by | Sep 23, 2024 | Uncategorized
C. S. Lewis wrote at the end of his book The Four Loves that he didn’t feel like he could fully express the nature of love on the page. “I dare not proceed,” he concluded.
Now one of the largest ballet companies in the United States is trying to fill in where words fall short, commissioning Four Loves by choreographer Silas Farley with a full orchestral score by composer Kyle Werner. The one-act ballet premiered at Houston Ballet over the weekend.
At a dress rehearsal before the premiere in the Houston Ballet’s lush performance space of burgundy walls, soaring ceilings, and red velvet seats, Farley sat at the tech booth watching dancers bring his vision to life, from a romantic pas de deux to a climactic final movement that features about 30 dancers.
Farley, a retired dancer with the New York City Ballet, is close friends with composer Werner. They met at church in New York City. Though the collaborators want everyone to be able to connect with Four Loves no matter their background, the ballet does depict their Christian artistic vision. As the curtain rises, three dancers are already spinning in a circle, representing the Trinitarian love of God that was active before time began.
“As Christians, we believe that the centerpiece and the starting point and the through line of all of history is the mysterious community of persons who are the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” said Farley, who is the type of person who can delve into the theology of the Trinity about half a minute into conversation. “The community of love that they are from before time is what overflowed and made everything. I think we’re able to show it even more clearly than we can speak it.”
Farley was in church in Houston the Sunday before his ballet premiered. As the congregation recited the Nicene Creed, the words struck him: “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified.”
“You see this in the choreography,” he said.
The Houston Ballet survived significant damage from Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and then closures during the pandemic, but it has the reputation and budget to regularly commission new works from renowned contemporary choreographers like Justin Peck.
The ballet’s artistic directors, Stanton Welch and Julie Kent (a longtime principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre), gave Farley full freedom to do whatever he wanted—which was a ballet based on C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves.
The text examines four classically Greek categories: storge (familial love), philia (friendship), eros (romantic love), and agape (divine love). Werner and Farley thought the four loves mapped well onto a traditional four-movement symphony, so that’s what Werner composed in the space of a few months.
In Farley’s ballet, the storge movement depicts a mother-daughter relationship, the philia movement depicts two male friends, the eros movement depicts a male and female couple, and the agape movement depicts the Trinity, bringing the loves from the other movements together. (The different persons of the Trinity also appear throughout the other movements.)
As Four Loves progresses, sky-blue and flesh-toned costumes fully transform into shades of white or brown, fabric dyed to match the dancers’ individual skin colors. Farley is in the minority in ballet as a Black dancer, and highlighting a diverse group of dancers swirling around the three figures of the Trinity was important to him.
The storge movement depicts a mother-daughter relationship. Houston Ballet principal Jessica Collado and first soloist Tyler Donatelli with artists of Houston Ballet. Photo by Amitava Sarkar / Courtesy of Houston Ballet
At the Houston Ballet two days before the premiere, dancers were in the studio practicing, doing lifts and sweating through their T-shirts. Farley observed and made notes, at times demonstrating particular movements. With his background as a longtime dancer at the New York City Ballet (NYCB), Farley considers himself to be following the neoclassical tradition of NYCB founder George Balanchine, the leading choreographer of 20th-century ballet. Balanchine created a piece called The Four Temperaments.
When Farley was a dancer at NYCB a decade ago, he met Werner at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York. Werner had just finished a PhD at Manhattan School of Music. An early meal together stretched to three hours; the two couldn’t stop talking. They became fast friends.
“It was funny because in The Four Loves, Lewis talks about in philia, in friendship, the kind of spark of realizing a kind of common passion, of looking at someone else and being like, ‘You too?’” said Werner. “We really experienced that. … then that eventually led to this piece.”
Farley retired from the ballet in 2020 at the ripe old age of 26. Ballet is like being a professional athlete; Farley’s brother plays in the NFL, and they’ve compared notes on their vocations’ toll on their bodies. Farley now teaches ballet at Southern Methodist University and choreographs for organizations like NYCB, American Ballet Theatre, the Washington Ballet, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met commission was another piece with Christian roots: titled Songs from the Spirit, it incorporated traditional Black spirituals and new songs written by incarcerated musicians.
The philia movement depicts friendship. Houston Ballet soloists Eric Best and Naazir Muhammad. Photo by Amitava Sarkar / Courtesy of Houston Ballet
In Houston, as studio time wrapped up before a full dress rehearsal that evening, Farley called his dancers in close, pulling up a slideshow. He showed an image of the Pillars of Creation from the Webb telescope, one of his inspirations for the agape section, and paraphrased the Bible: “All the morning stars sing together.”
He clicked over to Rodin’s sculpture Burghers of Calais, which depicts men who are willing to die to save their village. He showed images from Henri Matisse, Hieronymus Bosch, and photographer George Platt Lynes and an altarpiece, The Trinity Adored by All Saints, which he said was crucial for the piece’s depiction of the Trinity.
“Whether you connect with the image or not … I want you to know where I was coming from and put yourselves into it,” he said. “We’re all going to dance to our very best—but it’s beyond that.”
The dancers gave him extended applause when he finished sharing.
Farley sees ballet as a way for people to glimpse the resurrected and redeemed body. It’s ordinary humans who are doing things—throwing someone in the air, standing en pointe—which most people can’t do.
“It’s like the Olympics,” he said. With a reference to another Lewis work, The Great Divorce, Farley said, “We see a body that has been trained to be more real.”
“It’s not unnatural; it’s supernatural,” he said. “The body has been cultivated to the full manifestation of its capacity.”
People should go see ballets for more ordinary reasons, Werner piped in: Enjoy ballet like a good meal. Don’t feel like you must “understand” it. Both composer and choreographer want their work to be approachable to anyone, not didactic. Farley may have shown a slideshow for the dancers in order to make his choreography more accessible—but he wouldn’t do that for an audience.
“It’s a ballet, not a lecture,” he said. “Not a sermon.”
Werner said the creators want Four Loves to make sense artistically without someone having read C. S. Lewis.
“People show up late, people come from work, they sit down, they haven’t opened the program,” Werner said. “I would like if somebody tunes in the middle of it on the radio, that they can hear it and just be moved even if they don’t know anything about this.”
Four Loves runs until September 29 at the Houston Ballet.
The post Houston Ballet Debuts New Work Based on… C.S. Lewis appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Sep 23, 2024 | Uncategorized
C. S. Lewis wrote at the end of his book The Four Loves that he didn’t feel like he could fully express the nature of love on the page. “I dare not proceed,” he concluded.
Now one of the largest ballet companies in the United States is trying to fill in where words fall short, commissioning Four Loves by choreographer Silas Farley with a full orchestral score by composer Kyle Werner. The one-act ballet premiered at Houston Ballet over the weekend.
