow his leadership, even when others in the CIM disagreed. Hoste considered himself to be the little man who could “sort of steer” quietly from the back. He never sought to be in the limelight.

The CIM faced one of its most severe crises in 1900 during the Boxer Incident when 58 CIM missionaries and 21 of their children were martyred. Though other missions organizations in China sought monetary compensation from the Qing government for the lost lives of the missionaries killed by the Boxers, CIM decided to forgo that option, choosing instead to look to God for provision. Hoste went to Shanxi and handled the issues of church rebuilding and compensation waiving. In the “Monthly Notes” of the May 1901 issue of China’s Millions, he wrote the following words in accordance with CIM’s decision:

It will be well for Missionaries to take a more Christ-like course; and even gladly to suffer the loss of all things, that the Gospel be not hindered. Our own Mission has decided to make no claim whatever, either for life or property, and has assumed the responsibility of the orphan children of the martyred Missionaries.

While CIM missionaries were being killed, Hudson Taylor was unwell and realized that he could not provide leadership at such a critical time as he was far too weak. Even his wife, Jennie, dared not show him all the letters from China, fearing they could prove to be too much for him.

Before the Boxer Incident, William Cooper was considered to be a promising younger CIM colleague who could succeed Hudson Taylor. However, Cooper was killed during the uprising. Taylor knew he urgently needed someone to take on leadership—someone who understood the China situation well. J. W. Stevenson was the China director at that time. Even so, Taylor approached Hoste, a much younger and comparatively less experienced person than Stevenson.

Hoste had served in China since 1885, but his work was mainly confined to Shanxi. He had little exposure to the wider work of the CIM. Thus, when Hoste received the letter via cable from Hudson Taylor, Thompson writes, he almost straightaway declined the appointment by telegram.

But soon after Hoste sent the telegram, he came down with a life-threatening illness and remained sick for the next few months. After nearly four months of wrestling in prayer while unwell, Hoste finally wrote to Stevenson, his supervisor, “I feel I ought to accept the appointment; if, however, you do not see your way to agreeing … I shall [be] free from responsibility.”

But Stevenson readily agreed. Calling Hoste into his office, he said, with tears in his eyes, that the Lord had given him not only peace about it but also joy in the assurance that it was of God and would be for blessing. In January 1901, Hudson Taylor confirmed the appointment of Hoste as the acting general director of the CIM.

After the Boxer Incident, Hoste wrote an article titled “Possible Changes and Developments in the Native Churches Arising out of the Present Crisis.” Instead of focusing on the suffering of the missionary community due to the Boxer Incident, Hoste emphasized the future of the Chinese church, believing that the Chinese church could mature only without the control of foreign missionaries. His article insisted that the sole authority the missionaries should display was of a spiritual nature—and even there only as guides and exemplars. At all costs, they should seek to avoid dependency.

Hoste had always prayed that the Chinese church would be led by the Chinese and be self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating. Hoste’s vision for the CIM was not that it would become big and influential. Rather, his dream was for CIM to retain the willingness “to be small, despised and to be poor and suffer hardness.”

Praying for the two hundred

In 1929, Hoste issued a call for prayer for 200 new workers to be sent to China before the end of 1931—an appeal known as the Forward Movement. In typical fashion, he wrote a “direct and unemotional” letter stating the need so that all the mission’s friends and supporters could hear. As Thompson describes:

In Australia and New Zealand, in North America and Great Britain, the appeal went forth. Pamphlets and cards were printed and meetings convened to make known the spiritual need of China and the new response that it had called forth from the Mission. Prayer was being made definitely for two hundred new recruits to be on their way to China before the end of 1931. What would be the answer of God?

Illustration by CT / Source Images: OMF International

Hoste well recognized the spiritual issues involved. As the months passed, the “urgent necessity for prayer became apparent.” Only one in six of those who offered to serve were deemed suitable; the others were rejected due to health, age, and other issues. Neither natural nor spiritual qualifications could be lowered to meet the quota. As 1930 came to an end, only 90 new workers—less than half the desired number—had sailed for China.

With one year remaining, about 110 candidates still needed to be accepted, trained, and sent to China in answer to the Forward Movement appeal. Hoste declared, “We must have a day of prayer.” Thompson described the mood at the beginning of 1931.

Tuesday, February 10th, was set aside to be given up entirely to prayer that God would yet grant their request for the full number of two hundred new workers to be sent out before the end of the year. Cables were sent to North America, Australia, New Zealand and Shanghai, calling as many as possible in the fellowship of the Mission to unite in pleading with God on this day.

And God answered the prayers. From that day onward, “the tide began to turn.” By the end of 1931, Thompson wrote, some 203 new workers had set sail for China—“the last party, six young men, leaving England on December 31st!” Hoste witnessed God’s amazing answer to this prayer at the age of 70.

In June 1935, during one of the regular China Council meetings, Hoste vacated himself as chair of CIM and handed the role to George W. Gibb, the China director. Hoste had already been in leadership for over three decades by then, serving as the general director since 1900. If there was one thing that colleagues keenly remembered about Hoste, it was his prayer life.

“Patient, persevering prayer,” wrote Hoste, “plays a more vital and practical part in the development of the Mission’s work than most people have any idea of.” Hoste did not talk much about prayer, formulate a philosophy of prayer, or analyze its effects. He just prayed.

“It was because of his prayerfulness, more than any other quality, that he gained and maintained the confidence of the members of the Mission” in 35 years of leadership, Thompson noted.

