Evangelicals Struggle to Preach Life in the Top Country for Assisted Death

by | Oct 4, 2024 | Uncategorized

Canadian Christians increasingly find their pro-life values in conflict with their nation’s rapid acceptance of medical assistance in dying (MAID). Many say churches could be a refuge in Canada’s pro-MAID culture, reminding people of human dignity and providing community supports that can help them resist the lure of MAID.

But chances are, most Canadian Christians haven’t heard their pastors discuss MAID—and clergy, despite their pro-life convictions, are likely still learning about the laws that legalize the ending of life.

The few evangelical pastors who have addressed the issue directly have seen an almost immediate impact in their congregations. But most haven’t kept up with the legal landscape for MAID or have waited to speak out.

“I think one of the strongest reasons why MAID has a lot of traction generally in our society is that nobody wants to talk about death,” said Jeff Gullacher, a pastor in Alberta who began addressing the issue in his church earlier this year. “Everyone just wants to kind of sweep it under the rug and keep it as sterile and as short as possible.”

MAID was legalized in Canada in 2016. Amendments that passed in 2021 removed the criterion that a person’s death be “reasonably foreseeable” and allowed for the eventual legalization of MAID for individuals whose only medical condition is a mental illness.

The current law allows people who have “grievous and irremediable” illnesses, diseases, or disabilities and are experiencing what they consider to be unbearable physical or psychological suffering to be eligible for MAID—even if their death is not, in the law’s words, “reasonably foreseeable.” By the end of the month, Quebec will authorize patients to approve their own MAID requests in advance.

Heidi Janz, a specialist in disability ethics, has spent years lobbying against MAID laws because of the way they devalue people with disabilities. She is waiting for evangelical Canadians to join the fight.

“The silence has been deafening,” said Janz, who has multiple disabilities and uses a voice synthesizer to deliver public statements, including testimony before parliamentary committees.

Earlier this year, she spoke at a Christian conference in Ottawa, Canada’s capital, urging Christians to do more to support people with disabilities so they do not die by MAID.

Janz was hoping churches would call her afterward, inviting her to speak to their congregations. They haven’t. And she rarely sees churches publicly opposing MAID or being concerned about how it endangers already-vulnerable people.

“We’re just collectively shrugging our shoulders,” she told CT. “I think we’re going to have a lot to answer for.”

The use of MAID, sometimes called euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide in other jurisdictions, has surged in Canada, where 44,958 people have died through the provision. The number increases each year. In 2022, the most recent year for which complete data is available, 13,241 people died by MAID in Canada, accounting for 4 percent of the country’s deaths that year. Final numbers for 2023 will be released later this month, but projections put last year’s total around 17,000.

Canada is widely regarded as having some of the most permissive MAID laws in the world. For example, in American jurisdictions that have legalized the practice, patients cannot be prescribed lethal drugs to end their lives unless they have a terminal illness and a prognosis of six months or less. They also must take the drugs themselves.

Canada, however, has never required a time-based prognosis to determine someone’s eligibility for MAID. The drugs used in MAID are most often administered intravenously—in 2022, fewer than seven Canadians who died by MAID took the drugs themselves. In 2027, Canada plans to extend eligibility to people whose sole medical condition is a mental illness.

As MAID becomes more common, pastors are often at a loss to know how to address it with their congregations—whether during sermons or with individuals who are considering it or are grieving the loss of someone to MAID.

“The numbers are just now getting to the point where pastors are noticing that people in their flock are choosing this, and they’re really unsure how to deal with it,” said Larry Worthen, the executive director of the Christian Medical and Dental Association (CMDA) of Canada. But he’s received more invitations to speak to pastors across the country recently.

Many denominations do not have clear guidance about how clergy should respond when their congregants are considering or opting for MAID, said Gloria Woodland, director of the chaplaincy program at ACTS Seminaries of Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia.

Woodland teaches an eight-week seminary course about MAID that is being offered to churches throughout Canada. She also speaks to pastors. She begins by reviewing the law and how it’s changed since it was first enacted.

She said pastors may not know, for example, that people who are approved for MAID in cases where their deaths are seen as reasonably foreseeable no longer have to wait ten days between when their requests are approved and when MAID is administered. This means it is legally possible for someone to die by MAID on the same day they are approved for it.

“What I’m finding is the majority have not gone any deeper than what they’re hearing on the news,” she said.

When pastor Deric Bartlett decided to preach two sermons about MAID last year, he readied himself for criticism. Between 800 and 1,000 people typically attend his Baptist church—City Centre Church in Mississauga, Ontario—and not all visitors are friendly to the church’s teachings, he said.

