The questions seem to hang in the air, creating a lull in an hours-long dinner conversation.

Three Iranians — a married couple, Iliya and Naghme, and a guy who goes by Fred — sit at a backyard picnic table in a suburb of Birmingham. They’ve eaten their fill, but there are still plates full of grilled steak kebabs and sangak, Iranian whole wheat flatbread. Plenty to take home.

A worker at an Iranian supermarket in Birmingham, England, prepares a to-go order of sangak.

The conversation, in a mix of English and Farsi, roams from football to child-rearing to, inevitably, the war. The Iranians share the latest phone apps they use to reach their families back home. The government keeps shutting down access to the outside world, so the refugees search constantly for new ways to connect, new lifelines. Their host, an American missionary, excuses himself to check on his kids, who are playing inside with the Iranians’ children.

That’s when Fred asks the “what if” questions.

What if the Islamic Revolution of 1979 hadn’t happened? There would have been no hostage crisis, no nuclear program, perhaps no decades of animosity between Iran and the West. No mass killings of dissidents. No wave of refugees flooding from the Middle East into Europe.

But “would I know Jesus?” Fred asks.

The three Iranian Christians are part of what researcher David Garrison calls “A Wind in the House of Islam” that began soon after the revolution. As Iran’s Revolutionary Guard enforced a strict interpretation of Islam, interest in Christianity rose. The country went from fewer than 500 Christian converts to countless thousands meeting in secret, underground churches, Garrison wrote in his 2014 book.

Two years later, waves of Iranians, fleeing political and religious persecution, began a dangerous and deadly exodus into Turkey, then Greece. From there they spread across the European Union, Scandinavia and the British Isles as they petitioned for asylum.

Many, including Fred, brought their Christian faith to the post-Christian continent. Others, like Iliya and Naghme, became Christians here.

Iranian and American Christians prepare a meal at a missionary’s home near Birmingham, England.

Now, despite attacks on their homeland by the U.S., they worship alongside Americans, Brits, Kurds and other nationalities.

Perhaps none of it would have happened, Fred says, without Iran’s hardline regime.

“I think that’s God’s plan,” he adds. “God’s plan makes someone’s heart hard, like Pharaoh, to show his glory.”

Ramadan at the Ramada

“Peaky Blinders,” Ozzy Osbourne and mosques.

Birmingham is known for all three.

People in Birmingham walk past a tribute mural for Black Sabbath and its frontman, the late Ozzy Osbourne.

The United Kingdom’s second-largest city was home to the Peakys, notorious street gangs in the early 1900s who inspired the gritty Netflix series. Decades later, Birmingham gave birth to Osbourne, the self-proclaimed “Prince of Darkness,” and his heavy metal band, Black Sabbath.

Now, nearly one-third of Birmingham’s residents claim Islam as their faith, making them the largest religious group in the city. Their parents and grandparents came from Pakistan, Bangladesh and other former British colonies to fill labor shortages after World War II. In recent years, Birmingham has welcomed refugees from war-torn nations including Sudan, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Iran. Since the mid-1990s, Iranians who profess Christ in Britain have grown from about 100 to several thousand, according to estimates by the Evangelical Alliance, a London-based church network.

A sign points to the Ramada Hotel, a temporary home for many Iranian refugees in England.

Many of the refugees find shelter in an old Ramada hotel, which most pronounce like “Ramadan,” the Islamic holy month of prayer and fasting. The missionary who hosted Fred, Iliya and Naghme at his home has made many friends at the hotel in the past three years.

The missionary, who goes by C.M., and his family moved here as part of a disciple-making movement supported by Churches of Christ in the U.S. Like most of those interviewed by The Christian Chronicle for this report, he requested that his full name be withheld, citing security concerns.

Members of Birmingham’s Kurdish community participate in a demonstration by the Dakok Support Centre, a charity that supports the Kurdish community in the United Kingdom. Kurds are an ethnic minority in Iran.

C.M., a marathoner, works with a refugee running club — a therapeutic activity for those coping with trauma. The camaraderie can lead to discussions about Christ, he says.

Iranians are among “the most hospitable people I’ve ever met,” C.M. says. “They’re so community centric. We’ve had to learn that. Any time you go over to somebody’s house, or whenever they come to ours, it’s basically a minimum four-hour gathering. We have adapted and really enjoy the amount of time that we get together.”

Faith through dystopia and dreams

In addition to running, the missionary and the Iranians have bonded over their love of movies, especially “Interstellar,” Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending epic from 2014 about mankind’s flight from a dying Earth and its search for a new home. The film has become a running gag in the missionary’s home. Whenever there’s a spare moment, an Iranian Christian inevitably asks, “Can we start ‘Interstellar’?”

The dystopian movie’s plot and its hopeful conclusion resonate with Iranian Christ-seekers, as do their own dreams. Since 2018, Iranians interviewed by the Chronicle have described visions of the cross and dreams about Jesus that played a role in their conversion.   

For Iliya and Naghme, “what really drew us in was the way Christians treated us,” Iliya says. “We saw kindness, support and genuine care in the people around us. They welcomed us without judging us and helped us feel accepted and valued.”

A “narrowboat” navigates a canal in Birmingham, England. The city has 35 miles of canals, which played a pivitol role in the development of Birmingham’s economy in the 1800s and early 1900s.

When they fled Iran and moved to Birmingham, “we were searching for peace, purpose and a deeper connection with God,” Iliya says. As they studied the Bible with their new friends, “we were inspired by the teachings of Jesus — especially about loving others, forgiving people, helping those in need and having faith during difficult times. … Life is still not perfect, but we feel like we have more direction, purpose and comfort now than before.”

The gospel message appeals to those who grow up practicing Iran’s state religion, Shia Islam, Garrison writes in “A Wind in the House of Islam.” Unlike Sunni Muslims, Shiites believe that spiritual and political authority resides in a lineage of imams descended from the prophet Muhammad’s daughter, Fatima. Most Shiites believe in a divinely ordained line of 12 imams, the last of which disappeared after his birth. Shiites believe that this imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, will return at the end of time to establish peace and justice and redeem Islam.

Iranian children know this messianic prophecy, but they aren’t taught the truth about Christianity, says an Iranian Christian named Bita.

Locks adorn a bridge over one of the many canals in Birmingham, England.

“In Iran, they told us that Christians have three gods,” Bita says. That’s what she believed until political persecution forced her to flee Iran. She spent time in Istanbul, Turkey, where a friend gave her a Bible. During a health crisis that required surgery, Bita prayed to God and recovered. She moved to Birmingham and got a job in customer service. She studied her Bible with Christians and learned more about the faith, including the nature of the Trinity.

“In Iran, they told us that Christians have three gods. … I never thought Christianity could be like this.”

Three years ago, she was baptized. Now she’s part of a community that loves, prays for and supports each other.

“I never thought Christianity could be like this,” Bita says.

Praying for ‘an early jubilee’

One night after the backyard gathering, Bita, C.M. and other Christians gather for a prayer service hosted by a Birmingham church. The believers form circles of chairs and listen to a brief devotional from the book of Exodus focusing on the word “magnify.”

A Muslim man walks through a neighborhood in Birmingham, England.

When the Israelites were trapped between Pharaoh’s army and the Red Sea, they chose to magnify the impossibilities of their situation rather than God, one of the church’s ministers says. In the same way, Iranian Christians may be tempted to magnify problems with their asylum applications or the uncertainty of their nation’s future.

“God is so much greater than these little impossibilities,” the minister says. “You’re helping your mental health when you say, ‘I cannot sort this all myself.’”

The Christians take turns sitting in chairs in the middle of the circles as their fellow believers surround them in prayer. They ask for healing, for blessings, for the safety of their loved ones and for their homeland to know peace and justice.

“Can I have an early jubilee? Would you do that for us?” asks Graham Vallis, a British Christian, as he prays with one hand on the shoulder of his Iranian brother. In the book of Leviticus, God instructed his people to observe a year in which debts are forgiven, land is returned to its original owners, and slaves are set free. It was to happen every 50 years.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has been in power for 47.

Regardless of how the coming years unfold, Iranian Christians believe that God is at work in their lives and their homeland.

At a missionary’s home in Birmingham, American and Iranian Christians enjoy desserts including a box of gaz (nougat filled with roasted pistachios) as they play hokm, an Iranian card game similar to spades.

“Sometimes you are sleeping, and God needs to wake you up to have you travel to another land, just like Israel,” Fred says.

Even living under a repressive regime, people can cling to their families and become comfortable. “But something is missed,” he says. “It’s God’s presence, the real God’s presence.”

Across Iran and the Middle East “God is shaking,” Fred adds with a grin. “God is shaking those countries to let his people out.”

ERIK TRYGGESTAD is President and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact erik@christianchronicle.org.

But in this modern European capital with biblical roots, the nations come to them, often as refugees.

Known as a bridge to Europe, Greece is the easiest country for refugees from Africa and the Middle East to access. Hundreds of thousands of people of different nationalities pass through the country each year. This presents the opportunity for Churches of Christ to reach many people.

The Glyfada Church of Christ adapted to the variety of people by offering nine services during the week in five languages: Greek, Russian, English, Farsi and Albanian.

Some refugees stay in Athens for years, while others are only in the city for months. This transitory pattern changed how the ministers and missionaries at the congregation approached ministry.

“You’re going to think about, ‘I have this short time so I need to be prepared,’” said Ebrahim Fatahi, a member who helps lead the Farsi and Greek services. “How to approach them, how to bring them to the church, how to teach them enough that they can understand what is the plan of salvation, to be saved. Then when they leave, to tell them it’s important to be part of the church and then find them a church in other parts of Europe.”

Ebrahim Fatahi helps lead the Farsi and Greek services at the Glyfada Church of Christ.

Fatahi arrived in Greece in 2017 through Samos Island as a refugee from Iran. Through worshiping and now ministering at the Glyfada congregation, he experienced the effects of the changing number of refugees firsthand. When Fatahi started worshiping with the church, he said anywhere from 80 to 150 people attended the Farsi-speaking service.

He said attendance — and the general population of Farsi-speaking refugees in Athens — decreased in 2019 partially because many refugees from the 2015 European migrant crisis received papers to move to other countries. Today, Fatahi added, the average attendance at the Farsi service is between 30 and 40 members.

Dino Roussos, minister for the Glyfada Church of Christ, sings from a Greek hymnal.

Fatahi said that when refugees who become Christians leave for other countries, it is a bittersweet experience for the preachers at Glyfada. They do not witness firsthand the growth of new believers, but they do hear about what those Christians are doing when they settle in other countries.

“It’s a joy, and it’s sad, and sometimes it’s strange,” Fatahi said.

Overcoming challenges and change

Missionaries Keith and Tricia Young, who worship at the Glyfada congregation, learned to adapt to the flow of refugees through Athens when they arrived in October 2021. The couple expected to work exclusively with Farsi-speaking refugees, but when they arrived, there were a lot of Ukrainian refugees because of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

The Youngs adapted and began working with the Ukrainian refugees at the church. They later connected with nonprofit Hellenic Ministries and began serving Farsi-speaking refugees in the community.

“We never dreamed that we’d be working with the Ukrainian outreach and the Farsi,” Tricia said. “The Ukrainian outreach has taken off so much with so many people being baptized and starting to learn more about Jesus.”

Missionaries Tricia and Keith Young sit in a tree as they explore Athens with friends.

The couple attends the Greek, Russian/Ukrainian and Farsi-speaking worship services but said it has been hard for all the small groups to feel like one congregation. However, Young said that since the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders have encouraged interaction between the ethnic groups, and there is more crossover now. The smallest group at Glyfada is actually the Greek population, but Young said this gives the church more opportunities to evangelize.

“It gives the ministers here other audiences that might be more receptive,” Young said. “The refugee population has been the most receptive, especially the Iranian population. They were unhappy with what they had at home and they’re looking for something better.”

“It was traumatic for them when we talked about Jesus. This is the story they know, having to travel, going to Egypt to be in a safe place. They knew that story. It was their story, too.”

Young’s wife, Tricia, who teaches the children’s class during the Farsi service, said some of the children were receptive to the lessons because they could relate to the Bible stories.

“It was traumatic for them when we talked about Jesus,” Tricia said. “This is the story they know, having to travel, going to Egypt to be in a safe place. They knew that story. It was their story, too.”

The ebb and flow of refugees

The refugees with whom Fatahi and the Youngs work are some of hundreds of thousands of people seeking refuge in Greece. According to the International Rescue Committee, there are 214,000 refugees and 20,000 asylum-seekers in the country this year.

Major world events influence the number of refugees — and the countries from which they primarily come. Fatahi first saw the effects of the 2015 European migrant crisis, when over 821,000 refugees arrived in Europe through Greece.

A sign notes the Greek and English meeting times for the Glyfada Church of Christ.

A few years later, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Athens Institute for Education and Research President Gregory T. Papanikos said the government implemented strict border controls, temporarily reducing the flow of refugees and migrants.

Next, the Ukrainian refugee population in Greece increased with the escalation of the Russia-Ukraine war. Papanikos wrote in an October 2022 paper that the Greek government welcomed large numbers of Ukrainian refugees — about 32,600 arrived from January to May 2022.

Ministers for the Glyfada Church of Christ in Athens, Greece, sing during a worship service. From left, they are Ebrahim Fatahi, Dimitrios Argyropoulos and Dino Roussos.

However, that meant the number of refugees accepted from other countries decreased.

One of the most recent world conflicts that could affect refugees in Greece is the war between Iran and the joint U.S.-Israeli forces. However, data from the Ministry of Migration in Asylum does not indicate a significant increase in Iranian refugees.

Leonid Ivanov

“To my knowledge, there is no clear evidence of (Iranian outmigration because of the war) or at least no official record,” Papanikos said. “Current reports from international organizations suggest that, despite significant internal displacement within Iran, there has not been a major cross-border exodus so far.”

Leonid Ivanov, Hellenic Ministries’ director of compassion ministry, has served with the nonprofit since 2017 and also observed the flow of refugees through working in the community. Ivanov, who came to Athens as a refugee from eastern Ukraine, said he remembered the years when refugees in Athens were primarily Farsi-speaking, and the nonprofit served over 500 meals daily. Then, he said, the majority were African refugees, and today, there are many Ukrainian refugees.

“The most rewarding (thing) about ministering to the refugee community is to see the transformation in the lives of refugees,” Ivanov said. “Of course, I mean first the spiritual transformation. … It’s great to see how Muslims become Christian. It’s good to see how people can integrate into society, into Athens.”

“The most rewarding (thing) about ministering to the refugee community is to see the transformation in the lives of refugees.”

If refugees choose to stay in Greece, like Fatahi, or if they only stay for a few months, the ministers at Glyfada serve however they can — by helping with housing accommodations, food distribution and of course, sharing the Gospel.

“Here, they find fellowship,” Glyfada minister Dino Roussos said. “It’s not just salvation for eternity, which is the most important, but while we’re on this earth, we need to have good fellowship and a good place. This is a refuge for those who are hurting and trying to find the truth.”

KENZIE JAMES is a senior multimedia journalism major at Harding University in Searcy, Ark., and a returning Christian Chronicle intern. James grew up in Tallahassee, Fla., where she attended the Timberlane Church of Christ. Contact kenzie@christianchronicle.org.

Featured photo (above): A long line of believers waits to be baptized in the Kenyan village of Bunjosi.

BERMUDA

DEVONSHIRE — “Because Bermuda is a wealthy island, many feel they do not need God,” said missionary Larry Waymire. Students at the Bear Valley Bible Institute of Bermuda “are reaching out to show the importance of trusting God’s Word rather than the word of man, man-made religions or the riches of this world.”

The school, which recently completed its first year of operation with 16 students, offers classes for two hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays and four hours on Saturdays. Waymire, of Caribbean Ministries, teaches along with ministers from Bermuda and the Trinidad School of Preaching.

“Most of the students work full-time jobs and have families,” Waymire said, “yet they and their families make the sacrifice to attend class.” The school’s director, Keithlyn Fleming, is an elder of the Brighton Hill Church of Christ in Devonshire. Fleming works two jobs in addition to his duties for the church and school.

“Pray for our students as they continue preparing to bring lost souls to Christ,” Waymire said. “It may be your prayer that opens the next door to a searching heart.”

CHINA

MACAU — This special administrative region of China, a small peninsula and group of islands on the South China Sea, is the gambling capital of the world, boasting a casino industry several times larger than that of Las Vegas. It’s also the home of the Macau Church of Christ, a congregation of predominantly Filipino immigrants who come to the region for work. In addition to worship services, the church hosts regular singing practices and recently welcomed ministry interns from Heritage Bible School in Baguio City, Philippines.

