by | Sep 13, 2023 | Uncategorized
Former head of Baptist Union flees abroad as the first Protestant charged for opposing the war in Ukraine. His level of support back home is mixed.
Yuri Sipko is the first to fall.
The 71-year-old former president of the Russian Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists has been one of the few Russian religious leaders to publicly denounce the war in Ukraine. Although secular activists and a few Orthodox priests have been imprisoned for similar opposition, until last month no evangelicals had been targeted.
But on August 8, authorities filed charges against Sipko for publicly disseminating “knowingly false information” against the Russian military. They raided his home and temporarily detained his son. One week later, he was placed on the wanted list.
Tipped off by independent legal monitors, he fled the country on August 5.
“The sun is shining, and I have been provided for,” Sipko told CT in an interview from his refuge in Germany. “Praise the Lord there have been no problems, and policemen are far away from me.”
Waxing poetic, he hoped that the aspiration of Aleksandr Pushkin, the 19th-century Russian bard, might one day be fulfilled:
The heavy-hanging chains will fall,
The walls will crumble at a word;
And Freedom greet you in the light,
And brothers give you back the sword.
Sipko attributes his courage to God. His anti-war activism is inspired by Matthew 10:28, which says to not fear those who can only kill the body. As both a minister of the Word and a citizen of Russia, he feels it was his duty to reveal criminality.
But having long anticipated his arrest, he insists he is not guilty.
“This is a lawless law imposed by a lawless regime, against lawful people,” said Sipko. “The crime is the destruction of Ukraine. Silence, also, is a crime.”
With these words, he impugns nearly all of his evangelical colleagues. …
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by | Sep 12, 2023 | Uncategorized
A new breed of secular seeker is replacing the New Atheists. But how can we reach them?
The cultural ground is shifting when it comes to religion, atheism, and Christianity in the West. Three recent stories in my social media feed are a reminder how quickly it’s happening.
Richard Dawkins, the world-famous atheist, has been doubling down on his criticism of the transgender movement and progressive ideologies in general. The popular podcast host Joe Rogan, whose show receives over 190 million downloads per month, featured intelligent design expert Stephen Meyer, who advocates for a creator God behind the universe and critiques evolution by natural selection.
And for the first time, less than half of people in the UK identify as Christian. The most recent UK census, taken every ten years, saw those who tick the ‘Christian’ box drop to 46%, with those identifying as ‘no religion’ rising to 37% of the population. This decline is mirrored in the United States, where almost half of millennials and Gen Z now identify as “nones” (religiously unaffiliated).
But few of those who tick the “none” box identify as materialist atheists of the Richard Dawkins variety. In fact, nones are more likely to describe themselves as agnostics who are “spiritual but not religious.” Many of them still pray occasionally, engage in New Age practices, or even dabble in the occult.
That is, modern people aren’t necessarily less religious; they are just religious about different things. When people reject institutional faith, their “God-shaped holes” will be filled by something else.
As some of the most dogmatic atheist leaders today take up the culture war as their new sacred cause, they are also demonstrating a growing interest in hearing from views outside the …
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by | Sep 12, 2023 | Uncategorized
[UPDATED] New religion survey of 13,000 adults across six nations examines conversion, karma, and compatibility with national identity.
Among its neighbors, Singapore is a spiritual anomaly. Surrounded by deeply religious countries with overwhelming Muslim or Buddhist majorities, the island city-state is by some measures the world’s most religiously diverse society, with no single faith composing a majority.
Today, two out of three Singaporeans don’t see religion as very important. Yet the country has the region’s highest rate of conversions—including to Christianity—according to a special Pew Research Center study on religion in South and Southeast Asia released today.
Singapore’s lack of a single dominant religion coincides with more “religious switching,” Pew’s terminology for adults converting to a different religion from the one they were raised in. The percentage of Singaporeans who say they are Buddhists or followers of Chinese traditional religions has dropped, while those claiming to be Christians or religiously unaffiliated have risen.
By contrast, in the five neighboring nations included in the study—Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, Thailand, and Sri Lanka—nearly all adults surveyed said they continue to identify with the religion in which they were raised. And large majorities consider religion very important in their lives.
For Pew’s latest international report, “Buddhism, Islam and Religious Pluralism in South and Southeast Asia,” researchers surveyed more than 13,000 adults from June to September 2022. The six countries Pew selected are representative of religion in the region: Three are majority Buddhist (Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand); two are majority Muslim (Malaysia and Indonesia); and one is religiously diverse (Singapore).
(Researchers explained that though …
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by | Sep 11, 2023 | Uncategorized
A Nigerian pastor refuses to live his life by this framework—and he wants to help the African church get there too.
Godwin Adeboye saw something interesting where residents of Ibadan, a city in southwest Nigeria, were dumping their garbage.
At one location where people left trash, the government had posted a sign saying, “Do not drop your refuse here. If you do so, the government will charge you.”
In another spot, someone else had written a different message: “If you put your dirty material here, I curse you in the name of my family god.”
“If somebody says, ‘If you dump refuse here, you will die young, lose your fortune, or lose all your children in one day,’ nobody goes there, because they fear curses,” said Adeboye, a pastor and research director at ECWA (Evangelical Church Winning All) Theological Seminary in Igbaja, Nigeria.
The weight of curses wasn’t just something that Adeboye saw from a distance. When he experienced numerous family members die, seemingly from mysterious causes, many suggested that curses might responsible. These arguments led Adeboye to study this phenomenon from a biblical perspective and author Can a Christian Be Cursed? (Langham, 2023).
“I wrote this book out of my own experience and what I see my African brothers and sisters experiencing,” he said. “Many Africans, even Christians, sometimes believe their financial, moral, or marital failures are because a particular ‘spiritual’ curse is tormenting them, instead of taking personal responsibility.”
Further, Adeboye felt compelled to address a significant issue in African Christianity from an African Christian perspective.
“I’ve read many books written on African Christianity, and many authors are not empathetic to the African experience,” he said. “To make …
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by | Sep 11, 2023 | Uncategorized
Despite Scripture’s warning against communication from beyond the grave, most consider hearing from loved ones to be a comfort in their grief.
Last summer, Heather Beville felt something she hadn’t in a long time: a hug from her sister Jessica, who died at age 30 from cancer.
In a dream, “I hugged her and I could feel her, even though I knew in my logic that she was dead,” she said. She immediately texted a group chat with her close friends, including her husband and her pastor, to tell them about it.
Like fellow Christians, Beville is sure that death is not the end. But she’s also among a significant number who say they have continued to experience visits from deceased loved ones here on earth.
In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 42 percent of self-identified evangelicals said they had been visited by a loved one who had passed away. Rates were even higher among Catholics and Black Protestants, two-thirds of whom reported such experiences.
Interactions with the dead fall into a precarious supernatural space. Staunch secularists will say they’re impossible and must be made up. Bible-believing Christians may be wary of the spiritual implications of calling on ghosts from beyond. Yet more than half of Americans believe a dead family member has come to them in a dream or some other form.
The survey didn’t clarify how people processed these interactions—whether they thought they were mystical or believed they could have had natural causes. Those who responded that loved ones visited them in a dream, for example, included those who may believe their loved ones were trying to send messages to them as well as those who might have simply dreamt about a favorite memory with their family member.
Experiencing these interactions is correlated with some sense of religious faith. Sixty-three percent of people with …
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