Page 968 – Christianity Today (2024)

In 1910, a missionary began working with a headhunting tribe in northern India. One convert prayed for his son to translate the Bible into their native Hmar language.

The son, Rochunga Pudaite, did much more. He ultimately founded Bibles For The World (BFTW), an organization that reports delivering millions of Bibles to more than 100 nations.

Pudaite died earlier this week, after a short illness. He was 87.

Born in 1927, Pudaite was the first in his village to go to school and graduate from college.

As a young man, he befriended eventual World Vision founder Bob Pierce on a visit to India. Pierce later used his newly formed development organization to sponsor Pudaite’s theological education in Glasglow, Scotland, where the Indian theologian met Billy Graham. The famous evangelist encouraged Pudaite to pursue his graduate work at Wheaton College and "personally saw to it" that he was admitted, BFTW vice president Jeff McLinden told CT.

"Dr. Pudaite maintained a close friendship with both Pierce and Graham throughout his life," McLinden told CT. "George Beverly Shea and Pat Boone often sang at major rallies across the United States that Pudaite held to promote his quest to provide a billion Bibles to people around the world who had none." Watch Pudaite surprise Pierce on “This Is Your Life” below:

After completing his coursework, Pudaite translated the Bible into his native Hmar. In 1968, he and his wife Mawii founded Partnership Mission in Wheaton, Illinois. The organization later changed its name to Bibles For The World and moved to Colorado Springs. An ECFA charter member, the ministry took in more than $3 million in revenue last year.

BFTW offers a memoriam page for Pudaite. Colorado Springs’ The Gazette also noted his death.

Pudaite’s idea for the group was sparked after seeing the phone books of India’s largest cities and remembering the ad jingle for Bell Telephone ("Let your fingers do the walking"), Mawii told The Denver Post.

"Suddenly, he understood that these books contained the names and addresses of millions of people," she told the Post. "By typing their names and addresses from those books and printing labels, then packing and wrapping Bibles, and mailing them, he could reach Calcutta, Dehli, and other parts of India."

In an effort to increase biblical literacy among the Hmar, the couple invested in education. Together, they started 85 village Christian schools, 7 Christian high schools, 2 junior colleges, and a seminary for the Hmar people. They also founded their own denomination, the Evangelical Free Church of India, which today numbers more than 350 churches.

Pudaite wrote several books about the Hmar, and also created a Hmar/English dictionary. He was also the subject of several biographies and the film Beyond the Next Mountain.

"Dr. Ro was an inspiration to millions, and his life story and ministry work demonstrate how much one Christian can do when directed by the Lord," said McLinden in a statement. "Because of his efforts, millions of people around the world have been introduced to the message of the Bible, and they understand what it means to be true followers of Christ.”

[Image courtesy of YouTube – WVision Mag]

The two men share a last name but otherwise come from different worlds: Raju Pariyar, a popular folk singer known as “the Justin Bieber of Nepal,” and Bishnu Pariyar, a Christian pastor who runs a children’s ministry and orphanage in the tourist city of Bharatpur in the Himalayan country.

They sat next to one another on a flight from Kathmandu, Nepal, to Mumbai, India, in May. During the two-and-half-hour-long trip Pastor Bishnu told the renowned singer about the God who saved him and his family 20 years ago.

“I had a great passion to share the gospel, and he showed interest to listen,” Bishnu told CT by email. As he spoke to his seatmate, he imagined the impact on Nepal’s music scene if a star like Raju Pariyar came to Christ. In Nepal, only 1.4 percent of the population identify as Christian. Eight out of every ten Nepalese are Hindu, while the rest are Buddhist, Muslim, or followers of the indigenous faith Yumaism.

In early July, about six weeks after the pastor and pop singer met, his prayers were answered. Raju, along with his wife and two children, made the decision to give their lives to Christ. They traveled to Bharatpur, about 150 kilometers west of Kathmandu, to make their public proclamation in Pastor Bishnu’s church.

“Jesus has changed me fully,” Raju said following his conversion. “I left the previous worldly activities, and I am renewed in the spirit and following Christ as my redeemer.”

To date the 35-year-old has recorded 11,000 folk songs; his singles top the charts in Nepal, and he sells out stadiums for concerts. The award-winning musician has also toured in South Asia, the Middle East, and Australia. But despite the widespread adulation, Raju faces a difficult path ahead as a Christian performer in a nation that had been a Hindu kingdom up to 2008.

Last month, Nepal adopted a new constitution that establishes it as a secular country, but still requires the state to protect Hinduism. Four centures after the first known Christian missionary in Nepal, Portuguese Jesuit Juan Cabral, Nepalese Christians remain a persecuted minority. According to Pastor Bishnu, Nepalese Christians regularly face discrimination. “We are hated by the people and even by the government,” he said.

Raju is well aware of the religious climate, but has no plans to hide his conversion. He wants to shift to performing worship music. Raju said he wants to be known “as a Christian singer of Nepal, who has decided to become a Christian though we have challenges in Nepal.”

He asks for the support of the greater church as he begins speaking out for the faith.

“Please pray so that our faith be strong in the Lord and despite … the challenges,” he said by email. “Please pray for my musical career to be smooth and I can make a great change in the lives of the people and my supporters. Please pray that his will be done in my life and in my family, and my life and career will go well, and I can abide in Christ ever and ever.”

As CT has reported, the small but growing population of Christian converts in Nepal has pushed for social and political influence over the last several years, including securing rights for cemetery burials (amid a Hindu culture of cremation). Earlier this year, CT also covered the churches destroyed by the earthquake near Kathmandu and Christian involvement in recovery efforts.

As the mother of a nine-year-old with Down syndrome, I am usually eager to support legislative efforts to protect and honor individuals with Down syndrome. In the midst of Down Syndrome Awareness Month, I want more and more people to recognize the vibrant lives led by people with Down syndrome. I believe in the inherent value of every human life, and I want to live in a culture where women receive the support they need to continue unexpected pregnancies and pregnancies with unexpected prenatal diagnoses.

But I don’t support the Ohio bill that would ban abortion on the basis of a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome.

Though accurate statistics are hard to come by, many women who receive a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome choose abortion. Many doctors still provide outdated and biased information when they give this diagnosis, sometimes overstating health risks and social stigma in a way that plays into parents’ fears. Companies that offer early, noninvasive prenatal screening tests often use misleading marketing materials. Although these companies say their tests are 99 to 100 percent accurate, independent investigations demonstrate the inaccuracy of their claims.