Bishop Frank Houghton of CIM wrote, “While Mr. Hoste, being human, was not immune from errors of judgment, yet criticism was silenced, dissatisfaction found no room to grow or spread, because our General Director was a man who spent much time with God.”

Patrick Fung is the current general director of OMF International (formerly CIM).

This is a modified excerption of “Dixon Hoste and Prayer” by Patrick Fung in OMF International’s Mission Round Table magazine. Repurposed with permission.

The post Lived to Be Forgotten: Dixon E. Hoste, Missionary to China appeared first on Christianity Today.

These kinds of moments, and a thousand others, make raising kids and building a family spiritually illuminating tasks—especially when they ask theologically stimulating questions like “Does Jesus wear undies?” And although the creators of Bluey, an Emmy-awarded animated kids series, seem to have no overtly religious leanings, the show unexpectedly taps into unseen realities.

If you haven’t yet discovered Bluey, let me catch you up. The series, streaming on Disney+, centers around a family of Australian blue heelers: six-year-old Bluey, her younger sister Bingo, Mum (Chilli), and Dad (Bandit). Each episode is less than 10 minutes long and targets a preschool audience—but the popular show draws all ages, and, in 2023, was the second-most acquired streaming program with 43.9 billion minutes consumed.

When the producers announced that a longer episode was slated for season 3, the public grew panicked that the show may be ending (thankfully, it’s not!), revealing just how deeply the series meets a need in our culture—and I think it’s worth exploring why.

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The Heelers are just your average Australian family, with no superpowers or high-stakes problems to solve. But through their togetherness, these four transform the ordinary moments of family life into something more. In particular, Bandit and Chilli’s commitment to playing with their kids both inspires and indicts the merely human parents watching—and sometimes even brings us to tears.

But more than that, it’s my belief that Bluey delights and dismays us this way because it’s eschatological, pointing to the type of creative togetherness we’ll all experience one day in the new creation.

Before having kids, I scoured parenting books for effective methodologies; but 11 years in, I often find myself tactically bankrupt. I mean, how exactly do you handle one child’s jealousy that the other child is sick and gets to stay home from school? But the great thing about Bluey is that it acknowledges and solves these kinds of challenges—not through a didactic blueprint but through, of all things, improvisational and imaginative play.

Throughout the show, Bandit and Chilli wholeheartedly enter Bluey and Bingo’s worlds. They join in their children’s games and follow their zany rules assiduously—whether it be freezing when a chord on the “magic” xylophone is struck, diving to save the balloon from falling during “Keepy Uppy,” or acting like robots or sick patients—anything to inhabit the on-the-ground domain where their kids’ ethical and spiritual development is daily being formed.

Unintentional though it may be, the Heelers’ parental play takes seriously Jesus’ words, “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these” (Matt. 19:14), and even models Christ’s self-effacing humility in meeting us on our level. In both narratives—biblical and animated—the little ones’ stinginess, laziness, fearfulness, cheating, and lots of other juvenile behaviors can be redeemed and transformed.

Take Peter. As Erin Dufault-Hunter, associate professor of Christian ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary and an acquaintance of mine, pointed out to me one day, “After his resurrection, Jesus repeatedly asks Peter, ‘Do you love me?’ (John 21:15–17). It’s a game with words, one that recalls Peter’s braggadocio and betrayal and eventually turns him into a tender shepherd of the church.”

The Paradox of Playfulness

Courtney Ellis

Even though Bandit and Chilli sometimes ask very relatable questions—like “Can’t we play a game where I lie down?”—their near-constant willingness to indulge in their kids’ whimsical antics can also cause many parents to feel inadequate. In a recent podcast about the show, NPR host Stephen Thompson described binge-watching Bluey right after he’d launched his son on his college career. “I don’t think that was good for my emotional health,” he said, presumably because it made him doubt the quality of his parenting when it was already too late.

I, for one, resonate with these insecurities. Truth be told, I’m terrible at playing with my kids like Bandit and Chilli. I’m reminded of myself in a second-season episode called “Let’s Play Octopus.” Bluey has her dalmatian friend Chloe over, and Bandit pretends he’s an octopus capturing the girls as they attempt to steal his treasure. Afterward, when Chloe goes home, she tries to replicate the experience with her own dad—who is, shall we say, a bit too stiff and hyper-rational to pull it off. Exasperated, Chloe exclaims, “You’re not playing it properly,” to which the confused dad replies, “But this is how I play it.” Cross-armed, Chloe quips back, “Bluey’s dad is more fun than you.”

I’m that parent. And I think I’m an unnatural player because, for much of my life, I’ve been focused on being productive—thanks, in part, to the ever-industrious Protestant work ethic. As a working mother, I seek to maximize my day, grasping and collecting each scrap of time like a scarce resource that I can put toward “useful” ends. But beyond my idolatry of efficiency, I’ve struggled with an anemic theology of play. After all, what possible role can childlike play perform that adult-like purposefulness can’t? In short: a big role.

Studies show unstructured play can greatly benefit our kids—nearly half of whom are suffering from a growing mental health crisis. As Courtney Ellis, author of Happy Now: Let Playfulness Lift Your Load and Renew Your Spirit, points out in a piece for CT, “Playfulness is essential to human flourishing” and can be defined as “anything that brings us joy and connection.” This means the benefits of play also extend to enrich the congregational life of the local church family—and our walk of faith.

