Christianity Today

As a pastor, I’ve found one of the main difficulties in leading faithfully and living as good neighbors is that we can’t always choose our neighbors or the context and circumstances in which we lead and live. And in a time of tense divisiveness, global conflicts, natural disasters, and other complex crises, this sense of Read more...

In the past 50 years, the center of Christianity has shifted from the West to the Majority World. As Zambian mission leader Lazarus Phiri told me during a recent interview, “Those who were once a mission field are now looking like a mission force.” Yet all too often, well-meaning mission partners in the West operate Read more...

Bill Pannell, a Black evangelical who pushed white evangelicals to recognize their captivity to the culture of American racism, died on October 11 at age 95.  The evangelist and seminary professor argued that the Good News is all about reconciliation—between God and humanity, but also horizontally, between people—and Christians are called to the ministry of Read more...

As the sirens wailed on October 1, Nirit Bar-David took refuge in her familiar safe room. Iran had just launched another 180 missiles at Israel, and she had about a minute to take cover. So did the other 350 residents of Israel’s only Messianic Jewish moshav. Sitting on a pine-covered ridge about ten miles west Read more...

I first met the late William Pannell in 1993 in a hallway of Christianity Today. I was in my early 20s, just a year removed from graduating college. Dr. Pannell was visiting his old friend, former CT president Paul Robbins, and the pair was on a leisurely tour around the office.  I remember being enthralled Read more...

Billy Adkison, 91, spent his life farming in East Texas; he never wanted to go to outer space. “I don’t want to be higher than pulling corn and lower than digging taters,” he told CT. All the same, he has watched the skies from his yard to catch a glimpse of the International Space Station Read more...

In his 1990 essay collection, Wendell Berry considered the question “What are people for?” The answer, in true Berry fashion, is a beautifully intricate web of answers that add up to human flourishing.  That flourishing is connected to the flourishing of the environment around us, and this answer also has deep theological roots. God’s promises in Read more...

Jack Iker, a Texas bishop who took 48 congregations and 15,000 parishioners out of the Episcopal Church USA and helped start the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), died on October 5. He was 75. Iker was a conservative Anglo-Catholic who made common cause with evangelicals—whom he called “strange bedfellows”—in order to fight against liberal Read more...

Why are people leaving the church or their faith behind? Some answers boil down to platitudes, like a supposed desire to pursue a sinful lifestyle. But apologist Lisa Fields has found the reasons to be much more complex. Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, which equips Black Christians to know what they believe and Read more...

Priscilla Shirer remembers the advice she got earlier in her ministry career: You cannot do a thousand things to the glory of God, but you can do one or two. “I’ve never forgotten that,” she said. Each season of life, she prays and discerns what priorities she believes God has laid out for her. Whatever Read more...