At a dress rehearsal before the premiere in the Houston Ballet’s lush performance space of burgundy walls, soaring ceilings, and red velvet seats, Farley sat at the tech booth watching dancers bring his vision to life, from a romantic pas de deux to a climactic final movement that features about 30 dancers.
Farley, a retired dancer with the New York City Ballet, is close friends with composer Werner. They met at church in New York City. Though the collaborators want everyone to be able to connect with Four Loves no matter their background, the ballet does depict their Christian artistic vision. As the curtain rises, three dancers are already spinning in a circle, representing the Trinitarian love of God that was active before time began.
“As Christians, we believe that the centerpiece and the starting point and the through line of all of history is the mysterious community of persons who are the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” said Farley, who is the type of person who can delve into the theology of the Trinity about half a minute into conversation. “The community of love that they are from before time is what overflowed and made everything. I think we’re able to show it even more clearly than we can speak it.”
Farley was in church in Houston the Sunday before his ballet premiered. As the congregation recited the Nicene Creed, the words struck him: “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified.”
“You see this in the choreography,” he said.
The Houston Ballet survived significant damage from Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and then closures during the pandemic, but it has the reputation and budget to regularly commission new works from renowned contemporary choreographers like Justin Peck.
The ballet’s artistic directors, Stanton Welch and Julie Kent (a longtime principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre), gave Farley full freedom to do whatever he wanted—which was a ballet based on C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves.
The text examines four classically Greek categories: storge (familial love), philia (friendship), eros (romantic love), and agape (divine love). Werner and Farley thought the four loves mapped well onto a traditional four-movement symphony, so that’s what Werner composed in the space of a few months.
In Farley’s ballet, the storge movement depicts a mother-daughter relationship, the philia movement depicts two male friends, the eros movement depicts a male and female couple, and the agape movement depicts the Trinity, bringing the loves from the other movements together. (The different persons of the Trinity also appear throughout the other movements.)
As Four Loves progresses, sky-blue and flesh-toned costumes fully transform into shades of white or brown, fabric dyed to match the dancers’ individual skin colors. Farley is in the minority in ballet as a Black dancer, and highlighting a diverse group of dancers swirling around the three figures of the Trinity was important to him.
The storge movement depicts a mother-daughter relationship. Houston Ballet principal Jessica Collado and first soloist Tyler Donatelli with artists of Houston Ballet. Photo by Amitava Sarkar / Courtesy of Houston Ballet
At the Houston Ballet two days before the premiere, dancers were in the studio practicing, doing lifts and sweating through their T-shirts. Farley observed and made notes, at times demonstrating particular movements. With his background as a longtime dancer at the New York City Ballet (NYCB), Farley considers himself to be following the neoclassical tradition of NYCB founder George Balanchine, the leading choreographer of 20th-century ballet. Balanchine created a piece called The Four Temperaments.
When Farley was a dancer at NYCB a decade ago, he met Werner at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York. Werner had just finished a PhD at Manhattan School of Music. An early meal together stretched to three hours; the two couldn’t stop talking. They became fast friends.
“It was funny because in The Four Loves, Lewis talks about in philia, in friendship, the kind of spark of realizing a kind of common passion, of looking at someone else and being like, ‘You too?’” said Werner. “We really experienced that. … then that eventually led to this piece.”
Farley retired from the ballet in 2020 at the ripe old age of 26. Ballet is like being a professional athlete; Farley’s brother plays in the NFL, and they’ve compared notes on their vocations’ toll on their bodies. Farley now teaches ballet at Southern Methodist University and choreographs for organizations like NYCB, American Ballet Theatre, the Washington Ballet, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met commission was another piece with Christian roots: titled Songs from the Spirit, it incorporated traditional Black spirituals and new songs written by incarcerated musicians.
The philia movement depicts friendship. Houston Ballet soloists Eric Best and Naazir Muhammad. Photo by Amitava Sarkar / Courtesy of Houston Ballet
In Houston, as studio time wrapped up before a full dress rehearsal that evening, Farley called his dancers in close, pulling up a slideshow. He showed an image of the Pillars of Creation from the Webb telescope, one of his inspirations for the agape section, and paraphrased the Bible: “All the morning stars sing together.”
He clicked over to Rodin’s sculpture Burghers of Calais, which depicts men who are willing to die to save their village. He showed images from Henri Matisse, Hieronymus Bosch, and photographer George Platt Lynes and an altarpiece, The Trinity Adored by All Saints, which he said was crucial for the piece’s depiction of the Trinity.
“Whether you connect with the image or not … I want you to know where I was coming from and put yourselves into it,” he said. “We’re all going to dance to our very best—but it’s beyond that.”
The dancers gave him extended applause when he finished sharing.
Farley sees ballet as a way for people to glimpse the resurrected and redeemed body. It’s ordinary humans who are doing things—throwing someone in the air, standing en pointe—which most people can’t do.
“It’s like the Olympics,” he said. With a reference to another Lewis work, The Great Divorce, Farley said, “We see a body that has been trained to be more real.”
“It’s not unnatural; it’s supernatural,” he said. “The body has been cultivated to the full manifestation of its capacity.”
People should go see ballets for more ordinary reasons, Werner piped in: Enjoy ballet like a good meal. Don’t feel like you must “understand” it. Both composer and choreographer want their work to be approachable to anyone, not didactic. Farley may have shown a slideshow for the dancers in order to make his choreography more accessible—but he wouldn’t do that for an audience.
“It’s a ballet, not a lecture,” he said. “Not a sermon.”
Werner said the creators want Four Loves to make sense artistically without someone having read C. S. Lewis.
“People show up late, people come from work, they sit down, they haven’t opened the program,” Werner said. “I would like if somebody tunes in the middle of it on the radio, that they can hear it and just be moved even if they don’t know anything about this.”
Four Loves runs until September 29 at the Houston Ballet.
The post Houston Ballet Debuts New Work Based on… C.S. Lewis appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Sep 23, 2024 | Uncategorized
In 1983, Ed Pousson picked up Patrick Johnstone’s Operation World prayer guide and read an entry on Singapore. In it, the Southeast Asian country was described as the ‘Antioch of Asia.’
The American missionary and his Malaysian wife, Lai Kheng, had previously lived and served in Malaysia and were planning to make their home there after leaving the mission field.
Reading about Singapore changed the course of their lives.
“It was a defining moment for both of us,” Pousson said. “We prayed and decided on the spot that when we returned to Asia, Singapore would be our home.”
Singapore is the world’s most religiously diverse nation, says the Lausanne Movement’s State of the Great Commission report. Christians make up 17 percent of the population, while 26 percent are Buddhist, 18 percent are Muslim, 8 percent are Hindu, and 6 percent follow a Chinese traditional religion like Daoism (Taoism) or Confucianism, according to the Pew Research Center.
“Christians in Asia are most likely to be familiar with witnessing to their faith in contexts of religious difference,” the Lausanne report also noted.