I know firsthand the beauty and delight (and frustration and heartache) of life with Down syndrome. Our daughter Penny takes thyroid medication. She has trouble controlling her impulses at school. She has trouble telling time. She also glows with pride after she plays a new song on the piano, and bubbles over when she hears a friend is coming to visit. She skips with excitement when she sees a bookstore or a library, home to thousands of her favorite objects: chapter books. Her life is glorious, messy, and, in her own words, “great.” When she was first born, I didn’t believe happiness, hope, and possibility would define us as a family, but they do.

So I know what it’s like to receive a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome. I know the fear and the sadness and the confusion and anger and guilt. I know the desire to run away from it all. I desperately want to offer my hand to the women who stand in that place, assure them that it will work out, that their child will be safe and loved.

But I don’t think bills like Ohio’s will achieve the goal of welcoming more children with Down syndrome into the world. This bill ostensibly protects babies with Down syndrome, because it outlaws abortion based upon a prenatal diagnosis. In this way, this bill recognizes a troubling reality—our cultural bias against children and adults with intellectual disabilities. But such a law could potentially intensify that bias. This measure stands a chance of increasing the misinformation about Down syndrome and could even worsen the rate of abortion of babies with the condition. (Existing laws on selective abortion, such a similar ban in North Dakota, are difficult to enforce.)

First, doctors agree to abide by their field’s standard of care. In the case of Down syndrome and other genetic abnormalities, that includes presenting “all reproductive options.” If it is illegal to present abortion as an option in the case of Down syndrome, these doctors find themselves caught between their professional guidelines and a state law. They could easily offer no information rather than try to navigate the two conflicting mandates, especially when a new law requiring clinicians to hand out information about Down syndrome has received no funding.

Second, women with a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome need safe and open conversations with medical providers. These laws run the risk of stifling women’s questions. In our culture, a diagnosis of Down syndrome often brings fear. Women need freedom to ask questions so that their fears can be ameliorated and they can discover the truth about Down syndrome. When the law doesn’t offer women a chance to talk through their fears and consider their options, some will decide to get an abortion based on instinctual fears and incomplete knowledge.

In recent years, a coalition of parents, genetic counselors, Down syndrome advocates, adults with Down syndrome, doctors, and other professionals has come together in what has come to be known as the “pro-information” movement. This movement attempts to sidestep the politics that divide pro-life from pro-choice. The “pro-information” approach acknowledges that, in a country where abortion is legal, some women will choose abortion in the face of a prenatal diagnosis, but that no woman should choose abortion based on fear, shame, outdated information, or lack of support. All women should receive up-to-date, balanced information about the reality of their children’s condition. And the pro-information movement affirms the potential for good, whole, fulfilling lives for people with Down syndrome and their families.

In 2008, Congress passed the Prenatally and Postnatally Diagnosed Conditions Awareness Act. It called for accurate and up-to-date information on the heels of a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome and other genetic conditions. Senators Ted Kennedy (a Democrat from Massachusetts) and Sam Brownback (a Republican from Kansas) led the effort as co-sponsors, offering hope that our government could work across the aisle on this issue. But Congress never funded the law, the law never mandated the provision of the information, and Health and Human Services has not provided grants. People still do not have access to the information the act required.

Meanwhile, other groups have worked to provide doctors and patients a fuller picture of life with Down syndrome and other genetic conditions. The National Center for Prenatal and Postnatal Resources created booklets with input from major medical and disability organizations. They include information about abortion as well as adoption and continuing the pregnancy. These materials emphasize the real lives of families with children with Down syndrome—real lives that include more visits to doctors and specialists than the typical child, but also real lives that include laughter and love, just like a typical child.

Presumably, lawmakers who outlaw abortion due to a prenatal diagnosis want to support people with Down syndrome. The best way to do this is through changing the culture of bias toward people with disabilities, writing and funding legislation to provide accurate and up-to-date information to doctors and their patients, and exposing the misleading claims made through advertisem*nts for prenatal screening and diagnostic tests.

Information will not save all babies with Down syndrome. But it will provide women with a chance to overturn outdated assumptions and instead imagine a good future for their children and their families. It can change the implicit bias from doctors who present diagnoses based upon memories from medical school rather than using contemporary statistics and images. Information can offer a way for women to choose life.

[Image source]

I’ll never forget where I was when I nearly quit the ministry: sitting in my office at church, weeping. My wife was out of town with our children, ministering to a friend whose husband had just died from cancer. It was very early in my first pastorate. Being a senior pastor was new, different, and somewhat frightening.

I was experiencing the betrayal of a church leader close to me, someone who had discipled me, mentored me, and ordained me for ministry. What began, I thought, as constructive criticism, soon turned into private and public slander.

This new opposition wasn’t the kind of friendly and constructive criticism I’d expected and sought from people I’d grown up idolizing. This wasn’t coaching from older, wiser, pastors. This was jealousy, bullying, and threats. And it was deeply personal.

His disapproval of me had not stemmed from integrity issues, doctrinal issues, or even leadership failures. It was simply a difference in ministry model. I chose to pursue a style of leadership that departed, in some ways, from his. Having been his disciple, he had expected me to lead just like him in my own ministry.

I remember thinking in this moment, I think I’m going to quit. Maybe I’m not cut out for church leadership. Maybe they are right.

I replayed the conversations with this person over and over in my head. You are not cut out for ministry. You are an embarrassment. You will never make it without us.

That same day I called up a friend, a respected and experienced pastor. I was trembling when I called him and told him about the situation. I told him I was pretty sure I would leave the ministry.

Rich, my friend, responded that day with two statements that changed my life and ministry forever:

“Dan, you can’t quit. I won’t let you quit. You are right and they are wrong.”

“Dan, you must also forgive them.”

The first word was one I wanted and needed to hear. The second … well, I didn’t like hearing about forgiveness so much in this moment. But Rich was right.

I had always spoken and preached and taught about forgiveness, but perhaps it was in a sterile, academic way. I really had not had occasion to practice forgiveness. I’m not talking about letting go of petty hurts and insults—the kind of daily rhythm of forgiveness and repentance that oils relationships—I’m speaking of painful and difficult hurts.

How do you forgive when you’ve been so deeply wounded? I would learn this in a personal way over the next year as my reputation was maligned and I lost many friends. No longer was forgiveness a sterile topic for a future lesson.