Let the Children Play: Their Lives Depend on It

Russell Moore

In his book, Far Too Easily Pleased, Jesuit scholar James V. Schall reminds us that “leisure describes the life of God.” God created the universe not because he felt compelled to or because he lacked something. And as the triune God, the Father created the world together with the Spirit and the Son (Col. 1:15–17)—whipping up magma, mountains, and mammals out of sheer freedom and love. God created the entire inhabited world, in part, for us to rejoice in it and praise him for it (Prov. 8:31).

As Thomas Aquinas said, “God plays. God creates playing. And man should play if he is to live as humanly as possible and to know reality, since it is created by God’s playfulness.”

Joyful play is an indispensable ingredient in making us fully human in his image—which means God can and does use play for our sanctification. Our whole purpose as creatures is, as the Westminster Catechism so aptly summarizes, “To glorify God and enjoy Him forever” (emphasis mine). And if God created play, and all that God created will one day be renewed in the new creation, then we can expect that this kind of uninhibited play awaits us in heaven.

As Felipe do Vale says in another piece for CT, “The resurrection is not a cosmic Etch A Sketch, where God shakes everything to start over; it is a divine commitment to what has already been made and declared very good (Gen. 1:31).” The same God who created the frolicking chimpanzees at the zoo blesses the young children who quite literally ape them. This means our best play times are yet to come—and our earthly glimpses of play speak to an eternity of joy. And while we cannot yet imagine it, I have a feeling the experience will be infinitely better than “Keepy Uppy.”

I know I’ll never parent as well as the fictional Heelers do (although my shining moments might just add up to the length of one Bluey episode)—and my kids probably won’t resolve conflict as effortlessly as Bluey and Bingo seem to (which is why I’m investing in a college fund and a therapy fund for each of the girls).

Still, on a practical level, Bluey challenges me to make room for more spontaneity and creative collaboration with my daughters each day. And as I do, I remember that the utopia it depicts is coming soon: a perfected humanity enjoying complete and creative togetherness for all eternity—along with our self-giving, playful Creator.

Katherine Lee is a poet and a mom working on a memoir about the ways her motherhood has been defined by the women in her family. Her master’s in theology has informed these pursuits in surprising ways.

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The post ‘Bluey’: A Heavenly Vision of Life Together appeared first on Christianity Today.

That is, after I worked at a ministry where I was bullied, isolated, and left to fend for myself. When I finally decided to quit, friends and family still expected me to keep going to church. But I was so wounded from what I had experienced that the thought of attending church literally made me sick to my stomach.

I prayed and believed but didn’t receive. And every time, I felt shame and guilt. I couldn’t help but think, “Maybe I didn’t pray hard enough. Maybe I doubted without realizing it.” And whenever church peers repeated this adage, it caused a visceral response in me. I didn’t have language to convey why this statement bothered me so much at the time. But I do now.

As a therapist working with religious trauma, I have encountered many individuals who shared stories about experiences that didn’t quite classify as spiritual abuse but were equally unsettling. I began investigating this phenomenon further through my doctoral studies and soon stumbled upon a term to classify these experiences: spiritual bypass.

Spiritual bypassing is when a person uses Scripture, religious concepts or ideals, and spiritual mantras to “bypass” the effects of a negative experience out of a desire to ease their pain—for example, when we experience a loss and we say to ourselves, “God’s got this. His ways are higher than mine.” While this statement does hold truth, the statement may encourage us to “bypass” a healthy process of dealing with our feelings or thoughts about the loss.

However, as I studied this concept, I recognized spiritual bypassing can also be done toward another person—for example, if someone is expressing the hurt of his or her loss to a friend in the faith and that person responds with, “God’s got this. His ways are higher than yours. You just have to trust him.” This can cause the wounded person to feel dismissed, disregarded, shamed, and even spiritually gaslighted.

This is exactly what I experienced in the church—and I know many others have experienced it too. Understanding spiritual bypassing provided a language for my own experiences and for my clients seeking treatment for religious trauma. Instead of spiritual bypass, we are called to love our neighbors in such a way that honors their hurt as well as draws them to Christ—with the eventual (not immediate) goal of helping them heal emotionally and spiritually.

The Good Samaritan story in Luke 10 (vv. 25-37) is one with which most of us are familiar. A man is attacked, brutally beaten, and left for dead. But the wounding does not stop there. It continues as both the priest and Levite “bypass” the man on the other side of the path. These men, who are well aware of the law “Love your neighbor as yourself,” choose to ignore the man’s need for reasons we can only surmise.

What we do know is that a Samaritan, whom the Jews despised, is the only one who stops to help the man. He sees the man’s wounds and does not add insult to injury by passing him by on the other side. Instead, he draws near enough to see the man’s need and takes the time to bind his wounds with oil and wine—offering healing and relief specific to his wounds. And at his own expense, he brings the man to a place where he will have the time and space to heal.

Whether we are the Good Samaritan or the man in the road, this story reminds us of the high expectations Jesus has for his followers when it comes to caring for wounded neighbors.

In a previous article for CT, author Michelle Van Loon observes that “today’s pews are full of people who bear scars—or still-oozing wounds—from church hurt.” And when we spiritually bypass our church-hurt neighbor, we pour salt on their wounds instead of oil and wine.

As I researched spiritual bypassing, I found that most people have experienced this feeling of disregard and dismissal—as if their pain is invisible, much like the beaten man in the road—within the church or with friends and family members of faith.

I’ll never forget the woman who sat in my office during a session and said to me through clenched teeth, “My family keeps telling me I am being overdramatic and I am inflicting my stress and anxiety on myself. If I hear someone tell me one more time to ‘Be worried about nothing, but in everything by prayer, blah, blah, blah, I might just lose my mind.’” She stated these words made her feel “not seen, not understood, not safe.”