The nation’s multicultural makeup and its location along major shipping routes are often cited as some of its strengths. It’s easy to draw parallels between Singapore and the biblical Antioch, capital of the Roman province of Syria—a cosmopolitan, multiracial, and multireligious society that served as a major trading hub and commercial center that connected various cultures, said Pousson.
The blend of cultural influences from both the East and West has helped Singaporeans to be globally connected and culturally sensitive, said Manik Corea, national director of the Singapore Center for Global Missions.
These cultural and geographical qualities have also primed Singapore to become a popular missions base for the region. Mission agencies like OMF, OM, and Wycliffe are based there, and believers from surrounding countries go there to study at seminary or attend conferences.
As the Christian population in the country grew in the 20th century, the number of missionaries sent out also increased. Since 2010, however, missionary-sending activity has plateaued, according to the World Christian Database.
Singapore’s mission force is slowing down as fewer people take up full-time missions and as missionaries grow older, data from a 2019 National Missions Study of 158 churches shows.
The prophetic call for the country to be an Antioch of Asia has helped and also hindered mission efforts, said the Singaporean Christian leaders CT interviewed. Many also emphasized an urgent need to boost young believers’ missional mindsets.
Mythic roots
Regarding Singapore as “the Antioch of Asia” or one of its other iterations—an Antioch of Asia or an Antioch for Asia—has permeated Christian consciousness in the country for decades.
The prophetic saying is often attributed to Billy Graham, who visited the country for an evangelistic crusade in 1978. Others claim that this was prophesied by David Yonggi Cho, the founder of the world’s largest megachurch in South Korea.
But no concrete evidence of the phrase’s origins exists.
“As far as I am concern[ed], I did not hear from Dr. Billy Graham in 1978, between [the] last week of November and mid-December, while he was in Singapore, that Singapore will be ‘the Antioch of Asia,’” said Alfred Yeo, then general secretary of the Singapore Billy Graham Crusade. There were no papers or reports from the event that shared this either, Yeo added.
Other leaders of the 1978 evangelistic gathering, like then vice chairman of the organizing committee, James Wong, said otherwise, noting that Billy Graham “prophesied that Singapore would be like Antioch in the New Testament, sending missionaries to all of Asia.”
A Singaporean friend of the Poussons who attended the evangelistic meeting at the National Stadium in 1978 “would swear on a Bible” that he heard Billy Graham utter that prophecy, said Pousson. “That’s the only thing he remembers hearing Billy Graham say.”
The phrase has been referred to at Christian conferences, written about by renowned local pastor Edmund Chan, and featured in magazine articles (including one published at CT in 2020).
This idea has become embedded in the psyche of the Singapore church, whether valid or not, said Mark Syn, author of the book On Being the Antioch of Asia: Global Missions and Missions Partnership Through Asian Lenses.
“Many Singapore Christians and mission leaders I know believe passionately that Singapore carries a divine mandate as God’s ‘Antioch of Asia,’” said Corea, the missions center director.
“They believe God has called the Church in Singapore to be like the original in the book of Acts: the launchpad of Paul’s many missionary journeys and his original sending base.”
Corea himself is “not bothered” about who gave Singapore this prophecy but says it matters whether this title has divine sanction and, if so, how Singapore ought to live it out in a way that’s faithful, appropriate, and realistic.
While Antioch served as a base for Paul’s three missionary journeys, the city was slowly eclipsed by other major cities like Nisibis, Edessa, and Alexandria, which became important missionary-sending places, explained Andrew Peh, lecturer in mission and world religions at Singapore’s Trinity Theological College.
“This accolade is a little bit self-aggrandizing,” he said.
A modern marvel
Apart from being seen as an Antioch of Asia, Singapore has received other accolades over time, ostensibly giving the country an edge when it comes to spreading the Good News and equipping people to do so.
As “Asia’s wealthiest nation,” Singapore has the second highest per-capita GDP in the world. Christian churches reflect this wealth as well. A survey of more than 2,500 attendees of 24 churches conducted between 2009 and 2011 affirmed another article’s claim that “mainstream church-goers typically come from privileged backgrounds, while mega-church-goers tend to belong to the emerging/new middle class.”
“Singapore churches are affluent,” Syn agreed. “That certainly has helped with funding missions.”
The nation’s multicultural society has often been seen as another advantage for mission work. Chinese people make up three quarters of the country’s population of about 5.92 million, while Malays are the next largest and Indians the third.
Growing up in Singapore with an awareness of the need to respect and live harmoniously with people of different cultures and religions was helpful in his cross-cultural mission endeavors, says Corea.
While serving at a church plant in England’s East Anglia, Corea pioneered an international student ministry at a university. “Personally, I found it easy to befriend international people and to get along with people, despite their different mannerisms, customs, religions and perspectives,” he said.
He was also able to adapt well to a different culture when he served with his wife in Thailand for 13 years.
Yet Corea doesn’t think Singapore’s multiculturalism is always beneficial, because there is a propensity to create ethnic enclaves, especially as the majority of people—and Christians—are ethnically Chinese.
“It is possible—and I have witnessed it—for people to live within almost wholly Chinese communities, go to Chinese schools or churches, and not have friends outside their own ethnic grouping,” he said.
In Corea’s view, Singaporean Chinese Christians do well as missionaries in nontraditional roles like community development, business as missions, or tentmaking. “Singaporean Chinese are typically pragmatic, goal- and crisis-oriented, good at business in general, and [good] at organizing things in a focused way,” he said.
And while the country is as multicultural as it is global, its current approach to missions is “fairly parochial,” as many Singaporean believers tend to focus on serving within Asia, says Syn.
“They say, ‘Oh, we can fly anywhere in Asia within seven or eight hours,’” Syn shared. “I would love it to grow up in that respect. … I would love to see Singaporean missionaries going to Europe and Africa in larger numbers than they are.”
Singapore has the most powerful passport in the world, granting its citizens visa-free access to 195 countries.
“Our passport gives us access to so many parts of the world, more than most countries,” said Ng Zhiwen, a pastor who leads transdenominational missions movement Antioch 21. “If we are not participating in God’s mission, then we will not be found to be a faithful steward of all that God has blessed us with.
“We believe that we have been blessed to be a blessing to the nations, in the spirit of Antioch.”
A galvanizing force
Like Ng, many of the leaders CT interviewed say that conceiving of Singapore as an Antioch of Asia has served as a good rallying call for the church, despite its puzzling origins and potential for developing hubris.
The gospel arrived in Singapore in the 1800s through British missionaries from the London Missionary Society. In the early 20th century, fiery Chinese evangelist John Song’s preaching in the country stirred up a nationwide revival, and by 1938, Christians comprised 11.1 percent of the population.
The 1970s saw the birth of the charismatic movement in Singapore alongside the growth of evangelical presence in the country.