Calling out evil

In the story of Joseph—dreamer, slave, brother, wrongly accused, prime minister, son—I discovered a powerful secret about forgiveness and leadership. The story of Joseph’s epic fall and rise had been a staple of my growing up years in church. I knew the contours well and saw in Joseph not only a powerful tale of God’s provision and protection, but a beautiful shadow of Christ. Christ was the better Joseph, wrongly accused, imprisoned, then exonerated by resurrection and exalted in glory.

But there is something about the God-given forgiveness displayed by Joseph that I hadn’t seen until my current trial. In those famous words, Joseph says:

As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today. (Genesis 50:20 ESV)

Two things strike me about Joseph’s passionate words to his brothers. First, Joseph didn’t minimize the hurt against him. He pointed to his brothers and said to them, “you meant evil against me.”

We too often skip past this part and get to the good stuff: the forgiveness. Perhaps it’s our desire to see resolution and reconciliation that causes us to minimize real hurts. I think we do this in our own lives as well. As Christians we are so wired for forgiveness that we forget to look at evil—evil done to us—and call it what it is.

But to minimize sin—even sin against ourselves—is to hollow out the gospel message that offers forgiveness in the first place. Christ, in his death and resurrection, offers forgiveness for those who repent and believe. It’s free, but it cost Christ his life. The sins we committed against God were heinous violations of his holiness and tragic trespasses against our fellow man.

The only way we can begin to offer forgiveness is if we call our hurts what they are: evil. In a way, reading Joseph’s words freed me to move forward. It gave me permission to own what had happened to me.

Some slights are mere slights and many insults are petty. But real, honest, genuinely evil things done against us are not things to be dismissed lightly. Forgiveness is not a pass. It’s not a wave of the hand with a shrug, No big deal.

God meant it for good

What happened to me—this was big deal. It was evil—not simply by my own flawed accounting—but by numerous godly people who knew the situation. Owning this helped me to appreciate the next piece of Joseph’s forgiveness, the theological truth that formed the ground of my ability to forgive.

But God meant it for good. The doctrine of God’s sovereignty generates a lot of heat. Theologians have argued about it since the first century. But for me, this was no longer a sterile chapter in a systematic theology textbook. It was life.

Joseph’s words are beautiful declaration of the tension between human responsibility for sin and God’s sovereignty. His brother’s intended evil. They worked and schemed against their brother, denying him human dignity, abandoning him for death, and selling him, like property, to the highest bidder. They intended but God superintended.

God used human sin to accomplish His purposes in the world. Joseph’s ordeal is a shadow of another, betrayed by his brothers, sold for thirty pieces of silver, wrongly put to death. In Christ, Peter declared on Pentecost, we see the same tension:

this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it. (Acts 2:23-24 ESV)

Man schemed, God superintended for good. I can’t fully explain this mystery. But it does cause me to worship and it gives me grounds for repentance. I know that the evil done to me—pedestrian when compared to the evil I’ve committed against God—is not random. It’s not out there somewhere. It’s being used by God for his glory.

Sometimes we see, as in the life of Joseph, this being fully worked out. Mostly though, we won’t see the full flower of Christ’s kingdom restoration until He comes back in victory. I’ve seen God use this difficult season to draw me closer to him, to sharpen my leadership, and to allow me to build new friendships with people I’d never know if I wasn’t hurt so deeply.

Forgiveness as vital to leadership

Forgiveness is not ancillary to spiritual leadership. It’s vital. A leader’s ability to forgive others directly impacts his ability to lead others. I’m convinced of it, not only from the life of Joseph who became a wise and capable leader in Egypt.

I had to forgive those who had hurt me deeply not only for my own personal spiritual growth, but also because I had a congregation of people watching me. How could I preach of the forgiveness Christ offers and yet harbor bitterness in my heart? How could I help my people apply the gospel to their own relational struggles if I ignored what the gospel was telling me?

I’ve seen bitterness tear at the heart of a leader and poison his leadership. I’ve seen it up close in ministry and I’ve read about it in countless biographies. Look closely at tyrannical leaders–in ministry, in government, in business, anywhere—and you’ll find a common trait. Somewhere in their past was a deep hurt that wounded them so deeply they couldn’t move on. Bitterness and cynicism became embedded in their psyche, making them insecure and power-hungry.

When we can’t or won’t forgive, we communicate something other than the gospel we claim to declare. We say, with our lives, that God is less than all-powerful and that our circ*mstances are outside of his control. What’s more we offer a limited gospel, one that only heals certain kinds of pain. Ultimately, we lead our people away from the living water their hearts crave.

Forgiveness doesn’t always mean reconciliation. It doesn’t always mean every relationship is put back together perfectly. It doesn’t mean we ignore abuses or criminal acts. What it does mean, however, is that we don’t shut off our hearts from the gospel’s healing, cleansing flow. It means we trust the evil done against us, not to our own limited and faulty vengeance, but to the powerful justice of God.

Daniel Darling is vice-president of communications for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. He is the author of several books, including his latest, The Original Jesus.

Most of those who practice Christian theology think they are engaged in a serious science. This should not be surprising given the reality that at the center of Christian theology is a crucified Savior. Moreover, theology must well deal with the fundamentals of life—that is, life, death, and all the stuff in between. Stuff like love and the betrayal of love. Sentimentality and superficial nostrums must be avoided. Humor can be one of the ways that sentimentality and superficiality can be defied.

I do think, in spite of considerable evidence to the contrary, that theology can and should be, in some of its modes, funny. Theology done right should make you laugh. It should be done in an entertaining manner. Humor is not the only mode of entertainment the discourse of theology can take, but it is surely the case that we are often attracted to speech and writing that is funny. This calls into question the presumption by some that if you want what you have to say to be entertaining, then what you have to say cannot be serious. I have tried to defy that presumption by attempting to do theology in a manner that “tickles” the imagination.

A number of times, when being introduced before giving a lecture, the story is told of my encounter with a student at Harvard. It seems I was walking across Harvard looking for the library. Not sure I was going in the right direction, I asked an undergraduate if he could tell me where the library is at. He responded by observing, “At Harvard we do not end sentences with a preposition.” I am said to have responded, “Can you tell me where the library is at, [expletive]?”

There is just one problem with that story. It did not happen. However, the story now seems to have reached a canonical stage.

I relate this phenomenon because the story also reflects the general presumption that I am a “funny guy.” Some even think I have a gift for the one-liner. It is not for me to claim to be funny, but I do hope that I have been able to do theology in a funny manner. I think my work is funny in at least two ways. First, I hope that people laugh out loud about something I have said or written. Second, my work is funny because I try to find ways to “do theology” in disguise. So I push the limits of the presumptions about “serious” theology in the hope that the difference might make a difference for how we live.