HAITI

SANTO — In a country with a collapsed government, torn apart by gang violence, Christians continue to spread the Gospel. The International School of Theology, which meets in a small town near Port-au-Prince, reported 149 new believers and three new Churches of Christ during the first quarter of 2026. Many congregations meet in small groups as a safety precaution, church members said.

KENYA

BUNJOSI — Daniel Gaines recently shared a photo of 41 people waiting in line to be baptized in a pond in this village in western Kenya. The World Bible School correspondence ministry played a role in the conversions, said Gaines, director of Tanzanian Missions.

NICARAGUA

MANAGUA — Nearly 1,000 Christian women gathered for the recent Church of Christ National Women’s Fellowship. “Women of Impact: Shining to Edify” was the theme, based on Matthew 5:14-16. Josefina Sánchez of the León Church of Christ in Managua was the keynote speaker.

The National Ladies’ Committee organized the event, said Gaby Medrano, a committee member from Masatepe, Nicaragua.

Gaby Medrano, far right, and fellow Christian take a quick selfie during the Church of Christ National Women’s Fellowship in Managua, Nicaragua.

The committee worked tirelessly for a year to raise funds, Medrano told The Christian Chronicle, so that participants wouldn’t be asked for “a single córdoba (Nicaragua’s currency) in payment.”

“The Word of God was present from morning until late afternoon,” she added, “and God’s presence was palpable. … I believe the event was a resounding success, evidenced by the fact that sisters traveled from every department (state) of the country to attend.” An international women’s conference is scheduled for October in Nicaragua.

UKRAINE

KYIV — More than 40 women attended “God’s Garden,” an event hosted by a Church of Christ in the Ukrainian capital twice each year. In addition to taking deep dives into Scripture and participating in a talent show, attendees spent time “sharing life, supporting one another and just enjoying the day,” organizer Natalia Maliuga said.

“I am truly grateful to God for every sister, for every woman, who comes to our community in search of truth and meaning,” said Maliuga, administrative director for the Ukrainian Bible Institute. “It’s especially valuable to realize that many of us met after 2022 (when Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began). Back then, in the spring, our hall was almost empty. And today we see the Lord blessing and growing our community.”

ZAMBIA

LIVINGSTONE — Even during vacation breaks, students at the Southern Africa Bible College find opportunities to preach and teach.

Take Vincent Simwanza, for example. During a recent break from his studies at the Benoni, South Africa, school, he cared for his ailing mother and also spoke to three churches — the Riverside Church of Christ in Livingstone (his home congregation) and the Luanshya Central and Kamfinsa Churches of Christ, both in Zambia’s Copperbelt province.

The Kamfinsa church “is a congregation of particular significance,” Simwanza said. “The church had closed its doors during the COVID-19 pandemic, with members dispersing and the building eventually being taken over by a denomination. However, in 2024, by God’s grace, the building was reclaimed by the church. There are now two evangelists actively serving and ministering to the congregation.”

Unofficially, at least 1 million more Iranians worship in secret, and their numbers are growing, claim organizations that track religious movements. Iranian authorities arrested more than 250 of those worshipers last year on charges of “propaganda contrary to the holy religion of Islam.”

That’s nearly double the number arrested on such charges the previous year, according to a report from Open Doors, Christian Solidarity Worldwide and other nonprofits.

It’s difficult to imagine a time when Churches of Christ — much less, congregations comprised of U.S. servicemen —met freely in Iran and other predominantly Muslim countries, including Libya.

Ellen and Albert Bryan

But Churches of Christ did once exist in the capitals of Tehran and Tripoli, thanks to the work of Christians including Albert Bryan.

The unlikely missionary “was the sweetest man I ever knew,” said his grandson, John Bradley. “He was so kind. He was a wonderful husband to my very sweet grandmother. All the grandchildren loved them so much.”

Born near Lebanon, Tenn., in 1892, Albert H. Bryan Sr. was the son of a farmer who also taught in a one-room schoolhouse near his farm. Two of Albert’s brothers earned medical degrees from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. One became a medical missionary in China in the 1920s and was imprisoned by the Japanese when they invaded. The Japanese later released the brother, who returned to the U.S.

Albert, meanwhile, stayed on the farm and married Ellen Waters Baker, who grew up in nearby Watertown, Tenn. Albert took over teaching at the school when his father died. Although he never went to college, Albert studied civil engineering through mail-order courses and got a job with the Tennessee Highway Department. He helped plan some of the first paved highways in Middle Tennessee. Then Albert took a job in the civil engineering office at Arnold Air Force Base near Tullahoma, Tenn.

He attempted to retire in the early 1950s, but the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers asked him to change his plans and move to Libya.

At the time, the U.S. operated Wheelus Air Force Base, just east of Tripoli. Albert and Ellen moved there in early 1953. “I was in second grade when they left,” their grandson said.

Albert Bryan baptizes a man named David in the Mediterranean Sea in 1954.

During the Cold War, Wheelus was the largest U.S. military facility outside the U.S. Albert worked in the civil engineering department, assisting in building projects on the base.

“He and my grandmother right away started a church in their home,” Bradley said. “They were longtime members of the Church of Christ.”

John and Jan Bradley

In addition to being a self-taught civil engineer, Albert became , baptizing new converts in the Mediterranean Sea. Eventually, the Tripoli Church of Christ purchased its own meeting place with the help of the College Street Church of Christ in Lebanon. Bradley has a photo of the building, complete with North African-style pointed arches.

“There is a note on the back of the photo that says it was the first ‘non-Muslim’ church ever allowed by Libya in Tripoli,” Bradley said.

After four years, the Bryans returned to the U.S., though not for long. The Corps asked Albert to do similar engineering work in Tehran, so he and Ellen packed their bags for Iran.

“Again, my grandfather and grandmother started holding church services in their Tehran home,” Bradley said. “There were many U.S. military and civilians working there who attended those services. I do not know if they were ever allowed to buy a building in Tehran for church services.”

During the couple’s time in Tehran, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower visited Iran’s ruler, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. “My grandparents saw a huge parade down a boulevard in December 1959 with the president and the shah sitting together in a Cadillac convertible,” Bradley said.

The Bryans returned to the U.S. again in 1962. Seven years later, Muammar Gaddafi seized control of Libya and ordered the closure of U.S. air bases there. A decade after that, in 1979, Pahlavi fled Tehran in the midst of the Iranian Revolution.

A sign welcomes worshipers to the Tripoli Church of Christ.

Albert became an elder of the College Street church, eventually serving alongside his son-in-law and Bradley’s father, Leonard K. Bradley Sr. Ellen Bryan died in 1973 at age 86. Albert followed her in 1986 at age 91.

The couple’s sons served in the military. Albert Bryan Jr. fought in the Army in World War II. Robert Bryan graduated from West Point before earning a doctorate in nuclear engineering. Charles Bryan attended the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and flew reconnaissance missions during the Vietnam War.

Albert Bryan speaks during a service in Tripoli.

Bradley himself served in the Air Force for 41 years. He flew 337 combat missions in Vietnam, received the Distinguished Flying Cross and earned the rank of lieutenant general before retiring. In 2008, Bradley and his wife, Jan, launched the Lamia Afghan Foundation, named for a 9-year-old girl who pushed her way through a crowd to ask the general for boots during his tour in Afghanistan.

Through the foundation, the Bradleys provided more than 3.5 million pounds of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, built seven schools and clinics and provided prosthetics for children injured in their country’s decades of conflict.

Ellen Bryan, far left, stands with members of the Tehran Church of Christ, which met at Ellen and Albert Bryan’s home during the 1950s.

“I always wanted to be like Papa,” Bradley said of his grandfather. “I have fallen short, but I keep trying. The work Jan and I do in Afghanistan through our foundation, we feel, is trying to help very needy people have some hope of improving their lives.”

Although laws prevented the Bradleys from evangelizing Afghans, “people there, of course, knew we were Christians,” he said.

Taking a cue from Jesus’ words in Matthew 25:40, “I looked at our work as doing for ‘the least of these.’”

ERIK TRYGGESTAD is President and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact erik@christianchronicle.org.

In the ACP’s “Best of the Church Press” competition, the Chronicle claimed the Best in Class honor as overall top newspaper for the 10th time.

The prize was presented at the faith-based journalist group’s recent convention in Toronto.

“Quite a selection of reading, all smoothly written with a consistent voice,” the ACP judge commented, praising the Oklahoma-based international newspaper for Churches of Christ.

In the EPA contest, the Chronicle’s overall excellence was honored in the categories for best print newspaper, best online news and best publication serving a specific group. EPA winners were recognized at the Christian professional organization’s national meeting in Franklin, Tenn., south of Nashville.

RNA’s Excellence in Religion Reporting Award recipients were announced during a banquet in Decatur, Ga., just outside Atlanta.

“We are extremely honored and humbled by these awards,” Chronicle President and CEO Erik Tryggestad and Editor-in-Chief Bobby Ross Jr. said in a joint statement. “They speak to the strong commitment of our board, staff and generous supporters to high-quality journalism serving our fellowship around the world.”

“We are extremely honored and humbled by these awards. They speak to the strong commitment of our board, staff and generous supporters to high-quality journalism serving our fellowship around the world.”

See a list of the other winners below:

Associated Church Press “Best of the Church Press” awards

FIRST PLACE

• Theme issue, section or series: “In search of Shalom — the struggle for divine reconciliation” (Erik Tryggestad)

• News story (short format): “While mourning fire losses, California church helps neighbors and trusts God” (Bobby Ross Jr.)

Christians helping with the fire relief effort of the Lincoln Avenue Church of Christ in Pasadena, Calif., gather in a circle to pray in February 2025.

• In-depth coverage: Texas flooding package, including “Grief and guilt over Texas flooding deaths” by Bobby Ross Jr., “‘We were safe the whole time'” by Andrew Reneau, “Creek by Texas camp floods” by Kenzie James and “Christians organize food and supplies after catastrophic flooding” by Cheryl Mann Bacon.

• Biographical profile: “Andrew Hairston is the ‘strength that runs through our veins'” (Erik Tryggestad)

SECOND PLACE

• Biographical profile: “Christian at center of big case has ‘this sweet spirit'” (Kenneth Pybus)

• Feature article — international reporting (short format): “Bonjour! How an Algerian immigrant couple found their calling in France” (Bobby Ross Jr.)

Khaled and Djedjiga Hassani, Algerian immigrants to France, serve as caretakers for the former Betheline monastery, which is being renovated as a Christian outreach center.

THIRD PLACE

• Theme issue, section or series: “Faith in France: Exploring spiritual renewal in a secular country” (Bobby Ross Jr.)

• Convention or meeting coverage: “A journey of forgiveness on Botham Jean’s island” (Erik Tryggestad)

At the Red Tie Gala, members of Botham Jean’s family (from left, aunt Desma Charles, father Bertrum Jean, mother Allison Jean, sister Alyssa Charles-Finley and brother Valdez Franklin) watch a video about the Botham Jean Foundation’s accomplishments.

• Feature article — international reporting (short format): “Why go back to Ukraine?” (Erik Tryggestad)

• Personal experience (short format): Pope Francis yearned to be with ‘the least of these’ (Erik Tryggestad)

Evangelical Press Association Awards 

FIRST PLACE

• Emerging Journalist Award: Calvin Cockrell

• General article (short): “Church-supported nonprofit loses, then regains, USAID funding after reprieve from Elon Musk” (Erik Tryggestad)

• Single photo (candid): “In the land of ‘The Savior,’ Bibles are welcomed” (Audrey Jackson)

Children rehearse for a play at the La Palma Christian School in El Salvador.

SECOND PLACE

• Reporting: “In secular France, Christians work to bring new life to old monastery” (Bobby Ross Jr.)

• Column: Insight (Erik Tryggestad), including “Did Jesus come to bring division?” and “One man with God is everything.”

Erik Tryggestad sings hymns alongside Thailand missionary Robert Reagan and church members from across Asia during the “Bricks to Blessings” banquet hosted by the Moulmein Church of Christ.

THIRD PLACE

• Student Writer of the Year: “A Spanglish church where all are welcome” (Andrew Reneau)

• Department: International news (Erik Tryggestad and Audrey Jackson)

FOURTH PLACE

• Article series: “In search of Shalom — the struggle for divine reconciliation” (Erik Tryggestad)

• Personality article: “Confessions of a Jesus Freak” (Jerry Mitchell)

• Cover design: April 2025 front page (Audrey Jackson)

Front page of the April 2025 edition of The Christian Chronicle.

FIFTH PLACE

• Article series: “Faith in France: Exploring spiritual renewal in a secular country” (Bobby Ross Jr.)

• Editorial: “There is one body, so let’s act like it” (Calvin Cockrell)

Religion News Association Awards

SECOND PLACE

• Excellence in audio: Commentary and conversation: Episode 111, The Christian Chronicle Podcast (B.T. Irwin and Kenneth Pybus)

• Excellence in analysis and explanatory reporting: Weekend Plug-in columns for Religion Unplugged and the Chronicle (Bobby Ross Jr.), including “A miracle in my family — it’s time to tell the story” and “Grief and guilt after Texas over flooding deaths.”

Tod Dillard, second from left, with his wife Tracie, sister Tamie and brother-in-law Bobby at the Farris Church of Christ in southeastern Oklahoma.

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“True life begins when we let go of our fear, of our past, and then something new comes,” Arisha says in German as missionary Jake Haskew translates his words into English.

It’s not easy to forget past mistakes or “thoughts that won’t go away,” says Arisha, an Iranian Christian who made the dangerous journey from his homeland to Vienna two years ago. But when believers take the bread and wine to remember Jesus, “it’s as if he’s saying, ‘I know where you are, but regardless, you are still invited.’”

Arisha, right, leads a communion devotional for the Danube Church of Christ.

New beginnings abound in the small congregation, which recently moved to a facility in central Vienna near multiple universities and the city’s U-Bahn subway. Despite conflicts among their nations, the church functions as a multinational, multilingual family — evidenced as four church members read Ephesians 2:1-10 in their native tongue.

Stefan Krassnig, a longtime minister in Vienna, reads in German. Jonah Wilcox, a student in Oklahoma Christian University’s study abroad program, reads in English. Amir, another refugee from Iran, reads in Farsi. And Artum Budzhak, an immigrant from Chernivtsi, Ukraine, reads in Ukrainian.

Artum Budzhak reads Ephesians 2:1-10 in Ukrainian during Sunday worship at the Danube Church of Christ in Vienna.

In the passage, the apostle Paul tells the church in Ephesus that they once were dead in their sins. But God, because of his great love, “made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions … For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”

After the readings, Arisha says, “I think that tells us everything that we need to know.”

Before taking the bread and the fruit of the vine, the Iranian Christian asks his brothers and sisters to consider a question: “When was your beginning? What did it feel like? Or has it begun? How can we encourage others to start their new beginning?”

Members of a Church of Christ in Vienna pack them all into their cars on a Saturday morning. They drive about an hour north from Austria’s capital to reach this village near the Czech border.

The Christian caravan pulls up to Poysdorfer Hof, a hotel for refugees, and unloads. Inside, a small group of children, most of them Ukrainian, waits eagerly as the church members set up a table of snacks, plastic cups of juice and a coffee bar for the parents.

“I remember what they must feel like,” says Ibrahim, who made the drive from Vienna with his mother, Esmat. So do the other church members, all but one of whom are from Iran.

Eight years ago, Ibrahim was a refugee, too. His father had met a group of Christians while visiting the Middle Eastern nation of Kuwait. His family began worshiping with an underground church in Iran — and caught the attention of the Gasht-e Ershad, the country’s much-feared morality police. Ibrahim fled to Vienna and found the Pohlgasse Church of Christ, which baptized him. Other Iranians followed, though many of their families stayed behind. For security reasons, The Christian Chronicle is using only their first names.

@christianchronicle POYSDORF, AUSTRIA — Reggy Hiller, a member of the Pohlgasse Church of Christ in Vienna, Austria, sings with a group of refugee children from Ukraine. Hiller and a group of Christians from Iran — once refugees themselves — brought candy and Bibles for the children. #iranianchristians #ukrainianrefugees #churchofchrist #poysdorf ♬ original sound – The Christian Chronicle

Ibrahim is part of a wave of refugees from the Middle East who transformed the Pohlgasse church in the mid-2010s. The Vienna congregation now has a Sunday morning service in Farsi, Iran’s national language, for Christians from Iran and Afghanistan. The church also has an afternoon service in German and English, attended mostly by immigrants from Africa.

Add Ukrainians to the mix. The first wave came to Austria after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began four years ago. More Ukrainians followed as Russia’s drone and missile attacks intensified.

Now, both Ukraine and Iran endure daily bombings, and both peoples worry about their loved ones back home.