What were no doubt intended as words of life were, in fact, robbing her of life. This wounded woman wanted someone to validate her pain and her experience. She longed to be known.

In his book The Deepest Place, Dr. Curt Thompson describes “suffering with” someone as remaining present and accepting the person’s pain without following it up with spiritual platitudes. We allow them to know that we see them, care for them, are with them, and are willing to accept them just as they are—not as we are or want them to be.

Often, we spiritually bypass people because we feel uncomfortable with their pain or helpless to do anything about it. Out of our own insecurity, our instinct is to offer a Scripture verse, spiritual saying, or reminder of a biblical truth because it’s the only thing we feel capable of offering them in such a time. And although we might feel better about the situation afterward, we may not recognize the impact it has on the other person.

That is not to say there will not be times when someone reaches out to us for advice, wisdom, or words of encouragement. But unless we take the time to fully listen, recognize, and empathize with their pain, we will not know how to best meet their needs, and we may heap on them more harm than hope.

Rather than offering a one-size-fits-all solution for the wounded man, the Good Samaritan provided precisely what his specific injuries required by binding his wounds with oil and wine. Our actions and words toward our own hurt neighbors need to do the same.

I have learned this story the hard way in my own life. Before I experienced my own church hurt and before becoming a therapist or pursuing my doctorate, I was a small group and women’s minister in the church, who often talked with people about their latest struggles and hurts.

Once, I remember listening to a church member recount her story of church hurt, and my first thought was that those who hurt her did not use the biblical model of approaching someone with an accusation of wrong (Matt. 18:15–20). And before I could stop myself, I found those words spilling out of my mouth. She immediately responded with, “Oh, no! Do not use that on me!” I was a little befuddled because I thought she needed to hear that and it would support her case. Yet I was sorely mistaken because that verse had been used as a weapon against her.

This woman’s wound was oozing, and I was not only spiritually bypassing her hurt but also pouring salt in her wounds rather than oil and wine. And although I didn’t know it then, I recognize now that I was giving her what I thought she wanted or needed to hear rather than taking the time to listen for what she truly needed.

The Bible reminds us that it is wise to be quick to listen and slow to speak (James 1:19). Doing so enables us to hear the broken hearts of God’s children, but it also allows us to incline our ears to God and listen for the words he alone knows his wounded children need to hear. Scripture tells us that “If anyone speaks, they should do so as one who speaks the very words of God. If anyone serves, they should do so with the strength God provides.” (1 Pet. 4:11)

The Samaritan did not question the beaten man, offer him advice on how to overcome his pain, or tell him to forgive his abusers. He simply soothed the man’s wounds and carried him to a place where he would have the space and time to heal.

Very seldom do any wounds heal overnight—whether physical or spiritual. They all need a certain amount of time and space to heal. The Good Samaritan understood this. He did not put a time limit on the man’s healing, even when it was at his own expense. He instead wrote a blank check for the innkeeper to do whatever it took to care for the man, for as long as it took.

This is the radical love we are called to show the wounded souls in our families, churches, and communities, or the people God has placed along the path of our daily lives. We cannot put a time limit on each other’s healing—even when it is uncomfortable for us. Trying to force someone to hurry up and heal can deepen their wounds or at least halt their healing.

My own experience with church hurt was especially hard for those closest to me to fathom because they were also in ministry. They offered all the standard phrases of spiritual bypassing: forgive seventy times seven, do not let the sun go down on your anger, turn the other cheek. And while they may have meant well, their words reopened my wounds again and again. They were asking me to go back into the very environment that had repeatedly hurt me.

I finally implemented boundaries so that I could heal. After not attending church for a year, I slowly reintegrated back into the fold where I had once served. Even then, I still experienced PTSD-like symptoms when I approached the church: rapid heart rate, knots in my stomach, and dissociation. I gave myself permission that even if I felt unsafe while sitting in the parking lot of the church, I could leave. And many times, I did. But it was through giving myself time and space that I eventually healed.

The church is filled with wounded people just like myself and many of my clients. After all, it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick (Mark 2:17). Week after week, people enter the house of the Lord with unseen wounds, whether fresh or festering. And for many, space and time may be all the oil and wine they need. But through our simple acts of compassion, our church-hurt neighbors can experience the healing love of Christ as he intends his love to be known.

Peridot (Peri) Gilbert-Reed is a licensed professional counselor and supervisor. She is also a certified trauma specialist focusing on religious trauma.

The post Don’t ‘Spiritually Bypass’ Your Church-Hurt Neighbor appeared first on Christianity Today.

“It was just bonkers,” Cheng told CT after his wedding to Williams. “Everything was great, except Jesus wasn’t there to turn water into wine.”

In June, The Chosen wrapped filming the scene for its third season that premieres Friday, with about 10,000 fans serving as extras for the multiday shoot in Texas.

Maybe not since Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ has there been a biblical hit like this. Other Hollywood projects like Noah or The Young Messiah flopped with Christian audiences for various reasons. But because this show is financed through fans, it has a following unlike any studio project.

The first season debuted in 2019 as a massive crowdfunding success, raising $10 million. Now it has a devoted following all over the world and has been translated into more than 50 languages. The showrunners are planning seven seasons and fundraising $100 million. People often encounter the show with low expectations of didactic Christian content and are surprised to find something more compelling.