It is one thing to suggest that theologians need a sense of humor. It is quite something else to argue that their theology must be funny. I acknowledge the distinction, but I will maintain that not only should theologians know how to laugh at themselves but also their theology should manifest the joy that reflects the glory of God. Of course, joy is not the same as what makes something funny, but what is funny depends first and foremost on a joyful recognition that God is God and we are not. The joke is on us.

This excerpt is adapted from parts of the chapter, “How to Be Theologically Funny.” Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

The St. Louis Cardinals may have lost to the Chicago Cubs in the playoffs, but they don’t have anything to be ashamed of. They won 100 games in the regular season, continuing their run as a perennial contender. And part of the credit for this current version of the Cardinal dynasty must go to their manager, Mike Matheny.

After a tense interview for one of the most important baseball managing jobs in the world, Matheny reflected on his anxiety this way:

The fact was, I wanted the job. I was excited about the possibilities. I closed with “I’m not guaranteeing this is what’s going to happen to our boys, but I want you to see that this system works.”

The interview was not for manager of the St. Louis Cardinals. It was to coach a little league team of 10-year- olds. Matheny must interview well. He not only got the little league gig, he got the big league one too, taking over a defending World Series champion from a retiring Hall of Fame manager with no managing experience himself (other than with the kids). Since then he has returned the Cards to the playoffs for four straight years.

Before agreeing to coach a bunch of 4th graders, Matheny read the riot act to the kids’ parents. “I’ve always said I would coach only a team of orphans.” The problem with youth sports isn’t the youth, he said. It’s the parents. Heckuva thing to say in the face of said parents. They were to attend games and not stand out in any way. They could help only by playing catch and hitting grounders with their kids between practices and games. They were never to say a word to the umpire. And no lobbying coaches on behalf of their child. Any infraction of said rules would result in little Johnny being summarily dismissed from the team.

The riot act was leaked online, gained popularity, and was dubbed (by an alliterator other than Matheny) as “The Matheny Manifesto.” In this book of the same title, he teams with Jerry Jenkins of Left Behind fame to take his show on the road. His rules for his little league players don’t just work with the Cardinals. They can work everywhere: “I also want to examine how these values apply to life beyond baseball, beyond sports, and can plant a seed of hope in the next generation.” A little grandiose perhaps. But who would’ve thought a little league manager could take over the Cards—and continue to win?

The result is a beautifully readable and morally meaty sports book. Matheny and Jenkins tell stories well from Matheny’s own playing career. He racked up Gold Glove awards as baseball’s best defensive catcher—the position that births future managers. He broke Major League records for catching consecutive games without an error (252—more than 2000 innings!) and 1565 straight defensive chances. His most memorable highlight was taking a fastball off the face … and not falling down. He just stood there, hand on hip, more stoic than anything. Current players marvel at his grit (as will anyone who hunts down that clip on YouTube). Catchers are famously zealous about their toughness. So this is also a mark of courage: Matheny argues we shouldn’t take toughness so far. Baseball’s move, in concert with football, to be more diligent about guarding against concussions is a welcome one. Matheny retired with post-concussion syndrome which caused him to lose his balance, his concentration, even his sense of direction around his neighborhood. It may not look as manly for a catcher to sweep tag a slide at the plate, but it can lengthen lives, so Matheny is for it. Looking at that clip of him spitting blood and teeth, no one can accuse him of meekness.

Unless it is for his Christian faith, or so he fears. He worries about Christians being perceived as wet noodles, more Ned Flanders than Mike Matheny. He worries too much, I think. The parts of faith he explores with any texture have more to do with the particular history of American evangelicalism than with the imperatives of the Bible. For example, he was thrown out of a frat party at the University of Michigan for refusing to do shots. Courageous, but not exactly canonical. He’s tempted to punctuate his protests to umpires with the occasional F-bomb (aware that its rarity from his mouth would accentuate its effectiveness!). To do so would “jeopardize everything I stand for.” Here Christianity is reduced to not drinking and not cussing. To Matheny’s credit, he includes not not evangelizing. A preacher close to one of his teams accused him of “turtling up and hiding” his faith. So he tries to be more forthright bearing witness to it. I just wish he’d talk a bit more about Jesus rather than his own experience not doing things. It’s not exactly rare anymore, generations into the life of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and many similar organizations, to find an athlete memoirist standing up for faith.

The better parts of the book have to do with manners. And these are really, really good. Matheny had a faceful of youth sports done rudely with one of his children in a hockey league. Other parents yelled at their kids, at the refs, at one another—Matheny personally broke up a fight in a parking lot before an inebriated dad asked for his autograph. This just in: children don’t want this. Kids are already under enormous self-imposed pressure to perform. The last thing they need is detailed public instruction screamed by the people they love most in the world. Why do we marvel when they quit?

As a youth sports manager, Matheny’s job was to instill love and passion for the game. His players and their parents would conduct themselves with class. He would teach baseball the right way—played with courtesy toward opponents, toward one another, toward the umps (who, he promised, would perform miserably), and, most important, toward the game. Matheny teaches baseball as a craft. His players would honor that craft. They may also win. But that was ancillary. It seemed to work. His organization, the Missouri Warriors, has mushroomed into more teams who have indeed had a lot of ancillary. And there was that call from the Cards.

Matheny is on to something. We have screwed up parenting. He suggests that as youth sports have grown (and parents have made this their primary social outlet), with kids traveling all over the country in fancy uniforms, and managers imitating Billy Martin—kicking dirt on umpires little older or more competent than the players—and quoting Vince Lombardi that “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing,” sports have suffered. So have the souls of the little ones playing them. A youth sports manager’s greatest challenge, Matheny believes, is to mold the character of the kids. They should be decent human beings above all—hopefully for the rest of their lives. So should their parents. Flannery O’Connor famously described Christian faith as a matter of “mystery and manners,” of God’s wild intrusion into human affairs and our rigorous and detailed reordering of our life by the power of the Holy Spirit. I hear echoes of this liturgical (not a word Matheny uses!) vision of things throughout this book. Just as a second baseman has to learn the intricate and demanding steps of turning a double play by mental preparedness and rote repetition on the way to being able to improvise successfully and beautifully, so too do Christians have to concentrate, practice, and honor the craft of discipleship. Aristotle would approve; so would Thomas Aquinas and Stanley Hauerwas.