The U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran, launched earlier this year, quickly became entangled with the war in Ukraine. As the Middle East conflict restricted the global flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. eased its embargo on Russian oil, giving President Vladimir Putin more resources to attack Ukraine, which could result in more refugees.

Outside the Poysdorf hotel, Ukrainian children greet their visitors from Vienna.

Ibrahim prays for an end to the conflicts. He also thanks God for his new life in Austria, where he works in information technology — and for the opportunity to help fellow refugees.

After years of receiving aid from people of faith, serving the Ukrainians “feels really good,” says Parvin, another Iranian Christian. “When we support each other, differences don’t matter. In these moments, we are just people helping people, and that’s what matters most.”

‘This way we have hope’

In the hotel’s meeting room, the small group of children quickly becomes a standing-room-only crowd. The Pohlgasse church members come to Poysdorf regularly, and the numbers grow with each visit.

The kids closest to the table put down their snacks and grab copies of a Ukrainian-language children’s Bible produced by Eastern European Mission. They chatter gleefully with each other as they turn the pages. Next time, the church members will have to bring more.

@christianchronicle POYSDORF, AUSTRIA — Children from Ukraine sing “This is the Day That the Lord Has Made” in German during a visit by members of the Pohlgasse Church of Christ in Vienna. The Christians, most of them immigrants from Iran, brought candy, snacks and Bibles for the refugees. #poysdorf #ukrainianrefugees #iranianchristians #churchofchrist ♬ original sound – The Christian Chronicle

Three Ukrainian women lead a chorus of children in traditional songs, welcoming spring and celebrating Easter. Then Reggy Hiller, the only non-Iranian from the Pohlgasse church, talks about Jesus’ resurrection, the Great Commission and baptism — while doing her best to remember all of the children’s names.

Hiller, the daughter of missionaries Bob and Ruth Hare, is a longtime member and mission worker with the Pohlgasse church. She recently married an Iranian refugee, a musician and guitar instructor who was baptized in 2023.

“Is it good that Jesus was resurrected?” Hiller asks the children. “Yes! Because otherwise we would just stay dead, and that would be sad. But this way we have hope. We get to see each other again and stay with Jesus. We get to sing a lot up there, too!”

Sasha, 17, and her mother, Alesia, squeeze onto a wooden bench in the corner of the room. They’re from Mykolaiv, a port city and shipbuilding hub in southern Ukraine that’s endured heavy attacks since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022. Sasha’s sister is still in Ukraine. When asked if she’s OK, Sasha says, “Not always. It’s so hard.”

As for the Christians who came to serve them, “I think the Iran people are good, actually,” Sasha says. “They come here to find a better life, so I understand them.”

Girls flip through a Ukrainian-language children’s Bible provided by Eastern European Mission.

Sophia Semeniuk, 20, also grew up in Mykolaiv. She was studying in Germany when the invasion began and remembers crying bitterly when she learned of it. Now she’s taking online courses and earning degrees in psychology and counseling. One day she hopes to return to Ukraine and help the countless people traumatized by the conflict.

“I think it’s good,” she says of the Iranian Christians’ care for the Ukrainians, “and I think that Ukrainians can also be of help to the Iranians.”

She looks forward to the day when she can return the favor, reaching out to Iranians affected by war.

When asked if she’s found a church home in Poysdorf, she says no.

“I’m believing in God, but I believe that God is in your heart. God doesn’t have a place because he’s everywhere.”

Dimitri Godunow is on his way to do laundry when he sees the crowd in the hotel’s lobby. He grabs a snack and visits with the Iranian Christians.

Dimitri Godunow shows a photo of the bombed-out remains of his apartment building in eastern Ukraine.

On his phone, he pulls up a photo of a charred black apartment building. It once was his home in Kostiantynivka, a city in the predominantly Russian-speaking Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, now on the frontlines of the war.

“This is a completely new life here,” says Godunow, who was an attorney in Ukraine. As the brutal conflict pushed him westward, he encountered suspicion from fellow Ukrainians because of his region’s ties to Russia. And many of the men who leave Ukraine are regarded as traitors by those who remain and join the Ukrainian army, he adds.

“There are (no longer) any lines between religions and nationalities. I don’t want to make harm for anybody. I’m open to everybody — Iranians, Indians, Chinese, Americans — if we’re united in love.”

But there’s a sense of camaraderie among refugees that crosses geographic barriers, he says. He’s become friends with a Russian family from the republic of Chechnya, which endured more than a decade of bloody conflict in the 1990s and 2000s.

Receiving support from Iranian Christians might have seemed far-fetched a few years ago, but not now.

“For me, this is totally normal,” Godunow says. “It’s from the heart. There are (no longer) any lines between religions and nationalities. I don’t want to make harm for anybody. I’m open to everybody — Iranians, Indians, Chinese, Americans — if we’re united in love.”

Alisha, right, next to her daughter, Sasha, shows her forearm tattoo that reads “Only God knows why.”

Back amid the crowd of children, Sasha uses the English she knows to translate for her mother, Alesia, who’s eager to show off a tattoo she got a couple of weeks ago. She rolls up her left sleeve as her daughter rolls her eyes. Scrolled across her forearm, in cursive English, are words that seem to sum up the past four years for Ukraine, “Only God knows why.”

What inspired Alisha to have those words immortalized in her flesh?

With a teenage smirk, Sasha says, “Only God knows why.”

Laborers needed

After handing out the chicken salad crepes, the Iranian Christians pack up. Four girls, each holding an orange rose, crowd around Hiller’s car to tell her goodbye. She remembers two of their names — Marina and Adrina.

As Ibrahim drives Hiller and his mother back to Vienna, he reflects on their Ukrainian neighbors, speaking in German as Hiller translates.

Reggy Hiller, right, talks to Ukrainian women in Poysdorf.

“I’m pleasantly surprised by how nice they are,” he says. “Once you have a friend in them, you always have a friend.”

Hiller, 75, would love to see a Church of Christ planted in Poysdorf. But her schedule is full. That’s also true for Gerhard Krassnig, minister for the Pohlgasse church. As Hiller and the Iranian Christians return to Vienna, Krassnig is headed to Salzburg, near the German border, to visit a Church of Christ there. Missionaries Bill and Marie-Claire McDonough worked with the congregation and studied the Bible with Iranian refugees in western Austria. But the couple recently returned to the U.S.

“The harvest is plentiful,” Hiller says, quoting Jesus’ words to his disciples in Matthew 9:37. But the laborers — be they Austrian, American, Iranian or Ukrainian — are few, at least for now.

ERIK TRYGGESTAD is President and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact erik@christianchronicle.org.

Featured photo (above): During the Bible Conference in Panama, a woman in the traditional dress of Panama’s Indigenous people watches during a children’s class.

BOLIVIA

SUCRE — Butch and Patricia Sandoval traveled to this South American city to conduct a seminar titled “Images of Spiritual Leadership: Profiles of the Apostle Paul,” hosted by the Sucre Church of Christ. Sandoval encouraged church leaders “to remain tenacious in the midst it difficulties, to keep their integrity in the midst of criticism, to speak and act with authority living what they believe,” he said, “always being responsible, knowing God is aware, and remaining humble just like Jesus.”

Butch Sandoval is a minister and missions coordinator for the Mid-County Church of Christ in Troy, Ohio. In 2007, he and his wife were part of a church-planting team in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba, which they visited before traveling to Sucre. Cochabamba now has five Churches of Christ.

Butch Sandoval speaks in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

CROATIA

VARAZDIN —

Young people from across this Central European nation learned about Jesus during the annual Croatia Spring Camp hosted by the Varaždin Church of Christ and coordinated by the ministry Next Generation for Christ and Mladen Dominic, minister at Varaždin. The camp included activities for youths in the coastal city of Crikvenica and gospel messages at the church building in Varaždin. Kevin Withem, senior minister for the North County Church of Christ in Escondido, Calif., spoke on topics including “The God Who Searches” based on Jesus’ parables of the lost sheep, coin and son from Luke 15.

Goran Kumric, minister for the Church of Christ in Vukovar, Croatia, also shared his testimonial.

INDIA

KAKINADA — The largest Lads to Leaders conventions outside of the U.S. took place at four locales in southern India, said minister Ricky Gootam.

“We started with 200 kids in Kakinada in 2019, and we have grown to 2,200 in four places and in three different languages,” said Gootam, an India-born evangelist who serves on Lads to Leaders’ board of directors. The 58-year-old ministry, founded by Jack Zorn, hosts conventions for more than 20,000 young people from Churches of Christ at locales across the U.S.

Ricky Gootam addresses a Lads to Leaders convention.

This year, four participants were baptized during the convention in Srikakulam, India, and two more were baptized at the Kakinada convention. Students preached, read Scripture and sang in Telugu, Oriya and a tribal language called Kulu. Two participants memorized more than 500 Bible verses in Kulu, Gootam said.

Organizers gave Bibles to participants and asked them to give a Bible to someone who didn’t have one. “We have been getting reports already how our kids in the villages are reaching out to their friends and family for Christ and gifting them a Bible,” Gootam said.

India, the world’s most populous country, is home to nearly 1.5 billion people. Nearly half of that number is under the age of 25, according to global population estimates. “The fourth largest economy in the world has lot of energetic young Christians,” Gootam said. “We keep on encouraging our young Leaders and Leaderettes to be strong leaders in their local churches.”

NIGERIA

UKPOM ABAK — About 500 church leaders, alumni, government officials and stakeholders in Christian education attended the 72nd Founders Day and Matriculation Ceremony at the Nigerian Christian Bible College, said public relations and development director Uyai S. Joshua.

The college, associated with Churches of Christ, admitted 41 new students. Members of 18 Churches of Christ presented songs of thanksgiving during the event. See africanchristianschools.org.

PANAMA

PANAMA CITY — Bezaleel and Oholiab aren’t names that come up in a lot of sermons. But they were the focus of Esteban Rodriguez’s sermon, titled “God gives us the skills to perform our work.”

Rodriguez was a speaker at the Conferencias Bíblicas hosted by the Bible School of the Americas, which trains ministers for Churches of Christ across Latin America. Hundreds of Christians from North, Central and South America attended.

During the Bible Conference in Panama, a woman in the traditional dress of Panama’s Indigenous people watches during a children’s class.

Bezaleel and Oholiab, from the tribes of Judah and Dan, respectively, had special skills in stone cutting and making artistic designs in gold, silver and bronze. They played an important role of the construction of the tabernacle, described in Exodus 35.

In a social media post, the conference’s organizers thanked God “for every word received about work, money and communion with God, learning to live in balance between material and spiritual.” Watch recordings from the conference at facebook.com/EscuelaBiblicaAmericas.

It got him a punch in the stomach — and what likely would have been a lifetime of persecution.

Christo and Vania Arnaudov

Christo Arnaudov was a rarity in communist Bulgaria — a third-generation evangelical Christian. His grandfather preached the Gospel in the days before the Eastern European nation, which sits atop the intersection of Greece and Turkey, became a satellite state of the Soviet Union after World War II.

“There was a slang saying from the Communist Party that religion is like a drug for the nation,” said Deanna Christova, referring to Karl Marx’s critique of faith as “the opium of the masses” — an oft-quoted phrase in the communist era.

“If someone was holding a Bible, was caught with the Bible, they would accuse him of possessing drugs like opium.”

“And if someone was holding a Bible, was caught with the Bible, they would accuse him of possessing drugs like opium,” said Christova, a Bulgarian English teacher who worships with the Sofia Church of Christ, where Arnaudov preaches. The minister and his wife, Vania, spoke with The Christian Chronicle over a lunch of shopska salad, minced meat skewers and yogurt. Christova served as translator.

Christians had to be careful during the communist days. Arnaudov remembers his father receiving a treasure trove of 100 Bulgarian-language Bibles via a colleague in Sweden. A neighbor found out and told the police, who questioned his father for three days about where he got the Bibles. “I don’t know. One day I just found them in my house,” his father insisted — which was technically true.

Deanna Christova and Christo and Vania Arnaudov stand outside the meeting place of the Renaissance Church of Christ.

When he turned 18, Christo Arnaudov signed up for two years of obligatory national service. He was in line for appointment to a prestigious unit of investigators, similar to military police. About that time, an innocent-looking, plain-clothed man approached him and asked him about his faith.

“So I started evangelizing him,” Christo said with a laugh. He talked about the Partisans, the resistance soldiers who fought the Nazi occupiers in World War II. “They were few, but they brought Bulgaria the victory. And Christians, we’re very few, too, but God will give us the victory.”

Then came the gut punch. The curious man, it turns out, was an investigator for the military.

“You’re demoted!” he told Arnodov. Instead of serving in the special unit, the minister got posted to what American troops call K.P. duty (Kitchen Patrol). He guarded a food storage unit.

“Rather than beating me to death, he gave me the best position — manager of the food,” Christo recalled. “Everyone was my friend!”

From musician to full-time minister

Culinary benefits aside, Christo’s run-in with the secret police could have haunted him for decades in a society that viewed Bible and narcotics possession equally.

That changed in 1990 as the Iron Curtain fell and Bulgaria held its first multiparty elections. The country, then with a population of about 8.8 million, avoided the political turmoil and bloody wars of its neighbor, Yugoslavia, as it transitioned to a parliamentary democracy. But years of economic instability, food shortages and hyperinflation followed. Banks went bankrupt, including the one where Vania Arnaudov worked.

Shoppers and sightseers walk past the Church of St Petka of the Saddlers, a medieval Bulgarian Orthodox church building that stands next to Roman-era ruins in a semi-submerged mall in Sofia, Bulgaria. Behind it stands the Banya Bashi Mosque built by the Ottomans in the 1500s.

Vania, like most Bulgarians, grew up atheist but started questioning her non-belief during a period of illness. A coworker introduced her to the Bible and invited her to a church that met in secret. Vania met Christo there. They lived in Burgas, a city on the Black Sea near the historical region of Thrace. Christo, an accomplished viola player and singer, conducted the city’s choir.

The transition from communism to democracy affected Christo’s job, too, as musicians left Bulgaria to pursue opportunities in Italy and Austria. Bulgaria joined NATO in 2004 and the European Union three years later. More Bulgarians took jobs in other parts of the EU, and the country’s population fell to 6.4 million.

Christo looked for opportunities to perform in Western Europe, but making the move would cost at least 5,000 Euros. He made what he called “an extreme decision” to leave home and look for work in Athens, Greece. On arrival, he found the ancient city crowded with other Bulgarians. He took whatever jobs he could find. Vania later joined him and worked as a nanny.

Their daughter, Natalia, graduated from college in Burgas and came to visit them in Athens. That’s where she encountered a group of study-abroad students from Harding University in Searcy, Ark. The students worshiped with the Omonia Church of Christ, where Dino Roussos served as minister.

Dino Roussos

“They arrived already well‑versed in Scripture,” Roussos said of the Arnaudovs. “We had the privilege of guiding them deeper into the teaching and practice of the Bible and the Church of Christ.”

The “care and love of the brethren at the Omonia Church of Christ” made the biggest impact on the family, Christo said. As a result, “God changed the material and financial focus in me into an aim to grow spiritually and devote myself to ministry to the Lord.”

The Omonia church building served as the site of the Athens Bible Institute, an affiliate campus of Texas-based Sunset International Bible Institute. Christo began studying at the Athens school. His family launched a Bulgarian-language service for the Omonia church in 2001.

Over the next seven years, some 300 Bulgarians became Christians through the Arnaudovs’ work.

“Christo brought not only a strong teaching ability, but also the rather rare gift of organizing choirs, being a professional musician,” Roussos said. “His musical talent strengthened the church significantly.”

Roussos began traveling to Bulgaria in the mid-1990s. He preached to crowds of hundreds and baptized dozens. It was “a season of extraordinary openness and spiritual hunger,” he said.

Ten years later, as the Arnaudovs shared the Gospel in Athens, they got requests from Bulgarians back home to return. In 2004, Christo registered Churches of Christ as a legal entity in Bulgaria, as required by law. Four years later, the musician who left for Greece to earn seed money for a music career returned to Bulgaria as a church planter.

Rebirth in a changing Bulgaria

The Arnaudovs launched the Renaissance Church of Christ — an allusion to “rebirth” after decades of communist rule — in a small apartment in Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia, in 2008.

“From a very small home group, God kept adding to the church new people,” Christo said, “families with children who would believe, repent and be baptized into Christ.”

Eighteen years later, the Renaissance church meets in a rented facility owned by a local artist. Paintings and sculptures line the walkway to the bright white entrance. Sunday attendance ranges from 30 to 60, including regular guests from the U.S. embassy in Sofia. The church translates its services into English as needed.

A bulletin board in the Renaissance church building, decorated with Christian symbols, reads “Your Story.”