Distributor Angel Studios is trying to continue The Chosen’s success in other projects. The first season of Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga will begin streaming in December. It also drew millions in crowdfunding. Angel Studios founders, brothers Jeff and Neal Harmon, have described The Chosen as their House of Cards, the show that launched Netflix.

The show still operates like a budget version of a Hollywood production in many ways. All of the thousands of extras for the feeding of the 5,000 shoot made their own costumes, with specific instructions from The Chosen’s costume designer Leila Heise. People around the Midlothian area lent ATVs for shuttling people around the production area—900 acres of a Salvation Army camp.

But the show isn’t a simple homegrown product anymore. It just held its first splashy premiere at the Fox Theater in Atlanta. Angel Studios, the distributor, now has venture capital funding. A Chosen Christmas special in theaters last year raked in nearly $14 million, by far the largest gross for Fathom Events. (Even with all of that, the show’s first two seasons were not reviewed by Hollywood trade press like Variety.)

In addition to handling funding and marketing pressures, the show’s creators must navigate the inherent weightiness of reproducing the Gospels. To this point, they have threaded through controversies when they arise to keep making a show that many types of Christians love–theatrical showings for the new season on Friday night were sold out in blue New York City and red Tampa, Florida. Can The Chosen keep that “miracle” going?

Cheng and his fiancée registered to play extras in the feeding of the 5,000—or “F5K” as everyone called it—as soon as they heard about it. Fans could be extras either by donating to the show or winning a raffle. Cheng and Williams had thought about whether to try to get married on set, but the forecast was hitting 100 degrees and they initially put the idea aside.

“Feeding of the fried thousand,” one extra joked.

On the morning of the shoot, the couple was sitting under a big tent in first-century costumes, talking with some other extras, and mentioned that they had considered getting married there. One woman at their table stood up and loudly asked the crowd in the tent if there were any pastors in the vicinity.

Indeed, there were pastors. One pastor from Louisiana had just done a wedding and still had the liturgy on his phone, so he said he could officiate the ceremony. Cheng showed that he had the marriage license ready to go.

One extra made Cheng a boutonniere out of antibacterial wipes on hand for COVID-19 precautions. Another extra had brought a harp as part of his costume for the shoot and started playing. Two women showed up with shofars. A woman made a flower headpiece for Williams, and someone appeared with two pots of flowers.

The pastor performed the ceremony, and then someone procured a “wedding cake” from the craft services table: a banana nut muffin and a chocolate chip muffin.

Though Cheng and Williams didn’t have family and friends there, Cheng said it reminded him of “an old-time biblical wedding … when the whole town came and brought something. A community wedding.”

The “community” of extras that showed up for the shoot hailed from 36 countries and ranged in ages from 91 to seven weeks, according to the organizers.

Nicholyn Chang, from Malaysia, lives in Washington, DC, and came to the filming with her homemade first-century costume. Her roommate in DC is from Uruguay and got all of her friends in Uruguay to start watching the show too.

Between takes on the blistering day, a Catholic couple from Brazil was fanning themselves, and one of their two children was playing in a diaper under an umbrella. Friends had told them about the show many times.

“We were somewhat resistant. I thought it would be cheesy or preachy,” said Carlos Crestana. But by episode 5, he said, “We were all in. We told all our friends.”

The Chosen’s writer and director, Dallas Jenkins (son of author Jerry Jenkins), always insists that the show is not a replacement for church, nor is it a ministry.

Fans disagree: “It is a ministry, in a totally different way. It’s affecting so many different people,” said Cheng, who wears Chosen swag everywhere and says it “starts a conversation” about Christianity.

Jenkins has said his goal is to create art that reflects a world where faith exists, which he thinks is underrepresented in film.

On set one of the screenwriters, Tyler Thompson, was taking Polaroid photos. His parents, Steve and Morene Thompson, had come to play extras, and his mom started crying looking at the crowds, overwhelmed at what the project had become.

Tyler Thompson told CT he sees two kinds of Bible movies. There are either Hollywood studio-backed projects like Noah that have “a twist,” which tends to flop with church audiences because they “feel betrayed by some deviation from the source material.” Or there’s “extremely poorly funded, didactic, basically propaganda, [with] terrible actors who are white,” he said. “That flops with everybody.”

Unlike many other biblical epics, The Chosen intentionally cast people with the ethnicities of the story—Middle Eastern, Jewish, and African. Jordan Ross, who plays the disciple known as “Little James” in the show, has cerebral palsy and scoliosis that makes him limp.

The disciples and Jesus (Jonathan Roumie) have enthusiastic and sometimes overzealous fans.

“I love you, Matthew!” screamed a girl when the crowd of extras and actors, including Paras Patel who plays Matthew, were between takes.

Jenkins reminded the extras not to touch the actors or try to take selfies with them as they were going through the crowd during filming.

“It's never been on the job description for writing before that you’ll end up in a spot with 5,000 extras,” said Ryan Swanson, one of the other screenwriters, who has experience working on other Hollywood projects.

The show has had its controversies, but nothing has killed its momentum thus far. Jenkins often responds to complaints on livestreams like he did recently when people claimed a line Jesus says in the show—“I am the law of Moses”—was quoting from the Book of Mormon.

“Jesus makes many ‘I am’ statements and is called the ‘Great I Am.’ So no, I didn’t pull this quote from anywhere else,” Jenkins said.

Fans have brought up the possible Mormon influence on the show because Angel Studio executives the Harmon brothers; the president of Chosen Productions Brad Pelo; and the CEO Derral Eves are all Mormon. Jenkins and his cowriters, Swanson and Thompson, insist that they are the only ones who decide what goes in the show creatively.