Matheny distills his manifesto into bullet points. Key one: leadership. The coach is right even when he’s wrong. Kids hear their parents disrespecting authority in their coaches, teachers, and I would add pastors, and they should cut it out, especially when they’re “sure” they’re right and the coach is wrong. And leaders should be big enough to apologize when they err. Key two: confidence. A manager at every level should let the catcher call the pitcher’s pitches and not take over. Do weekend warrior dads really think they can see (in every sense) as well as the eyes behind the plate? Teaching the game the right way means giving it over to the players to learn themselves. Key three: teamwork. He tells stories here of aging baseball stars who go out of their way to treat rookies and fans and umpires with kindness, when clearly they don’t have to. Key four: faith, and here Matheny does show it’s harder to get thrown out of a game without cussing (a fellow coach jokes that he can only get thrown out for loitering!). Key five: class, and his gem of an example is umpires and catchers going out of their way to give each other time to recover when hit by a pitch. Key six: character. His players will not respond in kind when disrespected by opponents. Key seven: toughness. We rarely learn things the easy way. Sure it’s cool for a big leaguer to play hurt, but not for a child to. And key eight: humility, which he shows throughout by honoring the granular texture of the game. Baseball has been a “pacesetter” for his life, he says in a nice turn of phrase, and he honors it here.

My only caution is a certain nostalgia about the good ole days, perhaps attributable to his co-writer, but it seems to run deep, both in the writer and in his sport. Sure enough, as Matheny quotes Nolan Ryan, kids today seem only to play with uniforms on, and kids used to play anything involving a ball because … it was fun. Video games are the choice du jour, not the sandlot. Christians are often tempted to look back nostalgically, but we shouldn’t do it. In a truly moving vignette, Matheny recalls watching the film 42 with an older black man in the theater weeping and delighting like he’s in church. As even a superficial grasp of history shows, we human beings have only ever been sinners. We are now too. The Christian claiming to be counter-cultural while releasing a bestseller about managing one of baseball’s greatest franchise seems … odd. That way lies the cultural resentment of the old moral majority, winning presidential elections while claiming to be persecuted, and it’s a tired trope.

Matheny resists at points. He doesn’t want to claim to have all the answers—that’s the very arrogance he suggests we’d all do better without. And there are few better laboratories for how to be human beings, and a society, than the youth sports field. I’d love my kid to play for a Matheny. And I’d love to not be the parent he worries about.

My deep envy in reading the book as a pastor is for some of the power Matheny had as a little league coach. He could kick kids off the team. As a player he could tell a pitcher who publically showed him up that he would fight him right there on the field if he did it again. This insistence on manners is crucial to any life well lived. How come as a pastor I couldn’t exercise it? When people made up lies about me or listened to gossip rather than shut it down, I couldn’t kick them out of the church. And I shouldn’t—churches that enthuse about excommunication at the whim of perceived pastoral disrespect are often wretched places. But I wonder if we can insist on anything in human behavior without consequences. And I was surprised to find myself jealous of the authority of a little league coach.

Jason Byassee teaches homiletics at the Vancouver School of Theology in British Columbia.

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Bridge of Spies is based on the true story of James B. Donovan, who acted as the Official Unofficial U.S. Representative during Cold War negotiations between the U.S., East Germany, and the U.S.S.R. Donovan, if the movie is anything close to accurate, was the kind of man Tom Hanks was born to play: smart and determined, but most of all humble.

Donovan starts out as the pro-bono lawyer of Rudolph Abel (Mark Rylance)—a man accused of being a Soviet spy. His law firm clearly expects Donovan to merely offer a perfunctory defense; privately, the judge asks him, "We all know he's guilty—why put up a fight?" But Donovan is convinced that the appearance of a working system needs to be matched with the actuality of a working system—and not only pursues an appeal for Abel on constitutional grounds, but convinces the judge to not condemn Abel to death.

There are moments throughout the film, like the one where Donovan argues against the death penalty for Abel, where the brilliance of Hanks's casting becomes clear. Donovan, all allegiances aside, thinks that Abel is simply following his government's orders, which Donovan considers to be an honorable action, no matter whose side you're on.

At the same time, Donovan knows that having a Soviet spy ripe for the trading would be a primo diplomatic advantage for the US. Hanks's genius is in taking two motivations—one pragmatic, and the other idealistic—and intertwining them with such sincerity that you really believe both halves. (That this is a result of our most American actor being directed by our most American director, the latter-day equivalent of Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart, is probably pretty telling.)

And when a top-secret U.S. spy plane is shot down over Soviet territory, leading to the capture of test pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell), Donovan's gamble pays off. He's sent to East Germany to negotiate the release of Powers in exchange for Abel—though, idealist through and through, Donovan also attempts to lump the release of an American student caught on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall.

The result is one man, acting in no official capacity for the U.S. government, negotiating with two nations (one a subsidiary of the other) and with people who have no official ties to the government they "represent." The stakes ratchet up, but Spielberg keeps the tension at a low simmer. Donovan is less James Bond, and more Jimmy Stewart going to East Germany brandishing ideals and smarts in equal measure.

Spielberg's direction is so deft and seemingly effortless that it's easy to take for granted how well-composed everything is. Remarkably, the first twenty minutes of the film lack music, allowing you to read the scene for yourself to determine its feel, rather than having it blared at you. Even when it appears, the music is subtle and appropriate throughout. The costuming is wonderful, feeling authentic instead of caricatured, and the shift in color palettes between the U.S., West Berlin, and East Berlin does more for generating a mood than any speech or soundtrack could.

That everything is so technically high-quality across the board makes it pretty difficult to figure out whether Bridge of Spies is actually a good movie. It's certainly an extremely Spielbergian movie: the negotiation of Lincoln plus the espionage of Munich plus the moralizing monologues of Amistad.

This isn't to say that Bridge of Spies is the sum of those parts–simply that everything in the movie is extremely familiar. On one level, appreciating the film means appreciating the way Spielberg can reduce a story to its purest, most Platonic components. There's absolutely nothing in the film that doesn't need to be there.

But this also deprives the movie of an edge, or spark of life, or whatever you want to call it: the film plays like a succession of very well-crafted, technically superb Moments, but its grounding isn't inside the movie. Moments are imbued with gravitas not because they're powerful, but because you know Spielberg did them. And the fact that Tom Hanks is so clearly our nation's Everyman also means that his character doesn't get little humanizing moments—after all, why waste time fleshing out your lead when Tom Hanks's name alone means you don't have to?