Instead, he received more positive feedback than usual, including from one attendee who said the teaching had convinced them not to pursue MAID.

Other pastors reported similar experiences. Last February, Trinity Baptist Church in Sherwood Park, a suburb east of Edmonton, Alberta, hosted a seminar by Margaret Cottle, a palliative care physician and pro-life advocate.

The seminar was originally intended for the congregation and anyone they wanted to invite, said the church’s lead pastor, Jeff Gullacher. But when leaders of the church’s denomination, Canadian Baptists of Western Canada, heard about it, they offered to help the church livestream the event and make it available to people outside the congregation.

Gullacher received positive feedback across the denomination, he said. He has also heard of people who no longer support MAID after hearing the presentation.

Gullacher has not preached a sermon directly on MAID, he said, but the church has offered a series of classes on topics related to death and dying, including wills, estate planning, and decluttering. They’re also planning to use the curriculum Dying with Christ – Living with Hope, which was developed by CMDA Canada to help churches discuss MAID in small groups.

But while pastors say they’ve received positive feedback on corporate teaching about MAID, knowing how to respond to people considering MAID or grieving a death caused by MAID can be more challenging.

Cottle, who speaks to churches regularly, has no doubt that MAID contradicts Scripture’s teaching. “There isn’t any nuance about whether or not we should be doing medical killing,” she told CT. “The nuance comes in, How do you live as a faithful Christian in a society that thinks that medical killing is a good idea?”

In her courses, Woodland has Christian chaplains and pastors consider how they would respond if one of their congregants chooses MAID or whether they would agree to be present if someone asks them to be there when MAID drugs are administered.

Regardless of what they decide about those situations, Woodland said they need to be available to families who are grieving after a MAID death. She encourages pastors and chaplains to seriously consider what it means to value the inherent, God-given dignity of people in the face of MAID.

“If you believe in the sanctity of life, then you believe in the sanctity of life regardless of the situation,” Woodland said. “As a pastoral worker, our role would be to hold the hope for that individual, to hold the hope for them while they can’t hold hope themselves.”

Evangelical leaders say faithful Christian witness in a society that celebrates MAID means being prepared to take care of people in vulnerable situations—and admitting where the church needs to improve.

According to Health Canada, the number one cause of suffering cited by people who died by MAID in 2022 was “the loss of ability to engage in meaningful activities.” Eighty-six percent of people who died by MAID cited this as one of their underlying causes of suffering. Over one-third (35%) of people who died by MAID reported feeling that they were a burden to their friends, caregivers, or family; another 17 percent cited loneliness.

Churches and other Christian organizations are well equipped to offer answers and hope in the face of these existential concerns, said Julia Beazley, director of public policy for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, an organization that has publicly opposed MAID for years. Many pastors and churches have reached out to the group for information.

“We believe the proper response to the suffering of our neighbors is to respond with care and compassion, to journey alongside those who are struggling or who are nearing death with tangible support, relational support,” she said. “As Christians and as a society, we should do what we can to alleviate the suffering, not eliminate the one who suffers.” 

But Beazley acknowledged churches still have a long way to go, particularly in responding to the needs of people with disabilities and in countering the ableist assumptions in MAID law, which says life with disability is not worth living. Many churches are grieving the fact that for people with disabilities, it’s often easier to find support to end their lives than the support they need to live their lives.

“We need to be teaching loudly and clearly that every person’s life has meaning, value, and dignity,” Beazley said.

At St. Hilda’s Anglican Church in Oakville, Ontario, Paul Charbonneau and his congregation are trying to practice valuing human life from conception to death. Members have sat with people who are dying at home, giving relief to their caregivers. They pray about MAID during worship services, and the church has hosted several seminars about the topic.

The church is part of the Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC), which is itself part of the Anglican Church in North America. Along with being the rector of St. Hilda’s and a chaplain at a local hospital, Charbonneau is the executive archdeacon of ANiC. The denomination has told clergy that they cannot be present while MAID is being administered—even to pray for the dying person or their family.

Charbonneau agrees with this approach and also practices it in his capacity as a hospital chaplain. “I don’t want to be seen as complicit in any way,” he said.

What he does want to do is encourage Christians to speak out against MAID and to show people in vulnerable situations that lasting hope is found only through a relationship with Jesus.

He doesn’t see Canada’s acceptance of MAID waning any time soon. “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle once this thing is let out,” he said. The speed at which MAID deaths have increased and laws have changed has left many pastors feeling ill-equipped about how to respond, he said.