The Bulgarian Christians worship freely — a big change from the communist era when congregations met in secret. While he praises God for religious freedom, Christo said he misses the sense of unity that Protestant churches once had in his homeland.

“There was one church,” he said. “Some had Baptist beliefs. Others were Pentecostal.” But they found ways to work together and help each other survive under the communist regime.

“There wasn’t a separation between denominations,” Christo said. “Now, there is a line.”

But the collapse of communism has other benefits, including easy interaction with Christians from around the world.

“God opened the hearts of brothers and sisters to support us in the new planting,” Christo said. Among those is the West Ark Church of Christ in Fort Smith, Ark. Rick Odell, who served on the church’s ministry staff, led multiple groups to conduct children’s camps, Vacation Bible Schools and parenting seminars. Odell continues to recruit young people for mission trips to Bulgaria in his current role as associate director of church relations for Oklahoma Christian University.

There are no stomach-punching secret police in the streets of Bulgaria today, but other threats loom, including apathy. About 70 percent of the country claims Eastern Orthodoxy as its faith, and about 11 percent of Bulgarians practice Islam. But surveys show weekly church attendance at only 5 percent.

For that reason, building up the faith of young believers is paramount for the Arnaudovs.

“We encourage the young men at our church toward ministry and dedication,” Christo said, “so that they may continue God’s work.”

Back in Athens, Roussos now ministers for the Glyfada Church of Christ, a multicultural congregation of believers who speak Greek, Russian, Ukrainian, English, Farsi and Albanian.

“The multicultural nature of the ministry reflects the very heart of the Gospel, which was never intended for one nation alone.”

“The multicultural nature of the ministry reflects the very heart of the Gospel, which was never intended for one nation alone,” Roussos said.

Despite the challenges, “Bulgaria has a great future,” he added. As for the Arnaudovs, “their ministry is living proof that seeds planted in faith do not return empty.”

ERIK TRYGGESTAD is President and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact erik@christianchronicle.org.

A young Iranian Christian filmed the festivities on a Sunday afternoon in Vienna, Austria, after worshiping with the Pohlgasse Church of Christ. The worship service, though more subdued than the outdoor celebration, was one of happiness and “a great sense of relief,” said Reggy Hiller, a longtime member and mission worker with the church. “Prayers were lifted for the safety of loved ones and for Iran in general to finally be relieved from 47 years of suffering.” As the service concluded, two people put on Christ in baptism.

Reggy Hiller, left, gives Arabic-language Bibles to Iranians in Vienna.

Since the Iranian Revolution, Vienna and other cities across Europe have served as refugee and resettlement hubs for persecuted minorities — Jews, Christians, Baha’i and more — fleeing Iran and other Muslim-dominated countries of the Middle East. Large waves from Iran and Afghanistan arrived in the mid-2010s, and new waves are expected as the U.S. and Israel conduct daily airstrikes on Iran.

Churches of Christ have embraced the refugees, helping them to find housing and apply for asylum. Church members also study the Bible with the new arrivals and, if requested, baptize them. Several European churches translate their worship services into Iran’s national language, Farsi.

“Iranian Christians are part of the broader movement for freedom and democracy in Iran,” said Zhale, who worships with the Pohlgasse church. “Our advocacy is both faith-driven and patriotic … Iranian Christians in Europe are actively supporting movements that seek to bring peace, justice and national revival to Iran. Our faith inspires us to advocate for a future where all Iranians are safe and free.”

‘A matter of survival’

Iran, once known as Persia, appears in the Bible nearly 30 times. Its king, Cyrus the Great, ended Israel’s decades-long captivity by the Babylonians. The Old Testament prophet Daniel served in the royal courts of Babylon and Persia. The book of Esther revolves around Persian king Ahasuerus and his Jewish queen, Hadassah.

A series of shahs ruled Iran until 1978. The final shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, implemented rapid modernization, dubbed the “White Revolution,” and fostered strong ties to the U.S. Muslims across Iran expressed discontent with the shah’s pro-Western stance and authoritarian rule, which included severe repression by his secret police. Pahlavi, who suffered from leukemia, fled to the U.S. as the revolution brought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power. Iranian militants seized the U.S. embassy in Iran’s capital, Tehran, and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days as they demanded that the shah be returned to Iran for trial.

Members of a Church of Christ in Vienna, many of them Iranian, meet in an apartment in 2018 and sing a hymn in German, “Dies ist der Tag” (“This is the Day”).

Zhale was born a year after the revolution. Her father was a member of the shah’s army. He rarely left their house.

“The Islamic revolutionaries wrote slogans on the walls of our house, made threatening phone calls and warned us that my father would be arrested,” Zhale said, “even referring to stealing or harming the children … Our neighbors were radical Muslims who considered us taghuti.” The Arabic term refers to anything worshiped, obeyed or followed in rebellion against Allah. For security reasons, The Christian Chronicle is withholding Zhale’s full name.

Zhale’s school taught strict adherence to Islam, “and any question or doubt about Islamic teachings was met with disciplinary action or humiliation,” she said. “Over time, Islam became for me more a source of psychological pressure, guilt and suppression of individuality than a source of peace.”

In 2020, Zhale moved to Italy to study human rights. Eventually, she traveled to France, Austria and Slovakia and became closely acquainted with Christians there. Last year, while visiting a park in Vienna with her son, she met an Iranian Christian.

“As time passed and we became more familiar, I noticed her very kind personality, her energy and her positive spirit.” Zhale recalled. “She always had a smile on her face, and being around her gave me a feeling of peace and happiness.”

Eventually, their conversations turned to faith, and the Iranian Christian talked with Zhale about the concept of grace.

“Encountering the idea that God loves and saves a human being without coercion, without fear and without the mediation of force created a deep transformation in me. I came to Christianity not out of hatred but out of hope.”

“Encountering the idea that God loves and saves a human being without coercion, without fear and without the mediation of force created a deep transformation in me,” said Zhale, who was baptized on April 30, 2025. “I came to Christianity not out of hatred but out of hope.”

Nonetheless, she knew that putting on Christ meant she could not live under Iran’s current government. After her baptism, she applied for political asylum in Austria.

“What is slowly healing inside me in this safe country could easily be destroyed again in Iran,” she said. “Being here is not simply a choice for me — it is a matter of survival.”

A war against evil, and the evils of war

Other Iranian Christians told the Chronicle that they see the current war as part of God’s plan for their homeland. However, they mourn for the lives lost and pray continually for their friends and family in Iran.

Christians abhor violence and death, said Hossein, who worships with a congregation in Birmingham, England. At the same time, he said, “I’ve watched my country struggle for so long, and part of me hopes this could mean real change. I love Iran and our people deeply, and that’s exactly why I want to see more justice and freedom there.

“My faith, especially what I learned from the Gospel of Matthew, reminds me to care about peace and mercy even when things are complicated. I’m praying that innocent people are protected, that this leads to accountability where it’s needed and that it’s real. Freedom can grow in Iran.

Austrian Christian Gerhard Krassnig leads a “Five Finger Exercise” as he teaches a Bible lesson to members of the Pohlgasse Church of Christ in Vienna, including refugees from Iran, in 2018.

I’m also praying that hearts would change, that violence wouldn’t spiral and that somehow God would bring lasting peace out of all of this.”

The people of Iran, who live under an Islamic theocracy, “endure an experience even worse than prisoners behind the Iron Curtain,” said Fred Petrossian, an Iranian journalist, author and researcher based in Belgium. “Nevertheless, Iranian Christians, facing dehumanization since the Islamic Revolution, deprived of their basic rights and subjected to persecution, have continued to resist and bear witness to their faith and identity.”

“Iranian Christians, facing dehumanization since the Islamic Revolution, deprived of their basic rights and subjected to persecution, have continued to resist and bear witness to their faith and identity.”

In a column for Religion Unplugged titled “Against Evil Or War?: A Defining Choice For Iran’s Christians,” Petrossian discussed the plight of Iranian Christians — those spread among the diaspora and those worshiping in secret in Iran.

Iranians are “living under bombs, caught between a brutal present and an unknown future,” Petrossian wrote. Yet, “they can also find some comfort in the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who fought apartheid: ‘I’m not optimistic, no. I’m quite different. I’m hopeful. I am a prisoner of hope.’

“This, too, is the current sentiment of many Iranian Christians: hope, but without any illusions.”

ERIK TRYGGESTAD is President and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact erik@christianchronicle.org.

Farsi wasn’t on the list.

Nonetheless, the 65-year-old ministry, supported by Churches of Christ, has experienced a sharp spike in demand for God’s Word in the languages of the Middle East. Waves of Iranians and Afghans took dangerous paths to reach Turkey and Greece in 2016, and additional waves are expected in the wake of new attacks on Iran by the U.S. and Israel.

On top of a Farsi-language Bible open to the prophet Isaiah, Miriam flips through her own copy of a Farsi New Testament. She has highlighted the parable of the Pearl of Great Price in the Gospel of Matthew.

Workers with EEM are preparing not only to supply more Bibles for Iranians in Europe but also to send God’s Word into Iran itself.

“We cannot wait for that moment and then start deciding what to do,” said Bob Burckle, EEM’s president. “The Bible already exists in the languages many Iranian people can read,” and depending on the outcome of the current conflict, “the need could be far greater than anything we have seen before.”

The ministry has produced almost 90,000 Bibles for various age groups in Iran and is working on the first-ever New Testament in Gilaki, a language spoken by an ethnic group that lives in northern Iran near the Caspian Sea. EEM works with Transform Iran, a ministry focused on strengthening Iranian believers in the country and reaching new believers through radio and digital media. Transform Iran also invests in Bible translation.

Lana Silk

Iran’s 93 million people speak 39 languages, but a full version of the Bible exists in only four of these languages, said Lana Silk, an Iranian-born Christian and president and CEO of Transform Iran. Nonetheless, Iran has one of the fastest-growing Christian communities in the world, she said.

“For many here in the West, it is so much easier to write off this nation as a lost cause — to close the door on caring about these beloved people and justify that God either doesn’t care about them or that they’re out of his reach,” Silk wrote in a column for Today’s Christian Living. “Yet, I’ve seen God move radically in the hearts of the Iranian people, hungry for hope, freedom and justice. …

“Iran is changing, and consequently, so will the greater Middle East.”

Bart Rybinski

Bart Rybinski, vice president of EEM’s European operations, asked Christians worldwide to pray.

“This is a dangerous and deeply uncertain moment for the people of Iran,” Rybinski said, adding that believers should “pray for peace, for protection and for the Lord to move powerfully in the midst of crisis.

“But we also have to be ready. If a door opens for more people in Iran to receive the Bible, we must be prepared to respond without delay.”

Featured photo (above): Students at the Lomami Bible School take a class taught via cellphone by Yann Opsitch, director of Online French Bible School.

AUSTRALIA

MELBOURNE — About 65 voices from seven churches in Australia’s most populous city “joined to make a joyful noise” during Summer Song, church member Brett Christensen wrote in Happenings, a newsletter for Churches of Christ down under.

The Dandenong Church of Christ coordinated the event, and the Belmore Road Church of Christ hosted Sunday worship. David Nelson led singing and taught Bible classes. Nelson is an elder of the Otumoetai Church of Christ in Tauranga, New Zealand, and a facilitator for South Pacific Bible College.

As Australia’s summer turns to autumn, churches in Melbourne and Gosford will host ReConnect marriage retreats. Owen and Lauren Mitchell of Eustis, Fla., host the events. The couple works with Franklin, Tenn.-based Marriage Dynamics Institute.

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

MWENE-DITU — Wooden benches, open Bibles and a fully charged cell phone are all that’s required for study at the Lomami Bible School, which meets in the heart of the massive Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The school, launched in 2019, prepares Christians for ministry in Churches of Christ and has three teachers, said director Godefroid Kabamba.Guest lecturers also instruct students via Zoom or WhatsApp. Students take 60 courses over a period of three years. “We have already trained two cohorts,” Kabamba said, “and the third will complete their training in July 2026.”

The school seeks a sponsoring church.

Students at the Lomami Bible School take a class taught via cellphone by Yann Opsitch, director of Online French Bible School.

FRANCE

COLMAR — The Église du Christ that meets in this town just west of the German border had 25 visitors on a recent Sunday as a traveling group from Freed-Hardeman University in Henderson, Tenn., joined the small congregation for worship.

The travel-abroad students stopped in Colmar as they made their way from Italy to Belgium. They spent the day “discovering our beautiful city and sharing in some fraternal communion with the congregation,” Colmar church members said in a social media post. “They have blessed us so much with their presence, their joy of life and their zeal for the Lord. It was a day full of brotherly love, moments where the fruits of the Spirit overflowed in each and every one!”

PAKISTAN

LAHORE — A Church of Christ recently hosted its first worship service in this capital city of Pakistan’s Punjab province. An evangelist and his wife taught Bible classes for six months leading up to the first service, attended by members of other Churches of Christ in the city including minister Asher Kaleem.

“The people in this area eagerly waited to gather for Sunday worship, and Asher thanks God for making this possible,” church members said in a social media post. About 97 percent of Pakistan’s population of 259 million identifies as Muslim. Pakistani Christians asked for prayers for the new congregation.

The Woodmont Hills Church of Christ in Nashville, Tenn., supports the work.

Asher Kaleem prays for church leaders in Pakistan.

PAPUA NEW GUINEA

LAE — A recent youth camp in this South Pacific nation brought together 723 participants from 29 Churches of Christ and yielded 14 baptisms. The Melanesian Bible College hosted the event, which featured guest speaker Steve Raine of the South Pacific Bible College in New Zealand.

“The camp’s main objective is to strengthen Churches of Christ in the Marobe Province and beyond,” said Arthur Tatara, who teaches for World English Institute. Many youths walk for three or four days to attend the camp, Tatara added.

PHILIPPINES

SOFRONIO ESPAÑOLA — Christians in Palawan, a province of long, slender islands on the western side of the Philippines, trek through jungles to conduct home Bible studies. Evangelists from multiple congregations, including the Puerto Princesa City Church of Christ, make the trips at the behest of Filipinos who listen to a gospel radio program and ask for more information. “Above all, we thank God for this opportunity of preaching thy words into the heart of the lost,” church members said in a social media post. “May God give the increase.”

Church members conduct a home Bible study in rural Palawan, Philippines.

TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO

PIARCO — About 50 Preachers of the Caribbean gathered at a hotel near Trinidad’s international airport for a three-day ministry seminar. Bruce McClarty and Mark Blackwelder of Freed-Hardeman University in Tennessee taught on the theme “The Integrity of the Body of Christ.”

I mean, I’m not a good world traveler.

I pack too much. I’m a picky eater. Mostly, I prefer my bed at home to global adventure (unlike Erik Tryggestad, who has plenty of mosquito net stories).

Yet I am an inquisitive journalist and a big fan of on-the-ground reporting, so I’ve kept my passport up to date and covered stories in 20 countries during my 35-year career.

My most recent trip took me to this Caribbean island nation, where — as I noted in last week’s Plug-in — I reported on Christians keeping the faith at a trying time for Cuba.

Cuba in crisis: Read all the stories in the special package

Inevitably, such trips produce a memorable moment, be it frightening, frantic or funny. Sometimes, the notable occurrence relates to the actual story. Other times, an indelible personal experience stands out.

Here in Cuba, I interviewed longtime preacher Tony Fernandez in the dark as one of the island’s rolling blackouts hit the short-term rental house where I stayed. I used a tiny flashlight to see the questions in my notebook.

Fernandez didn’t seem to notice the power outage. He’s used to such inconveniences.

But the circumstances were new to me.

So, too, were these five unforgettable experiences during past international reporting treks:

1. Mexican checkpoint

In 2012, as turf wars waged between drug cartels south of the U.S. border, I joined an Oklahoma church team on its annual mission trip to a remote mountain village.

The day the team left, a Facebook friend was kind enough to post a U.S. State Department warning for everyone “crazy enough to travel to Mexico.” That same day, I read a news report about the violence — and statements such as “If you go, you better bring a body bag along” — making U.S. aid groups skittish.

Mexican church members and American visitors enjoy fellowship after a 2012 worship assembly.

So during the drive through Mexico, I was concerned when a convoy of trucks filled with men toting machine guns and sporting green military uniforms zipped past the Oklahoma team’s white rental vans and set up a makeshift checkpoint.

By “concerned,” I mean that I prayed hard.

As it turned out, the soldiers behaved extremely professionally as they examined the team’s cargo. They assured the Americans that they were trying to protect them from any potential threats.

2. Missing luggage

In 2009, I traveled to South Africa to visit a preacher-training school east of Johannesburg and report on signs of racial harmony 15 years after the end of apartheid.

I flew from Oklahoma City to Houston to catch my international flight and was assured my suitcase would meet me at my final destination.