The arc of Bridge of Spies is that Donovan is right, and people don't realize it until after the fact; this is the first act. Then, in the second act, Donovan is right, and people don't realize it until after the fact. Roll credits. Rather than characterizing the difficulty Donovan had in accomplishing his task (aside from a few cases of mistaken identity), the film makes him so resolute, and determined, and relentlessly right (both in the moment and morally), that we lose the ability to relate with him.

Compare Spielberg's treatment of Donovan with Aaron Sorkin's Steve Jobs: the latter figure is immanently relatable, but not because everyone in the audience is a genius aesthete designer. It's because we're all flawed. Sure, we probably rarely deny the paternity of our own children—but something in the combination of insecurity and determination in Jobs makes him not only fascinating, but relatable.

Bridge of Spies offers only the determination–only the high notes, as it were, with none of the lows. And in eliminating the lows, Spielberg mutes our experience of the highs. Bridge of Spies is an amazing technical achievement, and is sure to please any fan of Spielberg, but it lacks the personal spark that makes Spielberg at his best so captivating.

Caveat Spectator

We see some East Germans attempt to climb the Berlin Wall and get leveled in a hail of gunfire—there may have been a bloody streak or two, but it is not very graphic. Some minor profanity is briefly used.

Jackson Cuidon is a writer who lives in New York City with his wife and dog. He Tweets once in a while @jxscott.

It’s too easy to be disappointed in a director these days. The rise of mass production, mass consumption—mass everything—turns Guillermo del Toro into Del Toro Incorporated; when he disappoints, we demand a customer service line. Internet social media currently fill that function, and the ratio of angry rant to thoughtful conversation probably matches that of corporate tele-camps. And movies are especially vulnerable to this because of the unique way they mix business with art.

It’s complicated, yes—but there is something inescapably tawdry about reacting to a film the same way one would a stick of deodorant.

Often the complaint is simply that the director did not give us what we wanted. It’s surprising how many boil down to this: “This is different than the trailer.” “So-and-so was barely in the movie.” “It was too sad.”

This sort of thing says a lot about what the audience felt entitled to—and little about anything else. And it works no better with movies than it does with the spiritual; always consider that the reason a prayer to the movie gods went unanswered may have been that the prayer was extremely stupid.

In this context, it becomes a lot harder to criticize something well. It is especially challenging with a movie like Crimson Peak, because del Toro’s new gothic romance is pretty good.

Mia Wasikowska delights as Edith Cushing, a bookish and imaginative young lady who reveres Mary Shelley and is working on her first novel. A free spirit, she could care less about the exciting additions to Albany’s social scene—the English Baronet Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and his sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain). When Thomas shows an interest in her book, her defenses weaken. After the Baronet teaches her the waltz, Edith does the only proper thing and ends up at his ruined estate as the new Mrs. Sharpe.

Ghosts ensue.

The cast is good. Wasikowska will have to keep a lookout lest she find herself excelling in costume dramas for the next twenty years. Jessica Chastain, who always seems to want to slash at people with a knife while screaming hysterically, for once gets to act on these repressed desires. She seems to enjoy it. Tom Hiddleston and Charlie Hunnam (as Dr. Alan McMichael, Edith’s hometown admirer) do their duty, as does a welcome Jim Beaver, who plays Edith’s captain-of-industry father.

The film looks good, too. Del Toro clearly drew from some of his more vibrant technicolor inspirations, like the Italian director Mario Bava and the Hammer Horror films. Where some filmmakers would be embarrassed to use color so boldly, del Toro’s filmography works as a treatise in color theory. In Crimson Peak he fittingly uses red to stunning effect. Sometimes it frightens by invading scene palettes in jarring slashes. The rest of the time it lurks at the edge of the frame, watching you.

Ultimately, though, Crimson Peak is a movie that’s only prettygood. It’s fine. And for this director, working in this genre with this budget and this cast, that’s almost worse than making a bad movie.

The story is where the cracks begin to show. Don’t get me wrong, it follows the conventions of the gothic tale just fine.

And there’s nothing wrong with following those conventions. Originality in genre is overrated. Genre storytelling and consumption is a ritual—repetition is part of the point. That being said, the story in Crimson Peak is so symmetrically structured as to rob the story of most of its mystery before it even begins. Certain sound effects and details in the first act, which I won’t spoil by naming here, are dangerously direct and give away much of the plot—my screening companion, who never watches horror, felt the same way.

And the theme is hammered in like a stake in the heart. Two couples representing two different “views” on love—one symbolized by a butterfly, the other by black moths? A crowning monologue where we are informed that “monstrous love makes monsters of us all”?

This stuff is pat, it is on the nose, and it does not work. It’s also a surprising flaw for a director who is vocally resistant to structure and constriction and staleness in all its forms. None of this ruins the film—it will make a fine Halloween date night. Dedicated del Toro fans will want more.

Perhaps it is not fair to lay the blame wholly at the director’s feet. Filmmaking is collaborative, and without a window into the production process we can’t know what sacrifices and compromises the team made behind the scenes. Yet to me, the same smell hung over Pacific Rim. I think the disparity between his visual flair and his writing is going to be the defining challenge of del Toro’s career. Some will say that visual flair outweighs memorable characters or good writing. It doesn’t, but even if it did—someone who chooses to work in genre narrative can’t ignore those things.

Guillermo del Toro is oftencalled an “alchemist.” It is a good word for the standard bearer of a great medieval, neo-Platonic style. The director describes his prolific monster-building as an attempt to create a cosmology of the world around him. Despite his struggles with Catholicism (he was exorcized twice as an infant by his grandmother), del Toro always speaks of monsters in spiritual terms.

Crimson Peak opens with the line: “Ghosts are real. This much I know.” Hopefully his next film cements his reputation as an alchemist in this more profound sense—and not as someone who fails to turn something good into something golden.

Caveat Spectator

[Spoiler alert!] This movie deserves its R-rating, but anyone above the age of 17 who enjoys a scare will be able to handle it. The most graphic parts are the gore—several characters get stabbed and hacked in various ways, with blood very visible. One man gets brutally murdered by having his head smashed. The ghosts and monsters take the form of animated decomposing corpses. There are two sexual scenes, although the only nudity is a glimpse of the top of a man’s butt. In one of them you can see a woman’s hand buried beneath a man’s clothes. There are, spoiler alert, themes of incest. There are several other frightening moments. To pre-empt angry comments about the violent content, I’d suggest that if your theology doesn’t account for both Philippians 4:8 and Judges 4:21, you’re doing it wrong.