The show’s marketing this year also took some big swings—putting up Chosen billboards that looked like they had been defaced, causing confusion among even the fans and eliciting an apology from Jenkins. But the show kept the ads going. With that ad campaign, The Chosen’s head of branding Jeremiah Smith told CT the show was looking for “more of a psychographic than a demographic. People who were jaded with church…We thought humor and sarcasm would be a way to get a different audience in.”

Controversies and overzealous fans aside, Jenkins reminded the thousands under a hot Texas sun of the main thing: They were recreating “one of the greatest moments in human history.”

Being able to experience a moment like that, even a shadow of it, helps explain why Christians from Brazil to Malaysia love this show and want to be a part of it. Though the weather for the shoot was blistering, maybe this is what a day on a hot Galilean hill felt like. People sweated and sought cover under trees or umbrellas, but—even when told they could leave—stayed for hours. Children ran to and from the bushes to take bathroom breaks or pet the Roman soldiers’ horses. The disciples handed out real bread to the crowds, and after the sun went down and the shoot wrapped, Roumie recited the Lord’s Prayer to the crowd in Aramaic.

Ruthie Ross came from Denver, Colorado, with her 23-year-old son Miles Ross, who has Down Syndrome and is in a local acting program. The two of them had been planning this trip since August of last year.

“I’ve been thinking about something like this for 20 years,” she said. “I want Jesus to be more real to people.”

The first two episodes of the third season of The Chosen will be in theaters Friday, for five days. All episodes, as usual, will be free and available on The Chosen ’s app.

This article has been updated to reflect that Angel Studios founders Jeff and Neal Harmon are distributors not producers of the show.

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The post The Real Miracle on the Set of ‘The Chosen’ Is Christians Coming Together appeared first on Christianity Today.

Some of our neighbors see the church as an agent of reaction, pressing the brakes on every major movement for progress since the country’s founding. Others believe the church is a wolf in the process of losing its sheep’s clothing, finally being revealed as toxic, abusive, and self-protective. For still others, the church is a nonstarter, even invisible. Perhaps older generations attended services at Christmas and Easter and more recent generations claimed they did. No need to pretend anymore. 

For those of us who remain committed to church—even pastors, apologists, and Christian writers—it may feel tempting to meet this moment by downplaying the church as much as we can. You don’t have to go to church to be Christian, we might say. Christianity is about a personal, individual relationship with Jesus. What matters is whether you know him, follow him, love him, in your daily life. Organized religion may help some folks, but it’s okay if that’s not you. Try a sermon podcast instead.

I’d like to offer a different perspective. It isn’t exactly a theological case, though not because there isn’t one. As I’ve written elsewhere, theologically speaking, there is one reason and one reason only to go to church: God. 

If the God of the gospel is the one true and living God, then every one of us should be at church every Sunday morning (and more). If not—if Jesus did not rise from the dead—then the church is built on a lie, our faith is futile, and “we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:16–19). If the gospel were false, church would be a waste of time, even if it added decades to our lives and absolutely ensured our total personal flourishing. If the God of Abraham is fictional, if he is not the maker of heaven and earth, it would be better to live in the truth and be miserable than to playact the liturgy and be happy.

But by definition, Christians believe the gospel is true. And if it is true, then church—“the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15, NET) and Christ’s “body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Eph. 1:23, ESV)—is a vital element of human life lived to the utmost. 

That’s why the instinct to meet our culture’s critique or ignorance of the church by downplaying its import is so misguided. Church is not an optional add-on to Christian faith. It is how we learn to be human as God intended. Indeed, it makes possible truly human life before God. 

Church has what we need, the purpose and community and cultivation of virtue for which the rest of our culture is grasping in the dark. It’s right here. It’s nothing to be coy or embarrassed about. It’s nothing to apologize for. Church is what people are hungering for, even if they don’t realize it. Sometimes we ourselves don’t realize it.

Consider some popular recent diagnoses of what ails our society, especially our families and young people. Jonathan Haidt’s An Anxious Generation indicts the “screen-based” childhood of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy decries the colonization of education and parenting by a faux-scientific, quasi-religious therapeutic worldview. James Davison Hunter, Yuval Levin, and Rob Henderson detail the economic precarity haunting the public square, and a growing list of writers including Richard Reeves and Louise Perry have analyzed our confusion about gender, embodiment, work, marriage, and raising children. 

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Let the Cultural Christians Come unto Jesus

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We’re even seeing secular thinkers exploring anew the practical and cultural benefits of Christianity—so much so that Justin Brierley has written a book titled The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. Besides recounting actual conversions, he engages intellectuals who want to be Christian but can’t (yet) bring themselves to convert, a notable development in a supposedly secular age.

Now step back and consider what these authors prescribe.

They tell us that people generally and children particularly flourish when parents are married, when families are intact, when households and neighborhoods are bustling with brothers, sisters, and cousins. 

Kids need to be outdoors playing with friends, not indoors on screens. They need to be literate—readers of books that not only provide wisdom but also take them on imaginative adventures. 

They need to be charged with good work, with helping their neighbors and serving the least of these. They need to be embedded in a variety of intergenerational social settings that teach them how to navigate uncertain and sometimes risky relationships with peers as well as adults.

And speaking of adults, children need mentors on whom they can rely. They need rituals that mark transitions, whether from childhood to adolescence or adolescence to adulthood. They need spaces in which to feel free to discuss and debate aloud, with friends and trusted adults alike, what it means to be male or female. 