Wrong!

Bobby Ross Jr. makes a new friend during a 2009 reporting trip to South Africa.

For nearly a week, I had no peanut butter crackers (I generally bring such snacks just in case I need them). Even worse, I had no change of clothes. I didn’t bother to pack any in my carry-on bag. I learned my lesson.

Before I had a chance to go to the store, my friend Mike Avery — a minister who was on that same trip — loaned me a pair of Fruit of the Looms. Actually, “gave” is a better verb there because he insisted I keep them, and we still laugh about it.

3. Missile attack

In 2019, after a busy day that included a tour of a high-tech company in Ramallah, West Bank, and a visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City, I was wrapping up dinner when my phone pinged.

“Your mom just called super worried,” my wife, Tamie, texted from 7,000 miles away.

About the same time, a friend emailed to make sure I was OK.

Israeli Brig. Gen. (Res.) Nitzan Nuriel, a counterterrorism expert, briefs journalists, including Bobby Ross Jr., in the Golan Heights in 2019.

What in the world?

As I soon learned, rockets fired from the Gaza Strip had set off air raid sirens in Tel Aviv, where I had been earlier in the week. No damages or injuries were reported, but the attack quickly made international news.

In a nation with more than a million bomb shelters, this strike — which quickly drew an Israeli military response — was no big deal. I tried to assure my mom of this. And myself.

4. McDonald’s in Manitoba

In 2017, my daughter, Kendall, then a high school senior, accompanied me on a reporting trip to Canada, where I covered Syrian refugees in both western and eastern Canada.

We left Oklahoma City at 3:30 a.m. the day the trip began. We flew to Dallas and then Toronto, arriving at 10 a.m. Oklahoma time. Yet our day was just getting started. After a six-hour layover, we still had to fly halfway across Canada — to Winnipeg, Manitoba — and then drive another three hours to the small farming community of Dauphin.

Short version of the rest of our day: Despite our hunger as we left the Winnipeg airport, we passed up a McDonald’s we saw. We decided to eat somewhere better later. Ultimately, we spotted a bunch of snowy fields and cattle grazing along rural Manitoba’s two-lane farm highways. But somewhere to eat? Not so much.

Bobby Ross Jr. with his daughter, Kendall, on a 2017 reporting trip to Dauphin, Manitoba.

Finally, at 11:30 p.m., we made it to Dauphin and drove toward our Super 8 motel. And we spotted heaven on earth — the Golden Arches.

Starving and exhausted, we both laughed giddily. Who could have guessed that one of our precious memories from this trip would involve Chicken McNuggets?

5. Medieval rideshare drama

Just this past fall, my wife and I spent 10 days in France, where I did a series on spiritual renewal in the secular nation (along with a Plug-in column on “love in many languages”).

At 4:45 a.m. on our final day there, we found ourselves rolling our 50-pound suitcases (Tamie didn’t pack lightly either!) along dark sidewalks in Chartres in search of our rideshare driver.

Roadblocks in that medieval French city — famous for its Gothic cathedral — made it difficult to find him.

Tamie Ross rides a train from Le Mans to Chartres during the trip to France.

When we finally caught up with him, I dozed off on the hour-long ride to the Paris airport. But Tamie stayed awake and held on for dear life. Zigging and zagging along a major highway, she prayed as the driver exceeded 100 mph.

I won’t soon forget this. Tamie won’t let me.

Zigging and zagging along a major highway, she prayed as the driver exceeded 100 mph.

Thankfully, the driver delivered us in time to make our flight. Which was promptly delayed.

Back to my Cuba trip: I did something out of the ordinary for me. I boarded an international flight without checking a bag.

I’d like to suggest that this signifies deep growth on my part, that I’m becoming a better world traveler.

Actually, I learned before leaving that if I checked a suitcase, it’d go all the way to the Varadero, Cuba, airport — and I wouldn’t have access to it during my overnight stop in Miami.

So I forced myself, just this once, to pack lightly. But please don’t count on me to make it a habit.

---

BOBBY ROSS JR. is Editor-in-Chief of The Christian Chronicle. Ross writes the Weekend Plug-in column for Religion Unplugged, where this piece originally appeared. Reach him at bobby@christianchronicle.org.

Mario and Yani Suárez waited three days in line at a bus station in western Cuba. The couple slept in the terminal to buy tickets for an all-day, multi-stop journey.

Samuel Rondón Aguilar and his mother, Margarita, endured 24 hours on a train from eastern Cuba.

Cuba in crisis: Read all the stories in the special package

At a desperate time for this Caribbean island nation — crippled by severe fuel and food shortages, frequent power outages and rising tensions with the United States, its powerful neighbor 90 miles to the north — faith in Jesus brought together Cuban believers this week. 

From all over the island — which stretches nearly 800 miles — Christians came to attend the fifth annual Missionary Congress in west-central Cuba. The five-day event celebrates church-planting efforts in the socialist nation of 9 million souls. 

“It’s a horrible trip,” Samuel Aguilar, 24, said of the train ride from Rio Cauto in Cuba’s eastern province of Granma. “But it’s a huge blessing to be here with the brothers and sisters.”

More than 300 men, women and children fill the Versalles Church of Christ building in Matanzas, Cuba, during the national discipleship gathering.

The fuel crisis has disrupted the availability and affordability of gasoline for personal vehicles and limited the frequency and reliability of normal public transportation options. 

Despite the challenges, more than 300 men, women and children filled the Versalles Church of Christ, about 60 miles east of Havana, on Saturday night and Sunday morning. A smaller group of leaders engaged in evangelistic training Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. 

The host congregation — which baptized 236 people in 2025 — meets in a government-authorized, open-air auditorium in Matanzas, the namesake capital of Cuba’s province of Matanzas.

Over the weekend, attendees sang, prayed and studied the Bible — and enjoyed time for fellowship with like-minded disciples experiencing the same societal troubles.

“We find spiritual nourishment here,” said Yani Suárez, 33, a mother of three who — like most of the Cubans interviewed for this story — spoke through a Spanish-language interpreter. “We find the fellowship. We find the love. And we just become renewed.

“At our home congregation, there’s just a few of us,” added Suárez, a minister’s wife in Cuba’s far western province of Pinar del Río. “It’s difficult, and at times it feels like we’re all alone. Here, we get to see other Christians, and we get to see that we’re not alone.”

Mario and Yani Suárez stand during worship at the Missionary Congress event in Matanzas, Cuba.

Even a week before the conference, organizer Tony Fernandez — the Versalles church’s longtime minister — doubted if he could pull it off.

“I was really worried, and my wife knew that I didn’t have everything that I needed to do this,” said Fernandez, who has helped plant more than 50 Cuban congregations. “But she’s got groups of women who pray every day starting at 5 a.m.

“And they prayed, and God works,” he added. “We were able to have transportation. We were able to get fuel.”

Tony Fernandez, far right, performs with the Matanzas chamber orchestra. The group presented a special concert for visiting Christians Sunday afternoon.

Besides his ministry work, Fernandez performs as a professional bass violinist with Matanzas’ chamber orchestra and fosters other deep ties in the community through his faith-based humanitarian endeavors. Local authorities applaud his efforts and help pave the way for the Versalles church’s special events.

Among those who made it to the Missionary Congress: 35 Christians from Colón, a Matanzas province town more than 50 miles away.

“How are you going to get here?” Fernandez asked.

The answer: The back of a cargo truck.

“They paid the driver,” the minister said, “but they’re here.”

Christians traveled from all over Cuba to attend the Missionary Congress event in Matanzas.

Stranglehold on daily life

So far in 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump has launched military operations aimed at regime change in Venezuela and Iran. 

Speculation mounts that Cuba’s 67-year-old Communist government — formed when the late Fidel Castro rose to power in this nation’s 1959 revolution — could be the next target.

Since the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Jan. 3, the U.S. has blocked Cuba’s oil imports and paralyzed the island’s tourist industry. Canadian and European airlines halted flights to the island because of the inability to refuel. 

For decades, Cuba has blamed U.S. sanctions for its economic problems, while the U.S. cites its aim to restore democracy and respect for human rights. 

The U.S.-imposed blockade since the Venezuela attack has put a stranglehold on daily life in Cuba.

Minister Tony Fernandez, left, baptizes new souls into Christ nearly every Lord’s Day. Six came forward to be baptized during this week’s Sunday morning assembly.

“We’ve never been through anything like this,” said Fernandez, 53, who as a child worshiped God discreetly with his parents when Castro imposed severe restrictions on churches.

Still, the minister praises God.

“We live the Christian life as an adventure of faith,” he said.

“We live the Christian life as an adventure of faith.”

Liudmila Barrizonte, a 52-year-old former English professor, worships with the Suárezes in Pinar del Río. She joined them at the Missionary Congress.

“It’s very difficult,” Barrizonte said of Cubans’ circumstances. “Everything is very expensive, like 10, 12, 15 or 100 times more expensive than before.”

But the Lord has a way of providing, she stressed.

“God multiplies the bread and the fish every day for the Cubans,” Barrizonte said, referring to the biblical accounts of Jesus feeding 5,000 with five loaves and two fish. 

“When you tell people that most of us survive with less than $10 a month, they don’t believe it, but we do,” she added. “It has to be God’s work. There’s no other explanation for me.”

Liudmila Barrizonte, left, visits with visiting American Christians Rick Elam and Mike Kellett at the home of Jorge Sanchez, who manages the church’s farm south of Matanzas.

U.S. Christians offer support 

A dozen Christians from six U.S. states flew to Cuba for the Missionary Congress. Given the island’s proximity to Florida, refueling is not a concern for U.S. airlines.

Chase Turner, president and CEO of Herald of Truth, which focuses on empowering Spanish-speaking works in Cuba, Honduras and the U.S., preached at the event Saturday night. 

Mike Kellett, senior minister for the White’s Ferry Road Church of Christ in West Monroe, La., and co-director of its One Kingdom global ministry, gave two sermons Sunday morning.

“It’s just great to know that you’ve got brothers and sisters all around the world, and it’s encouraging to see them have such hope and such great spirits about them in the middle of their poverty,” Kellett told The Christian Chronicle. 

Herald of Truth and One Kingdom — in partnership with Illinois-based Hope and Equip — provided food for the conference and funds for roof repairs for the Versalles church. In addition, the ministries gave away free Spanish-language Bibles and bought motorcycles for a few Cuban preachers.

“We want to encourage the people here and also provide what they need from a financial standpoint,” said Turner, a member of the White’s Ferry Road church.

Chase Turner, president and CEO of Herald of Truth, preaches during the Missionary Congress event.

Some Cuban preachers lead as many as eight worship services each Lord’s Day, Fernandez said, and need a reliable means of transportation from congregation to congregation. 

“But then during the week, they can use the motorcycle as a taxi,” he explained. “Especially now when many buses aren’t running, that’s really needed.”

Other conference speakers included Tim Archer, minister for the Alvarado Church of Christ in Texas and director of development for the Texas International Bible Institute; and Jimmy Pinzón, who lives in Alabama and focuses on ministry outreach to Colombia.

Archer, a former missionary to Argentina, worked for Herald of Truth for two decades. 

He has made 48 mission trips to Cuba.

On his latest one, an eerie quietness greeted him in Matanzas — a normally bustling city of roughly 150,000 people.

“It’s sad to see the lack of cars or buses,” Archer said. “Normally, there’s heavy traffic. It’s a big city, and right now, about all you see are a few motorcycles around — and a lot of those are electric motorcycles because there’s just no gas. 

Residents walk along a Matanzas, Cuba, street during the U.S. mission group’s recent trip.

“There’s more trash around, too,” he added. “I think the trash trucks aren’t able to run as much.”

Yet Fernandez — Archer’s brother in Christ and longtime friend — approaches the difficulties with optimism and deep faith, the Texas minister said.

“I know that he hurts for people, and he is having to do so much,” Archer said, noting that the Versalles church feeds members every Sunday because otherwise “they’ll faint on the way home because they don’t have anything to eat.”

The Versalles Church of Christ in Matanzas, Cuba, feeds the crowd during the Missionary Congress event.

Blessings and baptisms

From a desire for fellowship to the opportunity for outreach instruction, all the Christians who traveled to Matanzas had personal reasons for doing so. 

What motivated the Aguilars to tolerate a grueling train ride?

Flooding after Hurricane Melissa ravaged the family’s hometown.

The son and mother came to thank Fernandez and other believers who helped in the storm’s aftermath.

“There were families who lost everything,” Samuel Aguilar said.

Samuel and his father, Arsenio, who is undergoing kidney dialysis and couldn’t make the trip, work with three small congregations and share preaching duties.

After the October hurricane, Fernandez drove to Rio Cauto and offered food, money and spiritual support.

“Because of the way the church helped out there, 22 people were baptized,” Samuel said. “So that’s a huge motivation for us to keep working and keep preaching because of all of these people that came to Jesus.”

Samuel Rondón Aguilar, right, thanks fellow Christians for their help after Hurricane Melissa. Also pictured, from left, are Esmailys Pamayo Leyva, Margarita Aguilar and Mairín Méndez Sánchez.

While in Rio Cauto, Fernandez noticed victims trying to dry out mattresses soaked in river water.

“That’s impossible,” Fernandez thought to himself.

So at the Missionary Congress, the Versalles minister presented the Aguilars and a couple who came with them from Rio Cauto with new mattresses. The Central Church of Christ in Sparta, Tenn., donated the items.

“It’s not just for us,” Samuel said of the gift. “There are other brothers and sisters who lost their mattresses, and we’re going to be able to help them.”

After arriving in Matanzas, the Aguilars learned their planned return train was being canceled, said Candice Pinzón, who has made a half-dozen mission trips to Cuba with her husband, Jimmy.

Pinzón said the faith and resiliency of the island’s Christians inspire her.

“They travel without the security of knowing how they’re going to get back home or the food along the way,” she said. “But they come anyway.”

Christians pray during the Lord’s Supper at the Missionary Congress event.

‘The Lord will fight for you’

Blanco, who came to Matanzas via the ferry and buses, preaches on Cuba’s Isle of Youth.

Before converting to the Church of Christ, the 76-year-old minister practiced Santería, a fusion of African religions and Catholicism.

But in 1990, he faced mounting problems in his life. So he decided, he said, to flip open his Bible and do what it told him.

“I opened it to Psalm 115, and it told me to get rid of my idols,” Blanco said.

He did just that and was baptized.

Since then, he has started three congregations on the Isle of Youth. Their combined membership totals 300, including many who came from the Santería faith.

René Sánchez Blanco leads a prayer during the Missionary Congress event.

“I really like to be with the other brothers and sisters and have a chance to preach to people,” Blanco said of why he came to the Missionary Congress.

As for Cuba right now, he points to Exodus 14:14: “The Lord will fight for you; you only need to be still.”

“Everything’s hard,” Blanco said, “but we trust in God.”

The town square in Matanzas, Cuba.

BOBBY ROSS JR. is Editor-in-Chief of The Christian Chronicle. He traveled to Cuba to report this story. Reach him at bobby@christianchronicle.org.

A U.S. blockade on oil shipments to this Caribbean island nation has spurred Cuba’s deepening humanitarian crisis.

“People are worried a lot about the stuff that they have to add to their crops, like insecticides, because they can’t find it,” Sánchez said,  speaking through a Spanish-language translator.

Cuba in crisis: Read all the stories in the special package

But Sánchez relies on a special means of keeping the bugs away.

“I do pest control at night,” he said. “What I do is, I come and pray in my fields, and God takes care of all of that stuff.”

Sánchez grows beans, onions, plantains, sweet potatoes, tomatoes and other vegetables at a church-operated farm about 20 miles south of the provincial capital of Matanzas in west-central Cuba.

Jorge Sánchez learns drip irrigation techniques at his farm in Limonar, Cuba.

The 17-year-old farm started small and grew after Tony Fernandez, longtime minister for the Versalles Church of Christ in Matanzas, baptized a rural couple.

The couple had lost two adult sons — one in a bicycle accident and another who died by suicide.

Jorge Sánchez, the couple’s third son, was “living a wild life of drinking and chasing women,” the minister recalled when The Christian Chronicle first visited the farm a few years ago.

But like his parents, Sánchez became a devoted Christian.

“No turning back, no turning back,” he sang gleefully in Spanish as he trekked through a field in 2023.

Jorge Sánchez works at the farm.

Maximum yields, minimum water

The farm produces crops to feed church members as well as orphans and elderly people in the community.

“I want to be able to provide a balanced meal to the people,” Sánchez said of his diverse range of produce. “I don’t want a whole lot of one thing. I want different things.”

A U.S. mission group that came to support and encourage Christians in Cuba visited the farm this past weekend. Two global ministries — Herald of Truth and One Kingdom — organized the trip.