“The Graham Crusade was really the peak [of evangelical fervor],” said then honorary chairman of the event, Benjamin Chew. “I definitely see a greater evangelical influence in Singapore in the ’80s.”
Still, the first local missionaries from Singapore were sent more than a decade before Billy Graham landed on its tropical shores.
In 1965, the year the country became an independent republic, Singaporean believers Kate Cheah and Tan Kai Kiat each left for Hong Kong on separate missions. Cheah served refugees in the notorious walled city of Kowloon, while Tan ran a medical mission there for a year, said Ng.
More recently, other Christian leaders have advanced Singapore’s prophetic calling.
The Antioch 21 movement, which Ng now leads, was founded by Rick Seaward in 2003 to encourage the country to live out its calling as Antioch of Asia.
“I believe that Singapore is supposed to be an Antioch of Antiochs,” Seaward wrote in an article for local Christian publication Salt&Light in 2018. “We are called to challenge other cities and nations to be Antiochs.”
The movement was relaunched in 2021 and led by Joseph Chean, former YWAM Singapore national director. He gathered pastors and leaders in the marketplace, education, health care, and mission agencies to pray and seek the Holy Spirit’s leadership in guiding the Singapore church, and he also established a sub-movement, Joshua 21, to mobilize believers aged 40 and below to go to the unreached, said his wife, Kim Chean.
Seaward and Chean died in separate car accidents: the former in Três Pontas, Brazil, in 2018 and the latter in Istanbul last year. But their vision for Singapore as an active missionary-sending base persists through the Antioch 21 movement, which declared 2023 to 2033 “the decade of missions.” The hope is to raise up a new generation of workers to go to the least reached places of Asia and beyond, said Ng.
“In the 1990s, the church of Singapore was one of the top mission-sending churches in the world,” Ng said. “Back then, there were 300-plus churches. Today, the number of churches has easily doubled.”
Ng’s main goal is to foster relationships among different churches and parachurch organizations to fulfill the Great Commission.
There are a lot more independent megachurches now, and not all of them are regularly engaged in missions, he said. The upcoming Antioch Summit in October, which aims to embolden believers to become “an Antioch to the nations,” has 600 sign-ups so far, said Ng.
Other ongoing nationwide movements like LoveSingapore have also placed a strong emphasis on Singapore’s role as an Antioch church. In a video prayer devotional released last year, Jeremy Seaward, pastor of Victory Family Center and Rick Seaward’s son, highlighted the importance of having an Antioch spirit. He referred to Acts 13:2–3, where Barnabas and Saul were set apart for God’s work.
The Antioch church’s example here is instructive for Singapore, says Corea.
“The struggle is for Singapore churches to realize our gift may be to give away the best of what we have for the sake of new, greater centers and movements of God happening in places other than home.”
Missing the mark?
Several key trends, however, have placed Singapore’s prophetic role as Antioch of Asia on shaky ground.
One such trend is the aging missionary population, which is also noticeable in other countries like South Korea. Fewer than 1 in 5 career missionaries in Singapore are under 40 years old, and more than 1 in 3 are 60 and above, according to the 2019 National Missions Study.
Another trend is a decline in long-term sending and a rise in short-term missions. “The notion of being a ‘career missionary’ is virtually nonexistent now,” said Syn, the author.
Singapore’s requirement for its men to enlist in mandatory military service when they turn 18 may well affect the duration of time spent in the mission field.
Missionaries often choose to return to the country to fulfill these obligations. Those who serve abroad are often required to place a bond of at least $75,000 SGD (around $58,000 USD) with the government when their son turns 13 years old if they intend to stay overseas for two years or more, says Corea, whose family returned to Singapore from Thailand when his son was that age.
Other leaders are less convinced of the detrimental impact that mandatory conscription might cause. “It’s hard to say, because the majority of our mission workers are female,” Ng said.
Young Singaporean Christians, meanwhile, may be less inclined to embark on longer-term missionary work because “they lack strong convictions about the lostness of people without Christ” or don’t want their children to miss out on Singapore’s excellent education system, said Lai Kheng Pousson.
Some families are bucking the trend. Chean’s daughters, 19-year-old Ashley and 21-year-old Olivia, are open to becoming long-term missionaries.
Ashley visited 14 countries, including Macedonia, Kosovo, and Lebanon, this year while attending YWAM’s discipleship training school, and Olivia will enter the same program when she completes her studies.
“Missions is certainly in the hearts of the girls and myself,” said Chean. “They see the benefit of setting aside time to focus on growing as a disciple.”
Yet one danger with the popularity of short-term mission trips is that missionaries may be “cultural novices [who] repeat the ethnocentric, imperialistic mistakes of the past,” Syn said.
Singapore’s enjoyment of religious freedom has led many missionaries to share the gospel in other cultures without recognizing or understanding the religious dynamics and composition of the people there, added Peh, the lecturer.
Many short-term mission trips also do not go to unreached people groups (UPGs) but tend to focus on visiting existing ministries or adopting projects in other countries, said Syn.
Findings from the 2019 study reflect this trend as well. “More than 60% of churches are not engaged in UPG work, and there has been limited take up of such work over the last 6 years,” researchers from the National Missions Study wrote.
To some leaders, the history of how the Singapore church was founded is precisely why the need to boost mission efforts across the country is critical.
“We were once an unreached nation, and it’s our privilege to pay it forward by also continuing the work to go to the unreached,” said Ng, the Antioch 21 movement leader.
The Poussons, who are in their 70s, continue to pray, preach, teach, and write in Singapore. They hope to inspire young believers to “take up the Antioch challenge [and] be like Paul: strong in spirit, strategic in thinking, sacrificial in lifestyle, and servant in posture.”
“We love Singapore,” they affirmed. “This miracle of God is blessed to be a blessing. To whom much is given, much is required (Luke 12:48).
“This little red dot [a moniker for Singapore’s depiction on a world map] has a big responsibility to go bless the nations through Good News and good works.”
The post The ‘Antioch of Asia’? appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Sep 23, 2024 | Uncategorized
In 1983, Ed Pousson picked up Patrick Johnstone’s Operation World prayer guide and read an entry on Singapore. In it, the Southeast Asian country was described as the ‘Antioch of Asia.’
The American missionary and his Malaysian wife, Lai Kheng, had previously lived and served in Malaysia and were planning to make their home there after leaving the mission field.
Reading about Singapore changed the course of their lives.
“It was a defining moment for both of us,” Pousson said. “We prayed and decided on the spot that when we returned to Asia, Singapore would be our home.”
Singapore is the world’s most religiously diverse nation, says the Lausanne Movement’s State of the Great Commission report. Christians make up 17 percent of the population, while 26 percent are Buddhist, 18 percent are Muslim, 8 percent are Hindu, and 6 percent follow a Chinese traditional religion like Daoism (Taoism) or Confucianism, according to the Pew Research Center.