But the more he watches acceptance of MAID grow in Canada and elsewhere, he said, “The more I’m convinced that Jesus is the only way that we’re going to be saved, and it’s the only way our culture can be saved.”   

The post Evangelicals Struggle to Preach Life in the Top Country for Assisted Death appeared first on Christianity Today.

Modern ‘Technoculture’ Makes the World Feel Unnaturally Godless

by | Oct 4, 2024 | Uncategorized

In his 1996 novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies, John Updike has a fictional Reformed Presbyterian minister feel his faith abandon him like an exhale, leaving his “habitual mental contortions decisively relaxed.” For this minister, the experience was one of relief, “an immense strain of justification” lifted “at a blow.” Unbelief, in this sense, is not so much a choice of the will but the relaxation of the will, with the mind clicking into an atheist-materialist position that feels reassuringly natural.

Many Christians today feel the “immense strain of justification” when measuring our theological beliefs against our everyday experience. We might be convinced God exists, but this mental stance conflicts with our surface experience of the world as a secular place where God’s existence is not obvious. It’s not obvious, at least, in the same way the coffee in your hand and the national election are obvious. Instead, belief demands mental exertion.

How come we often find atheism plausible—as an account that strikes us as somehow aligned to reality at a basic, intuitive level—even if we think it is incorrect? In Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age, Joseph Minich equips believers to grapple intelligently with the godless feel of the world around them.

Interpreting divine absence

In the book, Minich aims to bolster “persons motivated to maintain orthodox religious faith in our current context” by helping them “recognize the unique role that their will must take in the maintenance of their religion.” As he argues, this work of maintenance requires inhabiting our secular age theologically. 

Minich makes his case in a refreshing way. In recent years, there has been a steady stream of books on secularism, modernity, and disenchantment, but the bulk of these adopt a “history of ideas” approach, attributing these developments to Marxism or feminism or Hegelianism or Puritanism or late-stage capitalism, to name a few. Minich counters that these accounts, while relatively valuable, don’t tell the whole story. Ideas are not the only driving force of history.

As Minich argues, the root cause of our divine-absence discourse is phenomenological rather than ideological. In other words, it derives more from how we perceive the world than our theories about it. Supplementing the work of Charles Taylor, author of the oft-cited study A Secular Age, Minich agrees that our tacit experience of modern life has altered our view of reality.

The triumph of the Industrial Revolution played a pivotal role in this shift, ensuring that machines and modern technology would fundamentally shape our perception of reality. Over time, the Industrial Revolution gave rise to what Minich calls the “bulwarks of unbelief”: the background features of modern “technoculture” that (both consciously and subconsciously) render belief in God implausible (though not impossible) and atheism plausible (though not inevitable).

Minich’s entry point into this problem is how modern people interpret divine absence. As a phenomenon, this is nothing new. Ancient and medieval peoples experienced it (just read the Psalms, particularly Psalm 88), but they interpreted it differently. God’s perceived absence could mean, perhaps, that he stood in judgment over a person or people for their sin. Or it could mean that, like a trainer, he was leaving us to be tested. At any rate, God’s absence called for interpretation. 

Something happened in the hundred years spanning 1860 and 1960, Minich argues. In that period, the possible meanings of God’s absence shrunk down to one: God’s nonexistence.

In this regard, the ancients had the more logical approach. Minich asks, Why do modern people immediately and intuitively interpret God’s absence to mean he does not exist, when so many other explanations are available? Put another way, why is our first impulse to equate invisibility with unreality?

Part of the answer, Minich argues provocatively, is that our experience of what reality is has changed. As he sees it, modern technoculture mediates—and even distorts—our tacit sense of what is real. In consequence, God’s existence begins to seem (but only seem) less plausible than it really is. 

Since the Industrial Revolution, our engagement with the world has been increasingly filtered through technology. What is more, as our tools have grown in refinement, we rely on them not only to engage the world but also to exert a level of control over the world.

In Minich’s observation, technoculture makes the world “entirely subject to” our own “agency or ends” (emphasis added). In turn, this dynamic informs our sense of what is real and cultivates a default posture toward the world:

To put it bluntly, the [technocultural] world is a world for me. I do not find myself in a big, mysterious world suffused with agencies to which I am subject and around which I must learn to co-navigate with my immediate community. I find myself in a world almost entirely tool-i-fied, a world of my own (agentless!) subjectivity before an increasingly silent cosmos.