Bill Orange, an elder of the Pegram Church of Christ, southwest of Nashville, Tenn., demonstrated a concept known as Farming God’s Way.

“This type of farming might work for some of you,” Orange, a former missionary to Liberia and Fiji, said as he taught drip irrigation techniques.

Bill Orange explores the church-owned farm in Limonar, Cuba, about 20 miles south of the provincial capital of Matanzas.

Drip irrigation uses buckets and hoses to deliver a tiny but constant “drip” of water to plants. It’s designed to produce maximum crop yields with minimal water usage and is especially helpful in drought conditions.

Orange emphasized that he could learn a lot about farming from Sánchez but said drip irrigation might be helpful in certain situations.

Sánchez welcomed the advice.

“He taught me a very easy way to use the water,” Sánchez said. “I know how to plant, but this is so helpful for the watering.

“I’m a very simple man,” the farmer added. “I don’t like technology. It just stresses me out. And this is so simple.”

A scene at the church-operated farm Jorge Sánchez manages in Limonar, Cuba.

Fernandez said he hopes Orange can return to Cuba soon — perhaps before the three-month rainy season begins in May — to provide additional instruction.

“Because of the shortage of food, we’ve really been working on helping people start growing food at their own homes,” Fernandez said.

With the lack of fuel, “it’s getting harder to bring the food in from the farm,” the minister added. “This — being able to grow crops with much less water — is really important.”

Orange, who traveled to Cuba with Marilyn, his wife of 55 years, said he’s eager to come back.

“I tell people all around the world that I have mud in my blood,” Orange said. “You can’t get it out. I was raised on a farm.”

In that respect, Orange and Sánchez are kindred spirits.

“I was born in the fields,” Sánchez said.

Church members help tend to the farm that Jorge Sánchez manages.

‘God is going to find a way’

For his part, Sánchez keeps praying that God will provide a solution for Cuba’s fuel scarcity.

“You can see for yourself that we have a bunch of stuff that should have already been picked,” he said. “But if we pick it and just leave it there because we don’t have the fuel to take it to the city, then it’s just going to go to waste.”

But he remains undeterred.

Cuba’s fuel shortage has complicated efforts to take produce from the rural farm to the city.

“I have always learned to deal with difficult things like the dry season and lack of stuff, so it doesn’t really affect me,” he said. “Nevertheless, seeing the stuff there and knowing that people need it, it’s difficult to deal with. But I know that God is going to find a way.”

Sánchez lifted his pointing finger toward the sky.

And he smiled with confidence.

“If this fuel problem is not going to get fixed,” he said, “then I know that God is going to send us an electric car fueled by solar power, and that’s going to be our solution.”

BOBBY ROSS JR. is Editor-in-Chief of The Christian Chronicle. He traveled to Cuba to report this story. Reach him at bobby@christianchronicle.org.

Tony Fernandez thinks it’s the perfect time.

The longtime minister for the Versalles Church of Christ — a growing congregation in this provincial capital in west-central Cuba — welcomed a U.S. mission team this past weekend.

Cuba in crisis: Read all the stories in the special package

“A lot of people from the States who used to come to Cuba have decided not to come anymore, and that really discourages Christians here,” lamented Fernandez, who has helped start more than 50 congregations in his native Cuba. 

“A lot of brothers and sisters have the idea that if they send money to Cuba, that’s enough,” he added. “But even though there are a lot of needs here in Cuba, the most important thing is the presence of brothers and sisters who care about you.”

The U.S. State Department urges Americans to exercise increased caution in traveling to the Caribbean island nation — just 90 miles south of Florida — because of crime and unreliable electrical power.

Americans can’t visit Cuba for general tourism but can obtain special visas, including travel for religious purposes.

“I really want people in the U.S. to know that Cuba is a safe place,” Fernandez said. “There are scarcities, but it’s safe to come here.”

I’ve never felt unsafe in my two reporting trips to Cuba since 2023. 

After worship at the Versalles church on Sunday, a man on the street approached Americans and asked for money. But he did not appear threatening or react negatively when given no cash.

On the other hand, unreliable electrical power is an ongoing problem. Thankfully, I brought a battery-powered fan.

I interviewed Fernandez in the dark as one of Cuba’s rolling blackouts hit the short-term rental house where I stayed. I used a tiny flashlight to see the questions in my notebook.

And I relied on Tim Archer, a former missionary to Argentina who has made 48 mission trips to Cuba, to interpret Fernandez’s Spanish for me — and my English for him.

Tony Fernandez speaks as the Versalles Church of Christ in Matanzas, Cuba, gathers for an areawide worship assembly in 2023.

Fernandez didn’t seem to notice the power outage. He’s used to such inconveniences.

He’s focused on doing God’s work, regardless of the circumstances. The Versalles church baptized 236 people last year.

“I don’t see the U.S. groups as human beings,” Fernandez said. “I see them as people sent by God to bless the Cuban church.”

Then he said something that brought tears to my eyes:

“Giving a hug to a Cuban brother tells him that God has not forgotten him.”

“Giving a hug to a Cuban brother tells him that God has not forgotten him.”

Regaining my journalistic composure, I mentioned that the U.S. blockade on oil shipments to Cuba has spurred the island’s deepening humanitarian crisis.

As Cubans struggle with fuel and food shortages, I asked, do they hold any animosity toward Americans?

“The Cuban people love the American people,” Fernandez replied immediately.

I followed a group of Christians from six U.S. states to Cuba. They came to support and encourage fellow believers. Two global ministries — Herald of Truth and One Kingdom — organized the trip.

John Howard, an elder of the White’s Ferry Road Church of Christ in West Monroe, La., has traveled to 65 countries — sometimes on business but often for mission work.

“It’s a beautiful country, and the people are super friendly — at least all the ones we’re meeting,” Howard said of his first visit to Cuba. “There’s a lot of poverty, and all we can do is pray for them and hope for changes that will give them more freedom.”

Little traffic can be seen on a Matanzas, Cuba, street during the U.S. mission group’s recent trip.

For decades, Cuba has blamed U.S. sanctions for its economic problems, while the U.S. cites its aim to restore democracy and respect for human rights. 

Geopolitical tensions between the two nations do not fracture the bond between the Cuban and American people, Fernandez insisted.

“There’s a lot of things that people who don’t live in Cuba can’t understand,” he said. “But I hope they understand the love.”

“There’s a lot of things that people who don’t live in Cuba can’t understand. But I hope they understand the love.”

BOBBY ROSS JR. is Editor-in-Chief of The Christian Chronicle. Reach him at bobby@christianchronicle.org.

Yet the Caribbean island nation’s Christians have not lost faith, as The Christian Chronicle discovered during a recent reporting trip.

Find links to all the in-depth coverage below:

The Versalles Church of Christ in Matanzas, Cuba, feeds the crowd during the Missionary Congress event.

• No fuel? No food? Amid crisis in Cuba, there’s no shortage of faith

Christians travel by boat, bus, train — and even a cargo truck — to attend a national discipleship gathering.

Jorge Sanchez learns drip irrigation techniques at his farm in Limonar, Cuba.

• Faith sustains Cuban farmer during time of crisis

Crops benefit church members as well as orphans and elderly people in the community.

The town square in Matanzas, Cuba.

• ‘Cuban people love the American people’

Minister urges U.S. church members to keep making mission trips to the Caribbean island.

A classic car crosses a bridge in Matanzas, Cuba, in 2023. Decades-old vehicles are a common sight on Cuban roads because of a longstanding U.S. trade embargo.

• Bonus from 2023: For Cuba, a time of stress — and salvation

Amid an economic crisis, ministry and music propel a native son devoted to sharing the bread of life.

About the journalist

Bobby Ross Jr. takes notes during a visit to a church-operated farm in Limonar, Cuba.

BOBBY ROSS JR. is Editor-in-Chief of The Christian Chronicle. Since joining the Chronicle in 2005, he has reported from all 50 U.S. states and 20 nations. He writes the Weekend Plug-in column for Religion Unplugged. Reach him at bobby@christianchronicle.org.

That morning, my home country attacked his.

Tony found out several hours before I did. He’d been up since 2 a.m., when messages from his friends and family in Iran flooded his phone. It was a rare night when he forgot to silence his WhatsApp account, and it turned out to be providential.

“My family is safe,” he said. “Yes, and I’m very happy and excited.”

Erik and Tony prepare to part ways after lunch at Simply Falafel in Edmond, Okla.

I met Tony when he was my Uber driver to the airport for my trip to the Red Tie Gala in St. Lucia last year. I’ve had a lot of interesting airport rides in two-plus decades with The Christian Chronicle. A guy in Sarajevo told me that his country had pyramids with mystic powers. One driver was convinced that the Denver airport is haunted. (Seriously, they have a horse statue nicknamed “Blucifer.”) And there was the lady who, at 3 a.m., had a song blaring all the way to Will Rogers Airport — “I hope that heaven has a smoking section!” (If you’re in the smoking section, that ain’t heaven, pal.)

Tony was different. “I like your shirt!” he hollered as soon as he pulled into my driveway. I had on the “Jesus You” T-shirt I got from The Park Church of Christ in Tulsa, Okla., a few years back. It has become my airport shirt and has sparked some wonderful conversations, as I’ve mentioned before. 

At the airport in Sofia, Bulgaria, Erik Tryggestad meets Steve Rice of Oskaloosa, Iowa, who traveled to the European nation as part of a mission trip to train Bulgarian evangelists.

Tony, who worships with a Baptist church in Oklahoma City, has traveled all over the world working with Farsi-speaking believers. After many years as a preacher, he now leads a ministry that helps Western Christians effectively share Jesus with their Muslim neighbors. 

I got his number and promised to stay in touch. Four months later, I finally made good on that promise.

At lunch, Tony told me about growing up in Iran, where he started attending mosque at age 5. (His surname, Emamghoraishi, competes with mine in length and pronounceability.) By his teen years, Tony had questions about his faith that his teachers struggled to answer. He balked against the justifications for holy war, for killing infidels and shuddered at the frightening depictions of hell and eternal punishment that he heard over and over. 

On top of a Farsi-language Bible open to the prophet Isaiah, an Iranian Christian named Miriam flips through her own copy of a Farsi New Testament. She has highlighted the parable of the Pearl of Great Price in the Gospel of Matthew. The Christian Chronicle spoke with Miriam in 2018 when she was living as a refugee in Athens, Greece.

As a Farsi speaker, he didn’t understand why Islam required him to learn Arabic. But it was the Muslim call to prayer that really puzzled him. He knew he was supposed to face Qibla, the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca. But what if he were at the North Pole, where every direction is south? That reminded me a bit of the “what if you get in a car wreck and die on the way to the baptistery” argument so many of us in Churches of Christ raised in our teen Bible classes.

Tony began studying to become a mullah, but the more he learned about Islam, the more dissatisfied he became. So he abandoned his faith and became an atheist, even flirting a bit with communism. Then he came to the U.S. in 1978, just before the Iranian Revolution, to study industrial engineering at Lincoln University of Missouri.

After completing his degree, he moved to Bartlesville, Okla., and ran small businesses, including a doughnut shop. There he met his wife, a native Okie. She was pregnant with their second child when the couple’s landlord hired a painter named Waymmond for the whole complex. Tony got to know Waymmond, who also was a minister, and occasionally let him use the phone in his apartment. 

“He was very, very nice. I mean, I could see love and compassion through him. He had a beautiful smile. (He said), ‘Tony, it’s OK. Jesus loves you.’”

“Then he started talking about Jesus Christ,” Tony said. “I told him, ‘My friend, stop right here. I’m atheist. I don’t believe in the one you call God. This Jesus guy you’re talking about, don’t waste your breath.”

So Waymmond stopped, much to Tony’s surprise. “He was very, very nice. I mean, I could see love and compassion through him. He had a beautiful smile. (He said), ‘Tony, it’s OK. Jesus loves you.’” 

No wonder he liked my T-shirt.

Erik Tryggestad takes a photo with members of  the Park Church of Christ in Tulsa, Okla., just before receiving his “Jesus You” T-shirt in early 2024. The Park church hosted Christians and community members during a weekend-long project to produce Manna Packs for the nonprofit Feed My Starving Children.

His wife began attending the church where Waymmond preached, and eventually Tony tagged along to see what it was like. The preacher “greeted me just like the others,” Tony recalled, “and he knew I was an atheist.” That’s not how it was at the mosques in Iran, he said. Non-Muslims aren’t welcome. And when they prayed, “they called God their father. Are you kidding me? In Islam, if you call Allah ‘father,’ that’s blasphemy. But with your father … you can share your feelings, You can share your success, struggles.”

Tony got a New Testament and started reading, hoping to find some details to disprove Christianity or to prove that it was the same as other religions. Eventually, his studies led him to embrace the faith he had sought to discredit. 

He remembers the morning after his conversion. He got up between 3 and 4 a.m., as usual, to make the donuts. “I said, ‘Man, I’m so light. I have great peace.’” He always worried about what would happen to his wife and daughters if he died, but that fear was gone.

Muslim tourists stroll through historic Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2025.

Since then, Tony has traveled the globe and baptized more than 300 former Muslims. He has preached for congregations of Farsi speakers across the U.S., including Oklahoma City. Now age 70, he’s “retired” but coordinates FMC Ministry (From Muhammed to Christ) that helps American Christians effectively serve and share the Gospel with their Muslim neighbors.

He hears a lot of Christians pray for doors to open to reach Islamic nations and for God to prepare the hearts of Muslim people for salvation. That’s great, Tony said, but it’s really important that we pray for God to remove their fear. Many Muslims are afraid to question their faith, even a little bit. The terrible depictions of eternal torment and routine condemnations of non-Muslims he heard as a child instilled in him more fear than faith, he said. 

The incarnation, God becoming flesh in the person of Jesus, is a really difficult — even blasphemous — concept for Muslims, Tony said. Allah is divine and would not debase himself in such a manner. He must be worshiped with extreme reverence and respect. It’s important that Christians focus on the why behind the incarnation. God loves us so much that he put on flesh and came to be with us, to rescue us. And his love for us isn’t contingent on what we do.

“You have to reach out to your God. My God reached out to me.”

One convert put it this way: “You have to reach out to your God. My God reached out to me.”

I’m praying for Tony, for his family, and for all Iranians in Iran and scattered around the globe. May God work through all of the bad to bring about good.

ERIK TRYGGESTAD is President and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact erik@christianchronicle.org.

A diaspora of Iranian believers worships with Churches of Christ across Europe and other parts of the globe. Many stay in touch with family and friends back home. They described massive anti-government protests in recent weeks — followed by brutal retaliation. 

In a way, the Saturday attacks are almost an answer to prayer, several Iranians told The Christian Chronicle.

Cleddy Varner, a member of the Hillcrest Church of Christ in Abilene, Texas, leads a class on the Lord’s Supper for the Pohlgasse Church of Christ in Vienna, Austria, in 2018. Among the attendees are newly baptized believers from Iran and Afghanistan.

“I have personally heard from people who were in the streets in the past month when security forces stood in front of them with guns and opened fire,” said Zhale, an Iranian Christian living in Vienna, Austria. As they fled, some of the protestors “looked up at the sky, searching for drones and waiting for help.”

The attacks also threaten lives in Iran, including families of the estranged Christians. 

Reggy Hiller, left, gives Arabic New Testaments to refugees from the Middle East in 2016.

“It’s very mixed feelings right now, because of all their loved ones involved, not knowing about the outcome of all this,” said Reggy Hiller, a member of the Pohlgasse Church of Christ in Austria. She echoed sentiments voiced by church members from Venezuela after the Jan. 3 capture of that country’s president, Nicolás Maduro.

Since 2018, when a surge of refugees from the Middle East arrived on European shores, the Pohlgasse church has baptized more than 100 speakers of the Farsi language from Iran and Afghanistan. Many have children who worship with the congregation and participate in youth camps with other immigrants, including refugee children from Ukraine. 

Hiller, the daughter of missionaries Bob and Ruth Hare, recently married an Iranian refugee. Her husband, a musician and instructor, was baptized in 2023. After learning of the Saturday attacks, he went to his knees to plead with the Lord for his family’s safety, Hiller said. 

A newly immersed Iranian Christian embraces her husband after their baptisms in 2018. The refugee couple worships with the Danube Church of Christ.

Jake and Amanda Haskew work with another congregation in Vienna, the Danube Church of Christ, that also has welcomed new Christians from Iran in the past eight years. The congregation also is praying for safety and freedom for the Iranian people. 

“Given the last few minutes of news, there is a lot of hope that the future of peace and freedom may be soon,” Jake Haskew said shortly after reports that key figures in Iran’s government, including supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, died in the attacks.