“Christians in Asia are most likely to be familiar with witnessing to their faith in contexts of religious difference,” the Lausanne report also noted.
The nation’s multicultural makeup and its location along major shipping routes are often cited as some of its strengths. It’s easy to draw parallels between Singapore and the biblical Antioch, capital of the Roman province of Syria—a cosmopolitan, multiracial, and multireligious society that served as a major trading hub and commercial center that connected various cultures, said Pousson.
The blend of cultural influences from both the East and West has helped Singaporeans to be globally connected and culturally sensitive, said Manik Corea, national director of the Singapore Center for Global Missions.
These cultural and geographical qualities have also primed Singapore to become a popular missions base for the region. Mission agencies like OMF, OM, and Wycliffe are based there, and believers from surrounding countries go there to study at seminary or attend conferences.
As the Christian population in the country grew in the 20th century, the number of missionaries sent out also increased. Since 2010, however, missionary-sending activity has plateaued, according to the World Christian Database.
Singapore’s mission force is slowing down as fewer people take up full-time missions and as missionaries grow older, data from a 2019 National Missions Study of 158 churches shows.
The prophetic call for the country to be an Antioch of Asia has helped and also hindered mission efforts, said the Singaporean Christian leaders CT interviewed. Many also emphasized an urgent need to boost young believers’ missional mindsets.
Mythic roots
Regarding Singapore as “the Antioch of Asia” or one of its other iterations—an Antioch of Asia or an Antioch for Asia—has permeated Christian consciousness in the country for decades.
The prophetic saying is often attributed to Billy Graham, who visited the country for an evangelistic crusade in 1978. Others claim that this was prophesied by David Yonggi Cho, the founder of the world’s largest megachurch in South Korea.
But no concrete evidence of the phrase’s origins exists.
“As far as I am concern[ed], I did not hear from Dr. Billy Graham in 1978, between [the] last week of November and mid-December, while he was in Singapore, that Singapore will be ‘the Antioch of Asia,’” said Alfred Yeo, then general secretary of the Singapore Billy Graham Crusade. There were no papers or reports from the event that shared this either, Yeo added.
Other leaders of the 1978 evangelistic gathering, like then vice chairman of the organizing committee, James Wong, said otherwise, noting that Billy Graham “prophesied that Singapore would be like Antioch in the New Testament, sending missionaries to all of Asia.”
A Singaporean friend of the Poussons who attended the evangelistic meeting at the National Stadium in 1978 “would swear on a Bible” that he heard Billy Graham utter that prophecy, said Pousson. “That’s the only thing he remembers hearing Billy Graham say.”
The phrase has been referred to at Christian conferences, written about by renowned local pastor Edmund Chan, and featured in magazine articles (including one published at CT in 2020).
This idea has become embedded in the psyche of the Singapore church, whether valid or not, said Mark Syn, author of the book On Being the Antioch of Asia: Global Missions and Missions Partnership Through Asian Lenses.
“Many Singapore Christians and mission leaders I know believe passionately that Singapore carries a divine mandate as God’s ‘Antioch of Asia,’” said Corea, the missions center director.
“They believe God has called the Church in Singapore to be like the original in the book of Acts: the launchpad of Paul’s many missionary journeys and his original sending base.”
Corea himself is “not bothered” about who gave Singapore this prophecy but says it matters whether this title has divine sanction and, if so, how Singapore ought to live it out in a way that’s faithful, appropriate, and realistic.
While Antioch served as a base for Paul’s three missionary journeys, the city was slowly eclipsed by other major cities like Nisibis, Edessa, and Alexandria, which became important missionary-sending places, explained Andrew Peh, lecturer in mission and world religions at Singapore’s Trinity Theological College.
“This accolade is a little bit self-aggrandizing,” he said.
A modern marvel
Apart from being seen as an Antioch of Asia, Singapore has received other accolades over time, ostensibly giving the country an edge when it comes to spreading the Good News and equipping people to do so.
As “Asia’s wealthiest nation,” Singapore has the second highest per-capita GDP in the world. Christian churches reflect this wealth as well. A survey of more than 2,500 attendees of 24 churches conducted between 2009 and 2011 affirmed another article’s claim that “mainstream church-goers typically come from privileged backgrounds, while mega-church-goers tend to belong to the emerging/new middle class.”
“Singapore churches are affluent,” Syn agreed. “That certainly has helped with funding missions.”
The nation’s multicultural society has often been seen as another advantage for mission work. Chinese people make up three quarters of the country’s population of about 5.92 million, while Malays are the next largest and Indians the third.
Growing up in Singapore with an awareness of the need to respect and live harmoniously with people of different cultures and religions was helpful in his cross-cultural mission endeavors, says Corea.
While serving at a church plant in England’s East Anglia, Corea pioneered an international student ministry at a university. “Personally, I found it easy to befriend international people and to get along with people, despite their different mannerisms, customs, religions and perspectives,” he said.
He was also able to adapt well to a different culture when he served with his wife in Thailand for 13 years.
Yet Corea doesn’t think Singapore’s multiculturalism is always beneficial, because there is a propensity to create ethnic enclaves, especially as the majority of people—and Christians—are ethnically Chinese.
“It is possible—and I have witnessed it—for people to live within almost wholly Chinese communities, go to Chinese schools or churches, and not have friends outside their own ethnic grouping,” he said.
In Corea’s view, Singaporean Chinese Christians do well as missionaries in nontraditional roles like community development, business as missions, or tentmaking. “Singaporean Chinese are typically pragmatic, goal- and crisis-oriented, good at business in general, and [good] at organizing things in a focused way,” he said.
And while the country is as multicultural as it is global, its current approach to missions is “fairly parochial,” as many Singaporean believers tend to focus on serving within Asia, says Syn.
“They say, ‘Oh, we can fly anywhere in Asia within seven or eight hours,’” Syn shared. “I would love it to grow up in that respect. … I would love to see Singaporean missionaries going to Europe and Africa in larger numbers than they are.”
Singapore has the most powerful passport in the world, granting its citizens visa-free access to 195 countries.
“Our passport gives us access to so many parts of the world, more than most countries,” said Ng Zhiwen, a pastor who leads transdenominational missions movement Antioch 21. “If we are not participating in God’s mission, then we will not be found to be a faithful steward of all that God has blessed us with.
“We believe that we have been blessed to be a blessing to the nations, in the spirit of Antioch.”
A galvanizing force
Like Ng, many of the leaders CT interviewed say that conceiving of Singapore as an Antioch of Asia has served as a good rallying call for the church, despite its puzzling origins and potential for developing hubris.
The gospel arrived in Singapore in the 1800s through British missionaries from the London Missionary Society. In the early 20th century, fiery Chinese evangelist John Song’s preaching in the country stirred up a nationwide revival, and by 1938, Christians comprised 11.1 percent of the population.
The 1970s saw the birth of the charismatic movement in Singapore alongside the growth of evangelical presence in the country.