In technoculture, then, the idea of a supreme agent, God, fails to comport with our everyday experience. It does not even seem relevant. “In my judgment,” writes Minich, “the modern technological order tacitly communicates to us, day in and day out, that reality (the sort that actually concerns us), belongs to the order of the manipulable.”

Within this order, we can govern our lives with rational, efficient control, as when we adjust the thermostat, block a Facebook profile, or select a movie from the heap of options. But everything outside this “manipulable” realm hardly registers as “real” to modern sensibilities. No wonder that minds formed in such an environment will naturally equate divine absence with divine nonexistence.

Comings and goings

I have attempted to outline Minich’s argument, but this task is difficult. His book progresses in centrifugal rather than linear fashion, building like an upward spiral in a series of excursions. Here, we read about Karl Marx’s theory of labor. There, about the signification of the city in ancient cosmogony. Now, we consider Jacques Ellul’s concept of technique, and now, Martin Luther’s anthropology of hearing.

Shifts in style exacerbate the mental whiplash. On one topic, Minich waxes lofty and lyrical. On the next, his prose turns mind-numbingly technical. The central idea of the book, that modern technoculture obscures (and even distorts) our experience of reality, is reinforced with each spin of the narrative wheel, but the number and interdisciplinary variety of his arguments can be dizzying.

This makes it difficult to hold Minich’s work together or consider it in comprehensive ways. The saving grace is his appeal to the reader’s lived experience in technoculture. Some of his observations will resonate while others will fall flat, but you may find yourself nodding in recognition more often than not. 

Minich clarifies that he has not refuted atheism in some unanswerable way. At most, he has deflated it by showing how nonrational pressures make “atheist claims plausible” to modern minds.

But simply by raising the point that divine absence requires interpretation, Minich has accomplished something powerful. Beyond recommending some mental exercises to help us reattune ourselves to a reality that bolsters faith, Minich advances a particular theology of divine absence, which develops over the course of the book. 

He reminds us that God often makes himself scarce. History is full of divine comings and goings: smoking mountains one day, then centuries without so much as a prophet. Even before the Fall, God’s presence was not constant; he appears to have walked with Adam in the cool of the day and then withdrawn. We relate to God through his absence, it seems, as much as through his presence. 

In what would strike some readers as a twist, Minich reveals that he likes technology. The solution to the current crisis of divine absence, he thinks, is not reversing the clock and returning to a time when our engagement with nature and creation was more direct. Instead, he pushes us to inhabit our current moment theologically.

This involves a recognition, he writes, that “we are contingent creatures who develop. We mature. And we mature and change and are perfected by means of shifting circumstances and the trials that they bring.” Minich favors the analogy of child-rearing. For children to mature, parents must allow moments of controlled abandonment, permitting them to explore their world freely or be left alone with tasks. Understanding divine absence as one of God’s “parenting methods” helps us interpret this age of divine absence as a possible aid to spiritual maturity. 

While I appreciate what Minich is getting at, the child-rearing analogy presents problems, as it could be taken to insinuate that Christian sanctification succeeds by maturing us beyond our need for God. Minich anticipates this reading and warns against it, but he must work against his own imagery. 

Perhaps a more congenial image comes from the Song of Solomon, especially as we follow the ancient Christian habit of presenting it as a romantic allegory of the church’s union with Christ, its bridegroom. In this poem, the bride searches the garden for an absent lover. She catches a glimpse of him through the lattice. He again vanishes, which only inflames her longing.

Here, Scripture depicts the lover of our souls as both absent and present. As he deliberately, even playfully, eludes us, he induces an agony of love. By his absence, he teaches us how to long, and so to receive his presence (when we have it) as a gift, not a given.

In this way, trust in God sustains us in his absence, assuring us that the withdrawal of presence need not represent a withdrawal of love. God is absent, but as we say in the Nicene Creed, “He will come again.” 

Blake Adams is a writer, editor, and trained historian.

The post Modern ‘Technoculture’ Makes the World Feel Unnaturally Godless appeared first on Christianity Today.

Latino Churches’ Vibrant Testimony

by | Oct 4, 2024 | Uncategorized

The common language of worship has a way of capturing the heart even when the mind cannot understand. I remembered this as I wiped my tears while Spanish-speaking Christians sang passionately around me at The Sent Summit conference in Orlando last month.

Though my tourist-level Spanish could not bear the weight of references to the divine, I knew the meaning of the song in my soul. Voices rang to the glory of God. Words I couldn’t translate expressed the depth of our depravity encompassed by his unconditional love. 