Tim Wainwright's writing has been featured in the Atlantic, CT, and RealClearMarkets. He tweets here and blogs here.

A long time ago, St. Augustine wrote that while we’re to love all men equally, it’s impossible for us as limited individuals to do equal good to everyone in the world. So, he wrote in On Christian Doctrine, “you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circ*mstance, are brought into closer connection with you.” If you can only afford to give away one coat this winter, he says, then give it to your neighbor before you give it to a stranger.

I get squirmy thinking about this completely common-sense exhortation, because the practical extension is that if you can only feed one hungry kid, feed the one in your town, not the starving kid in a slum halfway around the world. Why does that make me feel uncomfortable? And what do I do with that?

I have an answer to the first question, which is that today I can sit in front of my TV and be brought by an “accident of circ*mstance” into at least feeling a closer connection with the kid halfway around the world. That is what film and television does for us, and it’s what makes the time we’re living in unlike any other. In his 1989 book The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey called this phenomenon “time-space compression.” Our natural relationship to physical things we experience, like space and time, have been altered today, he says—mostly by our technologies.

Other theorists have taken this idea and said that it’s actually an essential facet of contemporary life, what makes living today different from living at any other time in human history. Media, telephones, fast travel, globalization—all these things mean that the world has gotten if not literally smaller, then phenomenologically smaller: that is, it just feels like everything in the world is happening in my living room. A revolution happens in Iran and I can watch it on my computer screen in a browser, right next to the baseball game happening on the other coast. I hear about a natural disaster in a country I can barely find on a map and donate $25 by texting a number on my phone. Then I go text family members who are just across the house to come to dinner.

A movie—facilitated by more modern technologies—puts me in close contact for a few hours with someone else’s life: in a good movie, the images, sounds, and characters feel incredibly real. So for instance, in a movie like the brutal, searing, nearly incomprehensible Beasts of No Nation, I feel as if I am living alongside Agu for a while.

Agu (played by stellar newcomer Abraham Attah) is a child soldier in an unspecified African country—we’ll get to that in a bit. But Agu wasn’t always a child soldier. He was a the happy youngest boy in a Christian family, relatively well off in comparison to their neighbors, who gave away some of their land to refugees. He gets into scrapes with his friends. They know there’s a civil war going on, but for the most part, they’re just being kids.

Then the village discovers that the government forces are headed their way to take their town, and they send away the women and children. Agu is still a child, but he has to stay with the men. When the soldiers kill the men, he runs into the bush, where he meets with rebel forces led by their charismatic Commandant (Idris Elba). Agu is trained to join the rebel forces and from there, he sees the horrors of war—and so do we, of course, all the way to a place that seems a whole lot like hell. Whether or not salvation can come—and whether it will feel like salvation—makes the movie riveting, but very hard.

The film was directed, written, and lushly shot by Cary Jo f*ckunaga, whose more recent work includes the first season of True Detective and an excellent Jane Eyre adaptation. It’s a worthy project and for the most part, it works as a film, too. The story works on a lot of levels, including a Richard III-style meditation on the downfalls of ambition run amok. Agu, his family, his comrades, and his Commandant are all part of a world that feels very real, and the extent of the horror dawns slowly on us—mostly because our experience with boy soldiers is largely second-hand, through books like A Long Way Gone and documentaries by groups like Invisible Children.

So this dramatization will twists your insides, no doubt about it. But, I debate the merits of the choice to keep the setting nonspecific. On the one hand, unfortunately, all African countries are just some vague “Africa” to a lot of Westerners, so it might not matter all that much. And doubtless Agu’s experiences are a composite of vast numbers of stories of boys who really have been through this war.

On the other hand, a film like this isn’t meant to entertain. It's actually meant to do what Augustine suggests—it’s meant to take what is still pretty abstract in my mind and bring it close to me so that I can pay special regard. Before I saw the film, I knew that boy soldiers were out there. I had read books and listened to talks and read newspapers articles, but I hadn’t personally encountered anyone who’d had that experience, on whom I could put a face and name.

I know this partly because it was produced by Participant Media, who seem like they're everywhere this year, with films like He Named Me Malala and Spotlight. Participant Media is “dedicated to entertainment that inspires and compels social change,” and they want that with this film. Furthermore, it’s being distributed by Netflix—the first such major feature film to do this, though it will get a little play in theaters to qualify it for awards season—and this is significant, because instead of just hitting the major metropolitan areas and then going to VOD eventually, it will arrive all at once this weekend in the over forty million homes American homes that have a Netflix subscription.

Now, when I hear about boy soldiers, I will always see Agu in my mind’s eye. So will a lot of other people. And that, I think, is good. It encourages me to care—at the very least, it encourages me to pray and to understand that if I ever can do something, I should.

But I feel the nonspecific setting may work against this. It takes a fictional story and makes it a bit more fictional-feeling—almost as if the words “long ago and far away” were flashed on title cards at the beginning. The movie is called Beasts of No Nation, and surely this was on purpose—but as a storytelling choice, I’m not sure it was the wisest.

To answer my second question above: what do I do with the discomfort I feel after I see this? What a tough question in a world where I can see Beasts, Malala, and Spotlight inside of a week. I can feel outrage, compassion, empathy, and the need to take action all at once for boy soldiers and girls denied an education and historic abuse scandals enabled by secretive authoritarian religious leaders—not to mention, for instance, racism and poverty and homelessness and cruelty in my own city. No wonder we’re experiencing compassion fatigue. (Ken Morefield wrote about this for us earlier this fall.)

This is a question I can’t answer. I’m not sure exactly what St. Augustine would say. He didn’t live in a globalized world, and he didn’t have movies and Twitter and social media action campaigns and Netflix.

What I do know is that I can’t do it all, and that in trying to, I may lose my capacity to care. I guess all I know is a small thing I must do: to try to love my neighbor as best I can. To wake up each morning, trying to figure out who my neighbor is today. To hug my nieces and nephews and think of the little kids who don’t get to grow up like them and to wonder why, and be content without an answer, yet. To love, and pray.