One Iranian’s story

Iran, once known as Persia, appears in the Bible nearly 30 times. Its king, Cyrus the Great, ended Israel’s decades-long captivity by the Babylonians. The Old Testament prophet Daniel served in the royal courts of Babylon and Persia. The book of Esther revolves around Persian king Ahasuerus and his Jewish queen, Hadassah.

More recently, a series of monarchs, or shahs, ruled Iran until 1978. The final shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, implemented rapid modernization, dubbed the “White Revolution,” and fostered strong ties to the U.S. Muslims across Iran expressed discontent with the shah’s pro-Western stance and authoritarian rule, which included severe repression by his secret police. 

The shah, who suffered from leukemia, fled to the U.S. for medical treatment, and an Islamic Revolution in Iran brought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power. Iranian militants seized the U.S. embassy in Iran’s capital, Tehran, and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days as they demanded that the shah be returned to Iran for trial.

Iranian Christians and visitors visit before Sunday worship with the Danube Church of Christ in 2018.

Zhale was born a year after the revolution. Her father, a member of the shah’s army, rarely left their house. For security reasons, the Chronicle is withholding her full name.

“The Islamic revolutionaries wrote slogans on the walls of our house, made threatening phone calls and warned us that my father would be arrested,” Zhale said, “even referring to stealing or harming the children of the family. … Our neighbors were radical Muslims who considered us taghuti.” The Arabic, Islamic term refers to anything worshiped, obeyed or followed in rebellion against Allah. 

Zhale’s school taught strict adherence to Islam, “and any question or doubt about Islamic teachings was met with disciplinary action or humiliation,” she said. “Over time, Islam became for me more a source of psychological pressure, guilt, and suppression of individuality than a source of peace.”

In Athens, Greece, believers sing during a Sunday night worship service with the Glyfada Church of Christ before three Iranians are baptized in 2018.

In 2020, Zhale moved to Italy to study human rights. Eventually, she traveled to France, Austria and Slovakia and became closely acquainted with Christians there. 

Last year, while visiting a park in Vienna with her son, she met an Iranian Christian. “As time passed and we became more familiar, I noticed her very kind personality, her energy, and her positive spirit.” Zhale recalled. “She always had a smile on her face, and being around her gave me a feeling of peace and happiness.” Eventually, their conversations turned to faith, and the Iranian Christian talked with Zhale about the concept of grace.

“I came to Christianity not out of hatred, but out of hope.”

“Encountering the idea that God loves and saves a human being without coercion, without fear, and without the mediation of force created a deep transformation in me,” said Zhale, who was baptized on April 30, 2025. “I came to Christianity not out of hatred, but out of hope.”

Nonetheless, she knew that putting on Christ meant she could not live under Iran’s current government. After her baptism, she applied for political asylum in Austria.

“What is slowly healing inside me in this safe country could easily be destroyed again in Iran,” she said. “Being here is not simply a choice for me — it is a matter of survival.”

As she watches the news and waits for messages from home, “I pray for safety, peace and the wellbeing of Iranian people,” Zhale said. “My faith motivates me to seek freedom, human rights and justice. I have seen how faith and freedom are intertwined. I pray for a safe, just and democratic Iran where all citizens can practice their beliefs freely.” 

At times, Goran Kumrić wishes the people here would let it fall. 

The remains of the 165-foot Vukovar Water Tower serve as a museum and memorial for lives lost during a 1991 siege by Yugoslav and Serbian forces. The 193 steps to the top symbolize the difficult rise to independence for Croatia.

Instead, they’ve reinforced the Cold War-era water tower and turned it into a museum. Inside, video screens retell the horrors of the 1991 siege of Vukovar during the breakup of Yugoslavia. Ethnic Croats, outnumbered and outgunned, held out for 87 days against the Yugoslav People’s Army and paramilitary groups of Serbs. Two Croats, Ivica Ivanika and Hrvoje Džalta, kept the Croatian flag flying over the water tower throughout the siege until Ivanika was killed and Džalta was captured.

Kumrić, minister for the Vukovar Church of Christ, understands the need to remember Croatia’s long, bloody struggle for independence. But for Serbs, the tower also is a reminder of the ethnically charged hatred that contributed to countless deaths, even genocide, and the deep fissures that remain nearly 35 years later.

Inside the Vukovar Church of Christ’s small building, Goran Kumrić talks about his journey from Serbia to Croatia.

Kumrić grew up in Kragujevac, a city in the heart of modern-day Serbia. 

“I am very, very Serb,” he tells The Christian Chronicle as he stands near the church’s small building in downtown Vukovar. The city’s architecture is a mix of ornate, Baroque structures dating back to the 1800s and stark, angular communist-era buildings from the Yugoslav years. A few still bear bullet wounds and blackened, crumbling walls from the conflict three decades ago.

The scars of war aren’t limited to buildings. At a street corner, Kumrić spots a woman with disheveled hair wrapped in a head scarf, and he immediately rummages through his pockets. He asks her how she’s doing as he hands her a few bills and coins. 

The woman has multiple health issues, physical and mental, Kumrić says. During the war, Serbian forces took her captive and abused her.

Every time he sees her, he says, a thought resonates in his mind and tears at his soul. 

“My people did that to her.”

Fingernails of faith

From downtown, Kumrić makes his way past an abandoned, Soviet-style hotel with broken windows to the banks of the Danube River. Just across the water is the modern-day nation of Serbia.

At a table near an outdoor bar, Kumrić meets fellow church member Darko Gačiċ. An ethnic Croat, Gačiċ is tall, slender, white-haired and cleanshaven, in contrast to Kumrić, who is dark-complected with a traditional Serbian beard. 

Croatians walk and scoot past the war-damaged tower of Eltz Castle near the Danube River. Croatians restored the rest of the castle, which serves as the Vukovar City Museum.

Like most Croats, Gačiċ grew up Catholic. After he married, he began to question his faith, particularly baptism. He met missionaries who told him about non-denominational Christianity, free of patron saints and manmade creeds, and baptism by immersion. Gačiċ talked to his priest who, surprisingly, encouraged him to visit non-Catholic churches and explore his faith. 

Vlado Psenko

He doesn’t remember exactly when he was baptized, only that when he first went to worship as a new believer, he saw a rainbow. “That day, I felt like it was a sign,” he says as Kumrić translates. “I’m sure there’s a God, and I want to follow him.” 

Gačiċ became close friends with Vlado Psenko, a Croatian minister who moved to Vukovar in 2010 to plant the Church of Christ. Gačiċ became the church’s handyman, painting, repairing light fixtures and meticulously cleaning the building. When anything breaks in church members’ homes, Gačiċ is their first call.

Psenko died unexpectedly in October 2022 at age 59. Ministers for other Churches of Christ in Croatia, including Mladen Dominic, recruited Kumrić, a Serb, to take over the work. “In the first moment, I was surprised,” Gačiċ recalls, “But after that, I said, ‘God, you know what you are doing.’”

Serbian minister Goran Kumrić, left, and Croat Darko Gačiċ meet on the Danube riverbank in Vukovar.

He and Kumrić served on opposite sides of the conflict in the 1990s — the Homeland War, as Croatians call it. Gačiċ was captured and spent six months in a Serbian prison camp, where interrogators beat him regularly, once breaking his ribs. 

But that pain doesn’t come close to what Gačiċ experienced after the war, when his wife of 24 years left him for a younger man. Too depressed to eat, he lost nearly 50 pounds.

“It broke my heart,” he says. And he couldn’t fix it.

The church, especially Kumrić, has helped Gačiċ cope with the loss. That’s what matters most, he says, not nationality, ethnicity or the hostilities of the past.

“We’ve become like finger and nail,” Gačiċ says. “We are brothers in Christ.”

War and addiction

The Vukovar Church of Christ, once predominantly Croat, has a growing number of Serbs. About 30 believers attend Sunday worship, and members use the church’s small building throughout the week for Bible studies. 

Many homes across the city of Vukovar bear reminders of the 1991 siege.

On Tuesday morning, Kumrić conducts one of those studies with a visitor as Radmila Popovic sits at a table nearby, reviewing the church’s books. Popovic, 67, serves as the church’s accountant. She adored Psenko and his wife, Renata, and was devastated by the minister’s death. Some church members expressed doubts about Kumrić succeeding him, but Popovic became his advocate. 

“I’m the reason you’re here!” she tells him with a laugh.

Radmila Popovic reviews financial records for the Vukovar Church of Christ.

Like Gačiċ and the rest of her city, Popovic lives with trauma. Her first husband, a journalist, died while covering the Homeland War. Years later, her second husband left her. Her church family helps her recover, she says, and its increasing diversity shows her that believers can share burdens across lines of ethnicity.

Kumrić’s own trauma helps him relate to his brothers and sisters in Christ. The minister, who grew up Orthodox, has struggled throughout his life with gambling addiction, which contributed to the breakup of his first marriage. At rock bottom, he went to a Seventh-day Adventist revival at a friend’s invitation. A preacher prayed for him. 

“And then I felt my heart pumping — boom, boom!” he recalls. “I had no idea what God was doing in my life, but I knew he was doing something.”

‘The hatred is diminishing’

The experience convinced Kumric to study his Bible, and eventually he encountered Churches of Christ. He worked with a congregation in his hometown of Kragujevac, Serbia, for 12 years before moving to Vukovar.

Vanessa and Goran Kumrić

His second wife, Vanessa, is a Croat from Vukovar. She remembers the early postwar years, when nearly every other house was in ruins. Throughout her life, she’s felt the Holy Spirit calling to her, but repeatedly she chose drugs rather than God to cope with the pain. She had a tense relationship with her mother, who suffered from a narcissistic disorder and cancer, which eventually claimed her life. That, for Vanessa, was the breaking point.

“I was crying, and I was like, ‘Jesus, just please forgive me. I should have loved her more,’” she recalls. “And from that state of my heart breaking and me bawling my eyes out, his peace came in an instant, and he told me, ‘You loved her enough.’ So, from that broken state, I instantly calmed down.”

She met Kumrić at a Bible camp in Serbia. As they made plans to marry in 2023, they prayed about where they should live, Croatia or Serbia. Vanessa has two children from a previous marriage, so crossing the border would be difficult. More than that, she felt the need to bring the same sense of family she experienced at the camp to her home city. 

Goran and Vanessa Kumrić teach a children’s Bible class in 2023.

“I got a confirmation from the Lord! We should be here, in this place!” she excitedly told her fiancé, forgetting that she was in Serbia, not Vukovar, at the time. She corrected herself, and Kumrić’s mood shifted from elated to prayerful.

Shortly thereafter, they learned about the Church of Christ’s need for a minister. Kumrić’s first thoughts were the names of other preachers more qualified for the job. But he also felt his heart pumping, like it had years ago at the revival in Serbia. 

Once again, God was doing something. 

Leaders from Churches of Christ across Croatia and Serbia meet in Vukovar and pray for the city in 2024

The couple met with church members including Dominic, minister for the Church of Christ in Varaždin, Croatia, and president of the fellowship’s legally registered association. 

Mladen Dominic preaches in Serbia in 2014.

“It was clear that both of them were burning for Christ and that they were ready to serve people so that they could meet Jesus as their savior,” Dominic recalls. “The fact that Goran is Serb and Vanessa is Croatian is a great advantage for a city like Vukovar, where people are still divided due to war traumas that are very difficult to heal. … The search is still on for 1,744 victims (of the Homeland War), of which 332 are from Vukovar and the surrounding area.”

Kumrić accepted the job and married Vannessa. The couple began sharing their own stories of pain and recovery with the hurting. 

Recently, the Vukovar church hosted a gathering of more than 50 ministers and leaders from Churches of Christ across Croatia, including Dominic, and Serbia. The time of fellowship included a long, emotional prayer for the city.

Leaders of Churches of Christ in Croatia and Serbia visit the Memorial Cemetery of the Victims of Homeland War in Vukovar. The memorial includes 938 white crosses for victims exhumed from a mass grave following the 1991 Battle of Vukovar. “The youngest victim was 6 months old and the oldest was 104 years old,” said Croatian minister Mladen Dominic.

While bullet holes, a battered water tower and broken souls testify to the power of human brutality, “the hatred is diminishing,” Dominic says. “A sincere message of peace in Christ Jesus is the only solution to heal the wounds. That is why everyone is welcome to the Vukovar church, regardless of their nationality. 

“A heart that is reconciled with God will also be reconciled with man.”

A red heart frames a historic building in Vukovar’s square near the Danube River.

ERIK TRYGGESTAD is President and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact erik@christianchronicle.org.

I didn’t realize it at the time. As part of my visit to the Balkans for our “In Search of Shalom” series, I wanted to visit Vukovar, a city on the Serbian border that endured a monthslong siege during Croatia’s war for independence. Osijek has the closest airport, so I booked a flight on Croatia Airlines from the capital, Zagreb. 

The Osijek Airport welcomes visitors to northeastern Croatia.

I was one of six people on the small prop plane. When we touched down, minister Goran Kumrić was waiting for me. As we headed to Vukovar, we drove past field after field of bright yellow sunflowers. I thought about my friends in Ukraine who inspired the “Shalom” series. The sunflower is their national symbol. 

As I prepared to launch the series, I took a six-week online course through the nonprofit Peace Catalyst International, “Introduction to Christian Peacebuilding For Church Leaders.” The participants Zoomed in from locales around the globe and represented a diversity of faith traditions. Phil Gazley, a minister in Norwich, England, led the discussions.

Lisa Sharon Harper

Among the course materials were videos by Lisa Sharon Harper, founder and president of FreedomRoad.us. I downloaded an audio copy of her book, “The Very Good Gospel,” which she narrates herself.

I was surprised to learn that Harper had visited Osijek back in 2004 as part of a Balkan Pilgrimage for Reconciliation. She and her fellow sojourners saw the fields of sunflowers and broke into song, praising God. 

Later, they spoke with farmers who survived the wars of the 1990s. In a conference room in Osijek, “we shared with the director of a community development organization that we were overwhelmed by the beauty of the sunflowers,” Harper writes. 

The director’s response: “Yes. The sunflowers are so tall and plentiful because no one can go into the fields to plow them. The fields are full of mines.”

Harper also took part in a pilgrimage to 10 U.S. states, retracing the Cherokee Trail of Tears and the African American experience from slavery to civil rights. 

“I realized that my understanding of the Gospel was mute in the face of this evil, it had nothing to say,” she said in a video interview. “That was a frightening thought.” It also was the beginning of a 13-year journey of prayer and Bible study as she wrote “The Very Good Gospel.”

“The Very Good Gospel” by Lisa Sharon Harper (2016, WaterBrook).

“I believe that the Good News that Jesus himself proclaimed was that, in following the Jesus way, in following the way of Good News, then this world could be healed,” Harper said.

The book dives deep into Scripture, particularly the first three chapters of Genesis and the repeated phrase, “God saw that it was good.” It’s easy to read right past that without recognizing how good God’s goodness is. God declared shalom — a peace of wholeness, a just peace, a peace that theologian Neal Plantinga Jr. calls “the webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.” 

That’s a lot better than “good.”

I got to spend a few minutes with Harper recently, and I asked her how the pilgrimages she undertook helped to shape the vision of shalom she presents in her book. How can people who have endured brutal attacks from each other move toward shalom?

Recognizing mutual needs, and how cooperation can meet those needs, is key, Harper said. In Osijek, farmers told the story of how one family that had property free of land mines opened it up for the community to grow crops. That was a tiny step toward reconciliation. 

Tourists from around the world walk the streets of Sarajevo in summer 2025.

Harper also visited Sarajevo, where a priest had assembled a choir of Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats. They sang each other’s sacred music.

“They’re not getting together in a room and working out things diplomatically,” Harper said. “but what they’ve done is built relationship and rebuilt trust from the very smallest unit of trust that they could muster, which is common need.”

I think back to 2011 when I attended a Bible conference on Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and witnessed baptisms in the Black Sea. Christian composer Konstantin Zhugulin, a Russian, led worship and introduced the crowd to some of his own, beautiful compositions in his language. Such exchanges seem unthinkable now, but perhaps someday music will once again be a tool God uses to restore shalom among our brothers and sisters in Eastern Europe. 

Konstantin Zhigulin, a church member in St. Petersburg, Russia, leads singing at an evangelistic seminar in Crimea in 2011.

This principle doesn’t just apply to Croats and Serbs or Ukrainians and Russians, Harper said. It can work in places like New York City or Minneapolis to bring healing among people in tension. Focusing on problems like poverty can build bridges among people of multiple, divergent faiths.

When people stop seeing each other as “other” and work toward a common goal, they can actually help heal the earth. Look no further than the sunflower. 

Sasha Prokopchuk baptizes and hugs a Bible student in the Black Sea during a 2011 conference in Crimea.