While we shared neither language nor ethnicity, my experience in worship with Latino pastors and leaders in America reminded me: This community, like every culture, is important to the kingdom of God. And the wider church has much to learn with and from these siblings in Christ about faith, community, and resilience. 

First, while many American churches are suffering from an inability to reach younger generations, Latino churches are swimming against that tide. Aaron Earls of Lifeway Research has described Hispanic congregations as “newer, younger, and more effectively evangelistic than the average US Protestant church,” and he notes that “a majority conduct their services only in Spanish (53%), while 22 percent are bilingual.”

Young people in immigrant families in America often serve as teachers for their parents in a variety of ways, ranging from learning English to navigating the complexities of unfamiliar health care and educational systems. This dynamic makes younger people integral to the life of the church too. Latino congregations tend to be willing to embrace them not as passive recipients of the faith but as active participants in shaping it. Young Christians are called upon early to help lead worship, teach, and serve as translators.

This reverse intergenerational ministry, where young people tend to bring their families into the fold, demonstrates both the dynamism and complexity of faith that transcends age barriers. Having to navigate so many roles at young ages can uniquely equip Christians for ministry—but it’s also taxing and can be traumatic, marked by poverty, loss, and injustice.

“Gen Z doesn’t need to be reached; they need to be rescued,” one younger Latino leader told me during a gathering at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena in August. “It’s going to be messy.” This messy, beautiful process of integrating multiple generations is exactly what Latino Christian communities are willing to do. 

Pastors Josh and Noemi Chavez talked to me about what this looks like in their intergenerational ministry in Long Beach, California. “When I started pastoring, I was in my 20s. Thinking about young people was easy. I had to intentionally consider the older generation,” Noemi reflected. “Now, in my 40s, I have to intentionally think about the younger and the older. If the Great Commission is at the center of the vision and mission of the church, then as leaders we can lovingly shepherd the hearts of each generation and find joy in the expression of the gospel message.”

When successful, that witness creates a rich tapestry of faith that honors tradition while embracing newness and innovation. And many Spanish-speaking congregations are a cultural tapestry, too, serving as a gathering place for people from multiple countries with real differences in thought, expression, and, notably, political views. 

Contrary to popular US misconceptions, the Latino evangelical community is not a monolithic voting bloc. Hispanic voters in America hold a wide spectrum of political ideologies, including on immigration. Yet while many predominantly white churches are politically homogenous, Latino clergy told me they see a diversity of political views in their congregations.

This ability to maintain unity in worship is particularly striking and countercultural in today’s polarized climate, a valuable model of prioritizing faith and community over political disagreements. These Hispanic congregations are proof that it’s possible to debate politics and keep breaking bread together.

“The sent church is a diverse church,” Gabriel Salguero shared. “It is a reflection of the Kingdom of God.” With his wife, Jeannette, Salguero is the founder of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition and The Gathering Place Church in Orlando. For decades, they have shepherded pastors and church members from nearly every continent and walk of life, and he sees ideological differences as a strength, not merely an obstacle to overcome.

“The church needs this diversity, even diversity of thought,” Salguero remarked at the summit in Orlando. “If we’re all thinking exactly the same, we’re not all thinking.”

With a tapestry of generations and a range of varying views, what could possibly hold these communities together in Christ? The short answer is the Holy Spirit—and coffee.

While the service provides inspiration, the coffee afterward provides communion. After-service conversations over a cafecito, a café con leche, or pan dulce provide crucial opportunities for relationship-building and community formation. This is the space where those new to the congregation can become known, the young can connect, the elders can reminisce, and the pastors can provide holistic care. 

This commitment to being present with people in their everyday lives reflects a deep understanding of the familia cultural value, leading to profound care for others.

That model of care is ever more important as the broader church grapples with challenges of declining attendance, generational gaps, and cultural relevance. The Latino church in America reminds us that the gospel is not just a message to be preached but a life to be lived—in community, across generations, embracing diversity, overcoming challenges, and always open to the new things God is doing. 

“Hispanic churches continue to be a driving force in the revitalization of faith in the US,” Enid Almanzar, chair of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, told me after the summit. No church or ethnicity is perfect, of course. No community is free from the scars of striving to be more like Christ. 

Yet in these complex times, the Latino church provides a beacon of hope to believers in America and beyond as we seek to be the church that our world so desperately needs. Like Paul, writing to the Corinthians about the churches in Macedonia, I “want you to know about the grace that God has given” these fellow believers (2 Cor. 8:1) so you can benefit from their example of faith.

Nicole Massie Martin is the chief impact officer at Christianity Today.

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