Church’s growth in China has stalled

It’s not easy to track Christianity in China, but the latest data shows that the church’s growth there has stalled.

The Tennessee legislature decided not to pick up any proposals to restrict access to guns, frustrating The Covenant School parents who have been lobbying for red flag laws since their children survived a mass shooting.

When faced with migrants in limbo, who entered the country legally but are stuck waiting years for work permits, a Midland, Texas, pastor put aside border politics to help.

This lapsed churchgoer had plenty of reasons to stop going to services for the last three years … but a new church community overruled them.

As a Christian who adheres to the creeds of the faith, Bonnie Kristian is wary of Vivek Ramaswamy’s creedal politics with his list of ten “truths.”

Behind the story

Like most journalistic outlets, CT tries to avoid using unnamed sources. We want our readers to trust our stories, and part of that is knowing where information is coming from. When we hear from a source who can’t go on the record, we may have to do extra reporting to find someone who can talk openly or we may just find another way to gather the information.

But for some stories, the experience or narrative is specific enough that only particular people can speak to it, and we want to be able to include their voices without putting them at risk. We allow Christians from China who fear government persecution to use Anglicized names, and we offer victims of abuse anonymity, for example, provided we can verify their accounts.

In this week’s first-person piece on ministry to migrants, we discussed the potential legal implications of exposing this pastor and migrant by using their full names. We could have skipped the story, since the sources couldn’t safely be named, but we ended up seeing this precarious position as a key part of the narrative. As Carrie McKean writes, “That this is even a concern—about a church ministry helping legal immigrants—reveals the cruel absurdity of the current asylum process.”

In other news

The United Methodists have the shortest legal docket they’ve had in years as they grapple with a few more disaffiliation questions (and 10 more conferences are planning special sessions September through December to consider exits in the agreed-upon time frame).

In a new Pew Research Center survey, white evangelicals are most concerned about Americans overstating the extent of racial discrimination.

A Christian Reformed Church pastor’s arrest for the 1975 killing of an eight-year-old girl was prompted, in part, by a local author’s true crime book.