“The Graham Crusade was really the peak [of evangelical fervor],” said then honorary chairman of the event, Benjamin Chew. “I definitely see a greater evangelical influence in Singapore in the ’80s.”
Still, the first local missionaries from Singapore were sent more than a decade before Billy Graham landed on its tropical shores.
In 1965, the year the country became an independent republic, Singaporean believers Kate Cheah and Tan Kai Kiat each left for Hong Kong on separate missions. Cheah served refugees in the notorious walled city of Kowloon, while Tan ran a medical mission there for a year, said Ng.
More recently, other Christian leaders have advanced Singapore’s prophetic calling.
The Antioch 21 movement, which Ng now leads, was founded by Rick Seaward in 2003 to encourage the country to live out its calling as Antioch of Asia.
“I believe that Singapore is supposed to be an Antioch of Antiochs,” Seaward wrote in an article for local Christian publication Salt&Light in 2018. “We are called to challenge other cities and nations to be Antiochs.”
The movement was relaunched in 2021 and led by Joseph Chean, former YWAM Singapore national director. He gathered pastors and leaders in the marketplace, education, health care, and mission agencies to pray and seek the Holy Spirit’s leadership in guiding the Singapore church, and he also established a sub-movement, Joshua 21, to mobilize believers aged 40 and below to go to the unreached, said his wife, Kim Chean.
Seaward and Chean died in separate car accidents: the former in Três Pontas, Brazil, in 2018 and the latter in Istanbul last year. But their vision for Singapore as an active missionary-sending base persists through the Antioch 21 movement, which declared 2023 to 2033 “the decade of missions.” The hope is to raise up a new generation of workers to go to the least reached places of Asia and beyond, said Ng.
“In the 1990s, the church of Singapore was one of the top mission-sending churches in the world,” Ng said. “Back then, there were 300-plus churches. Today, the number of churches has easily doubled.”
Ng’s main goal is to foster relationships among different churches and parachurch organizations to fulfill the Great Commission.
There are a lot more independent megachurches now, and not all of them are regularly engaged in missions, he said. The upcoming Antioch Summit in October, which aims to embolden believers to become “an Antioch to the nations,” has 600 sign-ups so far, said Ng.
Other ongoing nationwide movements like LoveSingapore have also placed a strong emphasis on Singapore’s role as an Antioch church. In a video prayer devotional released last year, Jeremy Seaward, pastor of Victory Family Center and Rick Seaward’s son, highlighted the importance of having an Antioch spirit. He referred to Acts 13:2–3, where Barnabas and Saul were set apart for God’s work.
The Antioch church’s example here is instructive for Singapore, says Corea.
“The struggle is for Singapore churches to realize our gift may be to give away the best of what we have for the sake of new, greater centers and movements of God happening in places other than home.”
Missing the mark?
Several key trends, however, have placed Singapore’s prophetic role as Antioch of Asia on shaky ground.
One such trend is the aging missionary population, which is also noticeable in other countries like South Korea. Fewer than 1 in 5 career missionaries in Singapore are under 40 years old, and more than 1 in 3 are 60 and above, according to the 2019 National Missions Study.
Another trend is a decline in long-term sending and a rise in short-term missions. “The notion of being a ‘career missionary’ is virtually nonexistent now,” said Syn, the author.
Singapore’s requirement for its men to enlist in mandatory military service when they turn 18 may well affect the duration of time spent in the mission field.
Missionaries often choose to return to the country to fulfill these obligations. Those who serve abroad are often required to place a bond of at least $75,000 SGD (around $58,000 USD) with the government when their son turns 13 years old if they intend to stay overseas for two years or more, says Corea, whose family returned to Singapore from Thailand when his son was that age.
Other leaders are less convinced of the detrimental impact that mandatory conscription might cause. “It’s hard to say, because the majority of our mission workers are female,” Ng said.
Young Singaporean Christians, meanwhile, may be less inclined to embark on longer-term missionary work because “they lack strong convictions about the lostness of people without Christ” or don’t want their children to miss out on Singapore’s excellent education system, said Lai Kheng Pousson.
Some families are bucking the trend. Chean’s daughters, 19-year-old Ashley and 21-year-old Olivia, are open to becoming long-term missionaries.
Ashley visited 14 countries, including Macedonia, Kosovo, and Lebanon, this year while attending YWAM’s discipleship training school, and Olivia will enter the same program when she completes her studies.
“Missions is certainly in the hearts of the girls and myself,” said Chean. “They see the benefit of setting aside time to focus on growing as a disciple.”
Yet one danger with the popularity of short-term mission trips is that missionaries may be “cultural novices [who] repeat the ethnocentric, imperialistic mistakes of the past,” Syn said.
Singapore’s enjoyment of religious freedom has led many missionaries to share the gospel in other cultures without recognizing or understanding the religious dynamics and composition of the people there, added Peh, the lecturer.
Many short-term mission trips also do not go to unreached people groups (UPGs) but tend to focus on visiting existing ministries or adopting projects in other countries, said Syn.
Findings from the 2019 study reflect this trend as well. “More than 60% of churches are not engaged in UPG work, and there has been limited take up of such work over the last 6 years,” researchers from the National Missions Study wrote.
To some leaders, the history of how the Singapore church was founded is precisely why the need to boost mission efforts across the country is critical.
“We were once an unreached nation, and it’s our privilege to pay it forward by also continuing the work to go to the unreached,” said Ng, the Antioch 21 movement leader.
The Poussons, who are in their 70s, continue to pray, preach, teach, and write in Singapore. They hope to inspire young believers to “take up the Antioch challenge [and] be like Paul: strong in spirit, strategic in thinking, sacrificial in lifestyle, and servant in posture.”
“We love Singapore,” they affirmed. “This miracle of God is blessed to be a blessing. To whom much is given, much is required (Luke 12:48).
“This little red dot [a moniker for Singapore’s depiction on a world map] has a big responsibility to go bless the nations through Good News and good works.”
The post The ‘Antioch of Asia’? appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Sep 20, 2024 | Uncategorized
For years, integral mission—a theological vision that saw evangelism and social justice as inseparable components of Christian life, or as “two wings of an airplane,” as Ecuadorian theologian René Padilla once wrote—has been a legacy of the Lausanne Movement in Brazil. The concept was developed in the 1970s by members of the Latin American Theological Fellowship and motivated Brazilian evangelicals to fight street violence in Rio, battle alcohol abuse in indigenous reserves, and deliver homeless people from drug addiction, among many other achievements.
Recently, however, the legacy of integral mission theology (IMT) has come under scrutiny in Brazil, for generational, demographic, and theological reasons.
In June, the Lausanne movement held a conference in São Paulo to present its Great Commission report, an exhaustive survey of trends affecting global missions efforts. Leading up to the event, evangelicals debated on social media whether the event would become a kind of “funeral for IMT.”