Caveat Spectator

Beasts of No Nation is not rated, but if it was, it would be a “hard” R for violence, language, and thematic material. There is a lot of violence in this movie, obviously, but some of it is quite brutal and graphic, including a guy getting his head sliced like a melon with a machete, people getting shot (including execution-style) and brutally beaten and kicked; I think the depiction is probably merited, for the most part, but I had to look away sometimes. (I imagine it’s not much different than your average Game of Throne or Walking Dead episode in that respect.) There’s a lot of swearing and obscenity, and a lot of it is in English. The Commandant gives a pep talk to the men about the women in a town they’re going to that includes some crude euphemisms for male genitalia. When they actually get to the town, they end up at a brothel, and there is no on-screen sex but we know what’s happening. There is also the strong implication that the Commandant is sexually abusing some of the youngest boys, though the actual act is kept off-camera. Everyone is on drugs (mostly things they snort), including the boys. One member of the rebels wears only a rope around his pelvis for clothing and a few times we can see him fully nude as they go to war. Christian prayers and devotion are present throughout—Agu prays, but eventually stops—but they are mixed with some non-Christian religious practices, particularly among the rebels in a scene of initiation.

Alissa Wilkinson is Christianity Today’s chief film critic and an assistant professor of English and humanities at The King’s College in New York City. She is co-author, with Robert Joustra, of How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, Faith, and Politics at the End of the World (Eerdmans, May 2016). She tweets @alissamarie.

During the past two years, reports of terrorist attacks against Christians have steadily emerged from the Muslim world: 7 Egyptian Christians executed on a Benghazi beach, 165 Christian girls kidnapped from school by Boko Haram, and 21 Coptic Christians beheaded near the Mediterranean Sea, among other incidents.

The US State Department's latest International Religious Freedom (IRF) report, released Wednesday, confirms that the biggest threat to minority Christian communities and other religious minorities worldwide is now the "new phenomenon" of non-state terrorism, particularly in the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia.

“[N]on-state actors, including rebel and terrorist organizations, … committed by far some of the most egregious human rights abuses and caused significant damage to the global status of respect for religious freedom,” according to the 2014 IRF report. This echoes the concerns of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), which identified non-state actors as a "major challenge to freedom of religion or belief" in its 2015 report earlier this year.

“One of the more consequential facts of our era has been the … development of a sort of new phenomenon of non-state actors who, unlike the last century and the violence that we saw and persecution that we saw that emanated from states, are now the principal persecutors and preventers of religious tolerance and practice,” Secretary of State John Kerry said at a press conference. “Most prominent, and most harmful, obviously, has been the rise of international terrorist groups such as Daesh [ISIS, also known as ISIL], al-Qaida, al-Shabaab, Boko Haram. And all have been guilty of vicious acts of unprovoked violence.”

Recently, religious freedom watchdogs have begun emphasizing more the different sources of persecution, such as government and social hostilities. USCIRF, which recently had its funding extended until December, included non-state violators for the first time in its 2013 report. The Pew Research Center found that in 2012, 3 out of 4 people worldwide lived in a country with high levels of social hostilities involving religion, compared with 64 percent of people who lived with high levels of government restrictions on religion. (The numbers stayed about the same in 2013.)

This State Department report goes a step further, moving past government discrimination and social pressures to identify the religious persecution caused by organized terrorism. Blasphemy laws and prisoners of conscience were other troubling trends noted in the report.

Stability in Iraq and Syria declined sharply in 2014 as ISIS expanded, the report said. Hundreds of thousands of displaced Christians sought refuge in Kurdish cities, seeking to escape rape, slavery, or death.

“[ISIS] has forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands of people, conducted mass executions, and kidnapped, sold, enslaved, raped and/or forcibly converted thousands of women and children—all on the grounds that these people stand in opposition to its religious dogma,” according to the IRF report.

In Nigeria, Boko Haram “deliberately targeted Christians.” the report said. The group claimed responsibility for “scores of fatal attacks on churches and mosques, often killing worshipers during religious services or immediately afterwards.” (The violence prompted many Nigerian Christians to support the country’s newest president, a Muslim whom they hope can curb Boko Haram’s insurgency.)

The violence continued into 2015. In January, ISIS beheaded a Christian journalist in Syria. On the eastern edge of Africa, a group of Somali militants named al-Shabaab targeted Christians in an attack on a Kenyan college in April that killed as many as 150. The same month, ISIS executed dozens of Ethiopian Christians.

The State Department report blames governments for not protecting citizens, whether by inaction or inadequacy.

Some governments are accused of more than that.

The IRF report highlighted the sentencing of Asia Bibi, condemned to death in Pakistan for allegedly making derogatory remarks about the Prophet Mohammed, and Meriam Ibrahim, sentenced to 100 lashes and then death for marrying a Christian man. (She was released after significant international pressure.) Also noted were churches in China's Zhejiang province, where the local government has removed more than 400 crosses, destroyed church buildings, and arrested a leading lawyer defending the churches (ironically on the day before his meeting with David Saperstein, the new US ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom.)

The news isn’t all bad. The new Egyptian constitution is stronger on human rights protections and provides for the construction and renovation of Christian churches, according to the IRF report.

And the forced migration is bringing Christianity to new areas, Baylor history professor Philip Jenkins wrote for a CT cover story. Though it’s hard to tell if the violent persecution is growing the church, it certainly isn’t snuffing it out. Jenkins concluded:

Even with vigorous activism, though, whether military or humanitarian, it is difficult to imagine the churches of Syria and Iraq returning to the flourishing condition they enjoyed even half a century ago. But that is quite different from saying that Christianity as such faces extinction in the region, or that the church might cease to exist.

Looking at this story, we might adapt the famous remark about Russia, typically attributed to Otto von Bismarck: "Christianity is never as strong as it appears; but nor is it ever as weak as it appears." In God’s terms, words like strength and weakness can have surprising meanings.

Religion News Service noted how missing from the IRF report was the latest update to the list of Countries of Particular Concern. Currently on the list: Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.

The purpose of the IRF report is "to highlight the importance of religious freedom not by lecturing but through advocacy and through persuasion," said Kerry during the report's release. He continued:

Our primary goal is to help governments everywhere recognize that their societies will do better with religious liberty than without it. The world has learned through very hard experience that religious pluralism encourages and enables contributions from all; while religious discrimination is often the source of conflicts that endanger all. By issuing this report, we hope to give governments an added incentive to honor the rights and the dignity of their citizens; but the report also has the benefit of equipping interested observers with an arsenal of facts.

CT’s coverage of terrorism against Christians includes the viral video of a 10-year-old Iraqi girl forgiving ISIS, how modern-day “Monuments Men” are trying to save Biblical-era artifacts from ISIS, and the death of the first American volunteer to die fighting terrorism in Iraq and Syria.

[Image courtesy of US Department of State]