They need tech-free spaces in which to inhabit their bodies and be present to others: old and young, black and white, married and single, disabled and able-bodied. They need to suffer boredom—during a sermon, say, or a long budget meeting—and lack an obvious way to stanch it. They need to see adult friendships at both their best and their most challenging.

Now, if you were to design from scratch a local institution to fill to these needs for any child, individual, or family of any income bracket, you’d end up with something very like the church. Even those outside the church are beginning to realize this. See The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson lamenting “the churchgoing bust” (although he’s an agnostic) or Haidt speaking of “a God-shaped hole in everyone’s heart” (although he’s an atheist). 

In saying all this, I’m not suggesting the church is reducible to its role in solving social problems. It is more than this, but it is not less. Besides, our social problems are spiritual problems too—and the church is also where we learn to pray, to worship with others, to see what should be obvious but all too often eludes our grasp: that the world is charged with the grandeur of God. The church offers us the solemnity of rites and practices that train our eyes and hearts to stay focused on Jesus in a culture of perpetual irony, cheap snark, and easy entertainment.

None of this should be a shock from a theological perspective. God founded the church. It is no merely human institution. We should expect it to be finely tuned to the complex needs of the human experience—to help us with everything from early socialization to midlife crisis to dying well.

It’s true, to spin off a phrase from Jesus, that the church was made for man (Mark 2:27). In a deeper sense, though, man was made for the church. Humankind is meant for fellowship with God, and we have a foretaste of that feast in the church, the body of Christ. It’s where we were made to flourish. For what makes us flourish most supremely is found most powerfully there, where we worship together, hearkening to the Word and receiving the sacraments.

You’d think that Christians would see the opportunity here—the chance to tell our society that we have what it’s seeking, that a local institution responsive to these social ills already exists. But for the most part we’re failing to seize the moment, and I think the reason is twofold.

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At the cultural level, American Christians tend to treat the church as an embarrassing encumbrance or a bait and switch, something to be endured if you want to follow Jesus.

On the contrary: The church is the selling point. I don’t mean that we want people joining churches for the social perks. I mean that Christ himself has made the offer of the gospel one and the same as the offer of joining a people. Just as we cannot have the Father without the Son (1 John 2:23) or adoption by God without adoption by Abraham (Gal. 3:6–4:7), so we cannot have Christ without his body and bride (Eph. 2:1–22). It’s a package deal. The Lord and his family come together; either we have both or we have neither.

In a different context, the Protestant theologian Philip Melanchthon once remarked that to know Christ is to know his benefits. Something like that is true here as well: The church is a haven for humanness. It’s a school for learning to be human like Jesus, the one true fully human being. Accordingly, given the challenges of our day, the church is a training ground for antifragility.

Whatever you call it, the church is there for a reason. It is not an encumbrance. It is not organized religion you can take or leave. Minus the church, the gospel is bodiless, incorporeal, ghostly. According to Scripture, the community to which Christ has forever bound himself is none other than the church (Eph. 5:25–33; 1 Cor. 12:4–27; Rev. 21:1–14). The living God dwells there. In this world, therefore, the church is where fullness of life is found. Let’s act like it.

At the congregational level—and admittedly this is anecdotal—what I see is churches anxious about their falling status, nervous about losing Gen Z, and eager to give the people what (church leaders think) they want. The religious landscape has become a marketplace, and churches compete with one another by offering an ever-flashier product. More technology, louder worship, fewer rituals, catchier slogans, and a whole lot of therapeutic jargon. Something to be entertained by. Something to keep the boredom at bay. Perhaps even something to go viral on socials.

The lesson we should have learned long ago is that the more the church is indistinguishable from the world, the less the world has any reason to take an interest in it. The church cannot do better therapy than counselors, better concerts than rock bands, or better TED talks than best-selling authors. In a competition to entertain, the church will always lose to brunch and the NFL.

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The more we try to play catch-up to Hollywood, Nashville, and Silicon Valley, the less distinct the church will be—and the less suited to its purpose of worshiping God and forming humans. The practical benefits of the church’s common life are not its proper center. They are byproducts of the Spirit gathering a human community around the incarnate Son of God, and they will deteriorate or vanish altogether if we are no longer centered on Christ.

Every generation of the church has some urgent question to answer. Ours is not about Christology or iconography or even soteriology. It’s about theological anthropology, the doctrine of the human being. 

We Christians know something about what it means to be human—and the many ways being human can go wrong—and our society is desperate for answers to this question. Thankfully, our neighbors don’t have to read Augustine or Calvin or even Paul to figure it out. Being human isn’t something you learn by reading. You learn to be human with other humans, in company with the people of God. In other words, at church.

God has shown us how to be human in Christ, and we learn the lesson in his school, alongside fellow lifelong learners (that’s what “disciple” means, after all). Let’s have the confidence to show others. Let’s say with the psalmist, “Come and see what God has done, his awesome deeds for mankind,” and “let me tell you what he has done for me” (Ps. 66:5, 16). The world is knocking on the door. Let’s invite them to come inside.

Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry.

The post Worship Together or Bowl Alone appeared first on Christianity Today.

Five years after Coral Ridge Ministries Media first protested the “hate group” designation, the US Supreme Court has declined to reconsider the legal definition of “defamation.” The ministry’s suit against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) cannot go forward.