Most of the speakers were young and had joined the movement only in recent years. And no one mentioned “integral mission” from the main stage.
This reality did not escape the observations of longtime Lausanne leaders, who were focused on the upcoming 50th anniversary of the inaugural conference, which will be held next week in Incheon, South Korea.
“Some of us are going to Lausanne 4 with this question in mind: what will become of integral mission?” said Valdir Steuernagel, one of the most prominent Brazilian names in evangelicalism and a senior executive advisor of the Lausanne Movement.
Though the controversy over this concept may have reached fever pitch in Brazil, it goes back decades.
When integral mission was initially conceived in the 1970s, emerging from the first Lausanne congress in 1974, some evangelicals expressed concern about the implications of a gospel that addressed people’s material as well as their spiritual needs. Lausanne-friendly evangelicals were often accused of being influenced by Marxist thought or merely adopting a Protestant version of liberation theology.
These criticisms have persisted over time. In a 2015 video, Reverend Augustus Nicodemus, a former high-ranking leader in the Presbyterian Church of Brazil, described integral mission as “a corrupted or, at the very least, incomplete reading of reality.” Eventually, division over integral mission arose within the national Lausanne network as well.
Increasing tribalism within domestic Brazilian politics has intensified the conflicts.
In April 2018, pastor Ariovaldo Ramos attended a political rally at which he prayed for Brazil’s embattled president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Shortly after that, the left-wing leader was sent to jail on corruption charges.
That same day, Yago Martins, an influential YouTuber and podcaster in the field of theology, lamented Ramos’s presence at the event on Facebook, using the situation to criticize integral mission. In his words, it was “nothing more than Marxist missiology and theological leftism.”
Eighteen months later, Lula was freed, and he regained the presidency in the 2022 elections. The impact of Ramos’s presence at that 2018 event, however, continues to reverberate in the Brazilian church and in the Lausanne Movement.
Ramos—a former president of World Vision in Brazil and founder of the Frente de Evangélicos pelo Estado de Direito (Evangelical Front for the Rule of Law), which describes itself as a Christian movement promoting social justice and human rights—had long been one of the main Brazilian faces of integral mission in Brazil. In the eyes of the opponents of integral mission, Ramos’s support for Lula was seen as evidence that it was a left-wing political movement, an assertion that Ramos rejects.
“The theology of integral mission has no partisan commitment under any circumstances,” he said. “When I went to that rally, I did so out of my convictions as a citizen. And when I visited Lula in prison, I did it because I was invited to a pastoral visit. No pastor can deny a visit to someone who is in prison.”
In the following years, political polarization worsened among evangelicals, exacerbated by the contentious 2018 and 2022 presidential elections. Critics on the right observed champions of integral mission conspicuously defending a president (Lula) who had allegedly broken the law. Those on the left asked why evangelicals were supporting a candidate (Jair Bolsonaro, elected in 2018) whom they viewed as making misogynistic and prejudiced remarks.
“It has been a very hard season. It has left wounds that are still open,” said the leader of one Christian social services organization, who asked not to be identified so as not to impede his group’s ability to collaborate with other ministries. “People who are admired and respected, including theologians and missiologists, started avoiding each other and even exchanged insults due to different political views.”
This polarization has had notable consequences.
“Today, few preachers use the term ‘integral mission.’ They may even address the topic, but they do not use these words so as not to be canceled, labeled, or excluded,” said Ramos.
Though Lausanne Brazil’s integral mission task force still exists and the national Lausanne network has not suffered any high-profile resignations, Ziel Machado, who attended Lausanne’s second global gathering in Manila in 1989 and currently serves as vice-chancellor of the Servo de Cristo Seminary in São Paulo, acknowledges that Brazil’s divisive political situation has undermined a community once characterized by cooperation and fellowship.
“The term ‘integral mission’is tarnished and is now part of the conflict,” he said. “Lausanne teaches us to think about reconciliation. But we can’t apply this principle if we don’t address our problems. We need to understand which areas are affected and what reconciliation needs to be made.”
About a year ago, Lausanne’s Latin America director, Daniel Bianchi, asked whether it was time to retire the phrase. “At this time it is necessary to recognize that the term ‘integral mission’ has become a kind of buzzword and has been used for many things to the point of almost losing its meaning,” wrote Bianchi, from Argentina, who assumed his role with Lausanne in 2017.
Fernando Costa, coordinator of the Lausanne Brazil executive committee and executive director of the Centro Evangélico de Missões, said that integral mission has weakened after the death of many of its pioneers, such as Padilla and Puerto Rican Orlando Costas. “This has become something of a dirty word. Anything that is not very healthy for the church is labeled as integral mission,” said Costa. “It’s unfair to integral mission, but no one will put their face forward to defend it.”
These tensions around the idea of integral mission and within Lausanne have occurred simultaneously with the explosive growth of evangelicals in the country. According to the 1970 census, Brazil had 4.8 million evangelicals, representing 5.2 percent of the population. Today, there are 3.5 million evangelicals just in São Paulo, the country’s most populous city. Overall, 63 million Brazilians, or 31 percent of the total population, are evangelicals, according to a Datafolha survey.
Most of these are converts—only 7 percent of the evangelicals indicated to Datafolha that they had attended church since birth. In contrast to the evangelicals of the 1970s, these newcomers are joining a movement that enjoys increasing influence in pop culture and politics.
Many of these new converts are Pentecostals (in Brazil and Latin America, Pentecostals and independent Christians are counted among evangelicals), who represent about 65 percent of evangelicals in the country. These groups have been underrepresented in the Lausanne Movement, in part because in the past they didn’t have their own seminaries or colleges, instead relying on less formal frameworks to train their pastors and missionaries or using institutions operated by other groups, such as Baptists, Presbyterians, and Lutherans. This lack of scholars has in turn meant that Pentecostal positions on theology and missiology have been less visible.
Indeed, Brazil’s largest evangelical denomination, the Assemblies of God, was, until a few years ago, averse to theological scholarship and resistant to academic environments. More recently, many Assemblies of God members have sought theological training. “This has brought them closer to groups like Lausanne,” said Marcos Amado, who led the Lausanne Movement in Latin America from 2011 to 2013. But it has also created the challenge of integrating a different type of theological tradition into a cooperative environment.
Many Pentecostals attended Lausanne’s June Great Commission event. “What I saw was a young crowd very eager to serve Jesus. They have plans. They want to be an influence through social media and spread [the gospel] to as many people as possible,” said Amado.
Costa said that many leaders who are heavily involved in missionary work had limited knowledge of Lausanne’s history. “We are working with these individuals who are shaping the Brazilian missionary movement, to bring them closer to the theoretical and theological understanding of mission,” he explained. “They are discovering the identity of Lausanne along the way.” To do this, they rely on the mentorship of a group of experienced missiologists who have partnered with Lausanne for decades—older and more experienced participants like Valdir Steuernagel, who attended Lausanne’s 1989 global event at Manila.