The Supreme Court’s summary disposition was handed down Monday without explanation. The only dissent came from Justice Clarence Thomas. He argued the court should overturn the guiding 1964 precedent, New York Times Company v. Sullivan, which says media companies are only liable for libel against public figures when they publish false information with reckless disregard for the truth and “actual malice.”

“Coral Ridge now asks us to reconsider the ‘actual malice’ standard,” Thomas wrote. “As I have said previously, ‘we should.’”

Donald Trump also pushed for a reevaluation of New York Times v. Sullivan when he was president, calling the legal standards for libel “a sham” and “a disgrace” to America.

“We are going to take a strong look at our country’s libel laws, so that when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts,” Trump said in 2018.

According to Coral Ridge Ministries’ lawyer David C. Gibbs III, the “actual malice” standard is “a more-often-than-not insurmountable bar for a public figure to plead and prove a defamation claim.” He argued it should only apply to elected officials, not “private public figures,” or be disregarded entirely.

“Instead of the shield it was designed to be,” Gibbs wrote, “it is now a sword used to bludgeon public figures with impunity.”

Coral Ridge Ministries, also known as D. James Kennedy Ministries, first sued SPLC for defamation in 2017. The television ministry grew out of the megachurch Kennedy founded in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and has continued broadcasting since Kennedy’s death in 2007. The ministry currently spends about $1.4 million on airtime, tax records show.

SPLC, a civil rights group that specializes in tracking and reporting on extremist organizations, included the Christian television ministry on an interactive map of hate groups. Local and national media turned to SPLC and used its map after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, brought attention to the wide range of active extremist organizations in America.

Florida media reported that Coral Ridge Ministries was the No. 1 active hate group in the state, and CNN broadcast a map of “all the active hate groups where you live,” which included the television ministry.

Several other conservative Christian groups also protested SPLC’s broad definition of hate group. The Family Research Council said SPLC was “inciting hatred against Christians, which has already led to violence.” In 2012, a gay rights activist went to the lobbying group’s headquarters with a 9 mm pistol, a box of ammunition, and 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches, intending to kill people. He was convicted of terrorism and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Secular organizations continued to rely on the SPLC list, though. Amazon decided to use it in 2017 to determine which nonprofits would be eligible to receive donations through its AmazonSmile program.

“Enough is enough,” said Frank Wright, president of Coral Ridge Ministries at the time.

In court, Coral Ridge Ministries said it wasn’t wrong to say it was “anti-LGBT,” since the ministry condemned homosexual sex as sin. Kennedy and others in the ministry taught that same-sex intimacy was “an abomination,” “vile,” and “shameful.” The ministry’s attorneys said it was not a hate group, though, because it did not promote violence against LGBT people.

SPLC countered that Kennedy and his ministry promoted Christian Reconstructionists R. J. Rushdoony, who said that sexually active gay people should be stoned to death, and Gary DeMar, who said that a biblical government would only have to execute a few gay people to drive “the perversion of homosexuality underground, back into the closet.”

Judge Myron H. Thompson found, however, that there wasn’t a single, established definition of “hate group.” Some only use the term when a group promotes violence. Others, including the FBI, say a hate group is any organization that promotes “animosity, hostility, and malice against persons of or with a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity which differs from that of the members.”

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Thompson decided it was at least plausible to call Coral Ridge Ministries a hate group, and it would be “anathema to the First Amendment” to let the defamation suit go forward.

“If Coral Ridge disagrees with the ‘hate group’ designation, its hope for a remedy lies in the ‘marketplace of ideas,’ not a defamation action,” the judge wrote in 2019.

Besides that, Thompson said, Coral Ridge Ministries could not “plausibly allege actual malice.” The television ministry’s lawyers didn’t have any evidence to show that SPLC knew the “hate group” designation was false and used it anyway to hurt Coral Ridge Ministries. There was no evidence submitted to show the civil rights nonprofit wasn’t acting in good faith.

Thompson dismissed the case in its entirety. Coral Ridge Ministries appealed, specifically challenging the difficulty of the standard of proving “actual malice.” The three-judge appeals court unanimously ruled against Coral Ridge Ministries in 2021.

According to Judge Charles R. Wilson, the ministry was simply asserting malice, but not putting any meat on the “bare-bones allegations.”

“Coral Ridge did not sufficiently plead facts that give rise to a reasonable inference that SPLC ‘actually entertained serious doubts as to the veracity’ of its hate group definition and that definition’s application to Coral Ridge, or that SPLC was ‘highly aware’ that the definition and its application was ‘probably false,’” Wilson wrote.

Coral Ridge Ministries appealed again, asking the Supreme Court to review the lower court rulings. Several Christian organizations filed friend-of-the-court briefs urging reconsideration of New York Times v. Sullivan.

An attorney for National Religious Broadcasters, an association of evangelical media companies, argued that the 1964 decision has lowered the standards of journalism and encouraged too much reckless reporting.

“The number of falsehoods has exploded” since New York Times v. Sullivan, Matthew J. Conigliaro wrote, and it is partly the Supreme Court’s fault.

“The actual malice standard actually discourages well informed speech, including the research that one would expect responsible publishers to insist upon before obviously derogatory speech is disseminated,” he argued. “The actual malice standard permits publishers to take refuge in ignorance.”

The conservative Christian groups could only get support from one justice, however. None of the other eight signed on to Thomas’s dissent, and five years after the legal battles began, Coral Ridge Ministries was left without a legal way to fight the claims that it is a hate group.

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The post D. James Kennedy Ministries Loses Legal Battle Against ‘Hate Group’ Label appeared first on Christianity Today.