But is there any chance of restoring the image of integral mission, in Lausanne Brazil or elsewhere?
“The injury that the theology of integral mission has suffered will be healed only if there is repentance. It may come,” said Ramos. “I believe in the power of the Holy Spirit to convict people of sin, righteousness, and judgment.”
For Steuernagel, this conflict is part of the Lausanne Movement’s maturation process: “There is always tension in these meetings. If you take away the tension, I think you also kill the spirit of Lausanne.”
The post Brazilian Evangelicals Are Split on Lausanne’s Legacy appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Sep 20, 2024 | Uncategorized
It was our first Christmas season as a family of four, and we were excited to attend our new church’s lessons-and-carols service. As my husband carried our infant daughter into the service, I noticed my son marveling at the decorations and the music. I could see him taking it all in with reverence and delight.
After a few hymns my son didn’t know, it was clear he wanted to sing something familiar. Unfortunately, his song of choice was not in our hymnal. As he continued to express with increasing urgency and distress a desire to belt out “Jingle Bells,” I gently shushed him, offering a coloring book and suggesting we sing together somewhere else or after the service had ended.
The couple in front of us turned around as he began to cry. The woman made eye contact with me, glaring as she firmly said, “Maybe you should just leave.” Shocked, we collected our children and moved as quickly as my postpartum body would allow.
As we exited, I found myself in tears. The group of women setting up refreshments outside the sanctuary rushed over and reassured me that our family was always welcome. One of them took my son’s hand and offered him a large piece of cake. The next day, our pastor texted me to let me know he’d heard what had happened and was sorry we had experienced that. He reiterated that our family was always welcome.
Unfortunately, this kind gesture isn’t typical for many families like ours.
My son and I are autistic, and multiple members of our family are neurodivergent—a term that refers to brain-based differences such as autism, ADHD, learning difficulties, and more. To put it another way, we often experience the world differently than the people around us. My son and I are both sensitive to our surroundings and notice subtle patterns that others might miss. For him, this also means he may experience intense fear and distress when he perceives a threat, but he also experiences joy and delight more acutely than most of us.
In recent years, I’ve noticed an increase in conversations about inclusion and hospitality within the church. Indeed, the church is called to hospitality (Heb. 13:2) and care for the marginalized in our communities (Luke 14:12–14; Matt. 25:35–40). I’m grateful for these conversations.
At the same time, we often overlook the need for churches to better welcome and include adults and children with disabilities in all areas of church life. One estimate suggests that 80 percent or more of churches have no form of disability ministry, and yet nearly all churchgoers and pastors say someone with disabilities would be welcome at their church. It feels uniquely challenging for my family to join this conversation—to advocate or seek accommodation—because our disabilities are not externally visible.
In 2018, a robust national study indicated that children with certain chronic health conditions are far less likely to attend church than their typically developing peers. Specifically, children navigating “invisible” disabilities such as autism, anxiety, depression, ADHD, and other types of mental health issues and neurodivergence were the least likely to attend church.
Other studies have found that the majority of parents surveyed indicated that their children with disabilities had been excluded at church. Parents have also reported leaving churches or refraining from church activities because a child was not included or a church seemed unwilling to learn more or make accommodations.
Yet throughout Scripture, we see Jesus reaching out to forgotten, ostracized, or otherwise excluded individuals—healing and restoring them to their communities and loved ones. When Christ encountered a blind man in John 9, he made it clear the disability was not a punishment for sin. Instead, our Savior said, this man’s disability was “so that the works of God might be displayed in him” (v. 3).
I’ve previously heard “the works of God” in this passage defined as the miracle of the man’s ability to see. But what if, when we read passages like this, we consider that the miracle and works of God are also the restoration of community and dignity? I often find myself reflecting that perhaps the work of God and his church lies in enabling all of his image bearers to fully participate in the life of the church, regardless of ability.
Lamar Hardwick, an autistic pastor, writes in his book Disability and the Church: A Vision for Diversity and Inclusion about the importance of making a culture shift alongside practical and tangible changes so that everyone can participate in church life. Like me, Hardwick received his autism diagnosis as an adult.
Physical improvements can certainly be made through facility upgrades, such as ramps, elevators, accessible restrooms, and designated areas for people with mobility needs. Churches can also offer sensory accommodations and communication aids, such as sign language interpreters, assistive listening devices, and large-print bulletins. We can create accessible educational programming, provide training for leadership, and support caregivers.
But this isn’t enough, Hardwick emphasizes. True inclusion requires a culture shift—a movement toward a radical sense of belonging and welcome that values the perspectives of individuals with disabilities and advocates on their behalf.
Inclusion begins with recognizing that every person, regardless of ability, is created in the image of God and has gifts to offer the church community. Rather than viewing individuals with disabilities as needing charity, we are called to recognize their full humanity and the ways they contribute to our collective worship. Galatians 3:28 reminds us that in Christ, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (ESV). This unity includes people of all abilities.
A few months after the lessons-and-carols service, my son was “promoted” from the nursery to children’s church. It wasn’t a seamless transition. He made it clear he didn’t want to go yet, and we agreed that perhaps he wasn’t ready.
We found ourselves at a loss for what to do during the service. We would color and read books in our church’s small library or take walks around the church building. He would pick flowers out of the weeds and offer small bouquets to me as we chatted. One Sunday, as we walked toward the outdoor chapel, he bent to pick a dandelion. As he presented the yellow flower to me, he asked, “Why did God make things different colors?”
I stumbled through an answer, sharing that colors serve many purposes in both nature and the built world—from pollination of flowers to communicating which snakes are venomous to knowing when to stop and go at an intersection. I remember looking at his small outstretched hand, holding still more flowers, realizing that perhaps I wasn’t answering in a way that conveyed the Father’s affection for us. I took the flowers into my own hand, tucked one behind my ear, and added, “But sometimes God just wants us to enjoy beautiful things too.”
There is a movement in the design world to create spaces that are universally accessible from the outset, and designers like Susie Wise and Sara Hendren would argue that the tangible manifestation of this culture shift has to do with how we create and curate our physical spaces to cultivate belonging in the built world. For example, when we place a dumpster next to the accessible entrance, what are we conveying about how we value individuals with disabilities?
The church has the opportunity to radically transform our communities toward belonging—to make every aspect of the way we engage universally accessible and uniquely beautiful for every member of the body of Christ so that no person is limited from fully participating in the life of the church.
Inclusion is not just a moral imperative; it is a lifelong spiritual practice. By intentionally creating spaces where individuals with disabilities are welcomed and celebrated, the church can become a true reflection of the kingdom of God, where all are valued and all belong.
Sunita Theiss is a writer, communications consultant, and homeschool parent based in Georgia.
The post Becoming a Church for People of All Abilities appeared first on Christianity Today.