After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 in Ukraine, the Soviet Union began massive containment and cleanup operations that ultimately cost thousands of lives. Soldiers roamed the abandoned streets of the industrial town of Pripyat shooting housepets that were infected by radiation. Grim.

The Soviets also planted vast fields of sunflowers in the lands around Chernobyl. It turns out that Ukraine’s national symbol is a hyperaccumulator of dangerous heavy metals, including the cesium-137 and strontium-90 found in the soil near the reactor. 

Sunflowers bloom in the Kherson region of Ukraine.

“Planting sunflowers will not suddenly solve all of your nuclear nightmares,” writes Max Barnhart, a researcher at the University of Georgia, “but the flowers do something pretty cool to help clean up the environment.”

In the search for shalom, it’s all about the “pretty cool,” the tiny steps, the “very smallest unit of trust,” as Harper put it. 

May we all have faith as small as a sunflower seed.

ERIK TRYGGESTAD is President and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact erik@christianchronicle.org.

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Featured photo (above): Gospel tracts in hand, Christians on the island of St. Vincent canvass a neighborhood.

ECUADOR

QUITO — Longtime missionaries Kent and Sharla Marcum recently donated land in Armenia, a suburb of Ecuador’s capital, for a community center.

A Church of Christ meets in a tent on the property and has about 75 in attendance, Kent Marcum said. The proposed Jack and Robbie Sikes “Springs of Living Water” Community Center will offer medical and counseling services, apartments for the elderly and housing for visiting mission teams from abroad. The center honors Sharla Marcum’s parents, who spent more than four decades serving in four children’s homes, and takes its name from Revelation 7:17 — also an homage to the Marcums’ anniversary, July 17. The Southwest Church of Christ in Pueblo, Colo., collects funds for the work.

HAITI

LIMBÉ — In a country with no functioning government, Christians still manage to spread the Word, said workers with the Center for Biblical Training in Cap Haitien. One CBT graduate, Philton Telemarque, preaches for Churches of Christ in Limbé and Mon Adam and recently conducted a Gospel meeting that resulted in multiple baptisms.

See haitianchristianfoundation.org.

Women in the SWAN sewing program in southern India squeeze together for a graduation photo.

INDIA

SAMALKOT — “Behind every rural woman’s smile hides a story of struggle — child marriage, violence, poverty and broken dreams,” Sonia Madiki said. “From fighting for basic rights to struggling for dignity and safety, women in rural India deal with countless issues that demand attention.”

Madiki and her husband, minister Vijay Madiki, work with the Church of Christ Samalkot in southern India and a network of about 300 congregations. Sonia Madiki oversees SWAN, a program that gives rural, homebound ladies sewing machines and the skills to use them. SWAN recently hosted a graduation ceremony for dozens of women who completed the program.

Gospel tracts in hand, Christians on the island of St. Vincent canvass a neighborhood.

ST. VINCENT AND THE GRENADINES

ARNOS VALE — “Let’s be more evangelistic in 2026.”

That’s the theme for Churches of Christ in this Caribbean nation, said minister Mark Charles.

Recently, members of Churches of Christ near the capital, Kingstown, went into their communities to distribute evangelistic tracts and do open-air preaching. Charles, a bivocational minister who works in the insurance business, seeks support and medical mission teams to assist in the work.

Jeff Abrams shares a meal with 15 new Christians in Zaoporizhzhia, Ukraine.

UKRAINE

Zaporizhzhia — As Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine reaches a grim four-year mark, Christians nonetheless find reason to rejoice.

Jeff Abrams, founder of Rescue Ukraine, visited the Church of Christ in Zaoporizhzhia, near the front lines of the war, and spoke with 15 Christians who were baptized less than a month before his arrival. An additional 15 recent converts were unable to attend the celebration, Abrams said.

Throughout the conflict, Churches of Christ in Ukraine have provided relief items, shelter and Bible studies for their fellow Ukrainians. “Whatever is happening in Zaporizhzhia will hopefully be contagious to the rest of us,” said Abrams, who also asked for prayers for several young Ukrainian ministers who recently were conscripted into military service. See rescueukraine.com.

ZAMBIA

Kalomo — Thayer and Cheryl Salisbury made a long, muddy journey from their home in Eswatini to Namwianga Mission, where Thayer is teaching nursing and education students at George Benson Christian University. Learn about the Salisburys’ African Textbook Ministry at africantextbook.com.

When the team heads back to the hotel, the Salvadorans keep toiling, sometimes until 1 a.m. They sleep at the building site or in a nearby church member’s home, rising at daybreak to start again. Many have taken time away from their paying jobs to be here. Over the course of three days, an empty plot of land becomes a small but sturdy house.

Armando Gámez

For Armando Gámez, longtime minister for a Church of Christ in San Bartolo, these scenes have repeated themselves dozens of times since 2017, when Project Nehemiah began as a simple response to common needs. Gámez saw families in his congregation struggling without adequate shelter, members sleeping in spare bedrooms or makeshift structures, children sharing beds in overcrowded homes.

“There was sadness in knowing that our brothers and sisters need a physical home, and many might never be able to build one,” he said.

Project Nehemiah takes its name from the Old Testament leader who wept when he learned Jerusalem’s walls lay in ruin, leaving God’s people unprotected.

For Gámez, the parallel was clear.

“We wanted them to feel God’s protection,” he said.

Five Churches of Christ in El Salvador — in San Bartolo, Lourdes, Quezaltepeque and Huizúcar — pool monthly offerings until they have enough funds to build a home, approximately $5,000.

“There is a great need, and it is very difficult for a single church here to collect that money due to our economic situation,” Gámez said. Since the congregations began working together in 2017, they have built 20 homes and four church buildings and completed 18 renovation projects, ranging from roof repairs to electrical installations.

Isaías Hernández, a member of the Church of Christ in Lourdes, El Salvador, drills holes for window installation at the Project Nehemiah site in Montepeque. Since 2017, volunteers with Project Nehemiah have built 20 homes and four church buildings, helping fill a critical housing need in the area.

The houses are simple, concrete block structures with metal roofs and electricity but no indoor plumbing. Yet for families who’ve never owned a home, they are life changing.

“Many don’t believe it’s possible,” Gámez said. “One sister cried when she received her keys and said she had never had keys before. Now she has keys to open her own front door — a gift from the Lord.”

Partners in the U.S.

U.S. churches partner in the work, including Gámez’s sponsoring congregation, the Berea Church of Christ in Lebanon, Tenn. Gámez’s son, Erick, preaches alongside his father and works with the San Bartolo youth group. The Southern Hills Church of Christ in Abilene, Texas, supports Erick’s work.

Mission teams, including members of Southern Hills and employees of Hanner Chevrolet GMC in Baird, Texas, travel to El Salvador to help with construction. One of the church’s elders, Mark Hanner, runs the dealership with his wife, Jana. The couple supports mission efforts around the world.

During their first two trips, volunteers split into teams to build two houses at once. On their most recent visit, the team worked on a building for a congregation that had met for eight years in the minister’s backyard.

The Iglesia de Cristo in San Bartolo.

Southern Hills member Doug Tilman made his first trip with the group — and his first mission trip ever — in 2024.

It was “a very tough and draining few days of manual labor,” he said, but “seeing what we constructed and comparing it to what that family lived in before, I felt an overwhelming sense of happiness for them and pride for what God accomplishes through those that follow him.

“It also showed me that, even with a language barrier, people are people and desire the same basic things in life.”

Seeds planted long ago

Gámez started working at age 7, helping his mother pick coffee beans. He grew up in Zacatecoluca, an hour from San Salvador. His father was an alcoholic who abused his mother.

“I received no love from my parents, and I didn’t know God,” he said. “My life revolved around bad things, and I suffered a lot of physical abuse from those who were supposed to protect me.”

Elizabeth Gámez

He met his future wife, Elizabeth, when he was 9. They lived across the street from each other. By 14, he had fallen in love.

“I didn’t believe in family since I never received love or had a family of my own,” he said, “but God placed this beautiful woman in my heart.”

During El Salvador’s civil war, Gámez emigrated to Los Angeles at 18, crossing Mexico alone. An American family offered to pay for his university studies, but his goal was to return and marry Elizabeth. Two years later, he came back to El Salvador and, through Elizabeth, encountered the church and was baptized.

They married on March 18, 1992.

“Our marriage has been full of blessings,” Armando said. “God rewarded me with a beautiful wife, two wonderful and faithful children and a church that we have seen grow and expand its reach.”

Volunteers with Project Nehemiah work on the construction of a church building in El Salvador.

Elizabeth has taught for 18 years at a school in Lomas de Candelaria, a remote location with no public transportation. Her husband drives her there and back each day, a two-hour round trip. The school is one of the poorest in the region.

“I saw wonderful opportunities to show love through my gift as a teacher,” Elizabeth said of why she chose it.

Many of her students walk long distances to get to school. Some live in homes without electricity, and must study by candlelight.

“Yet despite everything,” she said, “the children are happy, motivated and eager to learn and move forward.”

A couple of years ago, Elizabeth discovered that the mother of one of her students, a girl named Helen, had gone to prison. Helen’s family had almost nothing, so Elizabeth asked her son, Erick, about helping them. Erick told Southern Hills member Bobby Lawson, who was leading a mission trip at the time. Team members chipped in, and soon Helen had a bed, sheets, pillows, cushions and pajamas.

“It was a beautiful and unforgettable day for her and for me as well,” Elizabeth said.

Elizabeth has identified other students living in similar situations.

The church provides shoes and backpacks so children don’t have to carry their schoolwork in plastic bags. Southern Hills, working with Abilene-based Global Samaritan Resources, recently sent a shipment of 120 backpacks filled with school supplies for Elizabeth to distribute.

Erick Gámez studied ministry at Baxter Institute in Honduras.

“My father began the journey and planted the seed. I am preparing the way and building upon it. The fruits will probably be seen by the next generation.”

“My father began the journey and planted the seed,” he said. “I am preparing the way and building upon it. The fruits will probably be seen by the next generation.”

Erick’s wife, Gabriela, a native of Honduras, recently completed Baxter’s online program. She oversees a ministry for young women. Erick’s younger brother, David Enrique, is a transportation supervisor for a TV station. He and his wife, Stefany, who has a background in business administration, help with children’s ministry and church finances.

An unexpected reunion

Armando and Elizabeth Gámez also helped raise Ricardo Fuentes, who grew up in a family of six and received assistance from Christian Relief Fund, a child-sponsorship and development program associated with Churches of Christ. The assistance helped him finish high school and earn a degree from the University of El Salvador. His father died from kidney failure one month before Fuentes’ graduation.

Fuentes taught English for seven years before he moved to Honduras to study at the Baxter Institute. There, he said, “My faith grew, my character was strengthened, and I found my true calling in serving the Lord.”

Carlos and Sara Garcia and their sons, Dylan, 5, and Daniel, 18 months, in front of the house they received from Project Nehemiah in 2024. Garcia is the preacher for the Church of Christ in El Triunfo.

In 2024, Fuentes was surprised to learn that the man receiving one of the homes built by the mission team was Carlos Garcia, a childhood friend he hadn’t seen in years. Both received scholarships from Christian Relief Fund and took computer classes together.

Garcia, now minister for the Church of Christ in nearby El Triunfo, received the keys with his mother, Antonia, standing by. Antonia had watched workers with Project Nehemiah build houses the year before and asked Erick Gámez to consider Garcia’s family. She prayed fervently that her son would be chosen and was in tears when he received the keys.

Volunteers work on the construction of a house in El Triunfo, El Salvador.

A year later, Garcia joined the Texas team as they worked at the church building construction site. He shared photos of his wife and two sons, now 5 and 1.

“My children are very happy in the house,” he told the team. “My wife spends a lot of time taking care of it. She has a garden, so there are flowers all over the place.

“Maybe we don’t have a palace, but the house looks like a palace to us.”

ROBIN SAYLOR is a freelance journalist based in Abilene, Texas, and the editor of Authentic Texas magazine. A member of the Southern Hills Church of Christ, she is an avid traveler who enjoys telling stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

Standing on the observation deck at Aegibong Peace Ecopark, holding cups of coffee from the brand new Starbucks behind them, visitors gaze across the Han River to the rolling hills of the world’s most isolated, enigmatic and repressive state.

North Korea’s “Peace Village” stands across the Han River from Aegibong Peace Ecopark near Gimpo, South Korea.

Through digital binoculars they peer into North Korea’s “Peace Village,” a set of nondescript, multilevel buildings. There, a woman beats sheaves of rice on a stone threshing floor. A man in gray work clothes rides a bike past monuments to the North’s deceased leaders, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.

“Propaganda Village,” South Koreans call it.

South Koreans stop by the DMZ Starbucks as they gaze into North Korea at Aegibong Peace Ecopark.

The South Korean military started allowing visitors here only recently, says Sang Yang, who preaches for Churches of Christ in the capital, Seoul, and across the nation of 52 million. His parents fled from the North during the Korean War, a brutal conflict that claimed 2.5 million lives between 1950 and 1953. He grew up in the countryside and came to Seoul at age 16 with the equivalent of $5 in his pocket. He got a job ironing shirts at a laundromat in the city’s business district, Gangnam, and slept under a table there at night.

Sang Yang

By the light of a kerosene lamp, Yang studied lessons from the Bible Correspondence Center, or BCC, a ministry of Churches of Christ. Bill Ramsay, an American who served in the Korean War as an Air Force radio mechanic, launched the center in 1964. Yang was student No. 61,873.

Ramsay baptized him in a bathtub.

Now Yang, 66, directs the BCC, which includes in-person and online ministry courses. The center occupies a four-story building in the heart of Seoul, which also serves as the meeting place for a small Church of Christ.

For Yang, Aegibong is more than a tourist attraction. Looking across the river, he repeats words he’s said many times. “My relatives are right there. And I don’t know if they’re alive or dead.”

This is part of series on the struggle toward divine reconciliation. Read more here.

The park takes its name from the legend of Aegi, a woman in the 17th century who was deeply in love with the governor of North Korea’s Pyongan Province. When China’s Qing dynasty invaded, the governor sent Aegi south and told her to wait for him on an isolated mountain peak. She waited there until her death, and asked to be buried facing her lost love in the north.

Like Aegi, Yang yearns to be reunited with his family in North Korea. More than that, he wants to bring the Good News he found in Seoul to the people of the North, whose government severely restricts Christianity. All that stands in his way is the Korean Demilitarized Zone, 160 miles of razor wire and barricades.

But Yang has a workaround. With a wry smile, he leans close and says, almost in a whisper, “I sneak into North Korea every night.”

The Waterproof Gospel

About an hour south of the sparsely populated Peace Village, the city of Seoul stands as a juggernaut of steel and glass. Billboards flash with ads for Samsung, LG, Hyundai and other multinational corporations, a testament to South Korea’s breakneck development.

“Only God knows how many churches and people there are who truly practice according to the Bible as the Lord’s church.”

Christianity thrives here, too, as testified to by the neon crosses that glow on the sides of skyscrapers. The Yoido Full Gospel Church, one of the world’s largest congregations, has an estimated 1 million members.

Skyscrapers reflect the setting sun as they stand on the banks of the Han River in Seoul, South Korea. The small cross at far right stands atop the meeting place of the Yoido Full Gospel Church.

A recent directory lists about 500 Churches of Christ in South Korea with a combined membership between 15,000 and 20,000. “However,” Yang says, “this is what we are saying based on the names written on the church signboards. Only God knows how many churches and people there are who truly practice according to the Bible as the Lord’s church.”

The number of Christians in North Korea is far more difficult to estimate. North Korea’s ruling ideology “treats religion as an existential threat,” according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, “resulting in the severe persecution of Christians … with punishments including forced labor, imprisonment, torture and execution.”

An estimated 400,000 to 900,000 North Koreans escaped to the South during the war, and about 43,000 more have defected since the armistice of 1953 that established the 160-mile DMZ. Neither side signed a peace treaty, so the two Koreas technically are still at war.

Roh Myung-kwan

Roh Myung-kwan left North Korea during the war years, just like Yang’s parents, and studied at the Bible Correspondence Center. After his baptism, Roh prayed fervently for peace, that the suffering souls in his homeland would find relief — and Jesus.

The Bible Correspondence Center building stands in downtown Seoul.

He and Sang devised the “Waterproof Gospel” project in the early 2010s. Roh financed the printing of 1.2 million copies of the Gospel of Matthew, in Korean, on single, waterproof pages. Church members tied the pages to balloons and checked weather patterns. Whenever the wind blew from south to north, they gathered near the DMZ and released the balloons, with quiet cries of “Hallelujah.”

In 2023, Yang shifted to a newer technology — albeit one that is still more than 100 years old. The minister produces a 60-minute program that travels into North Korea through shortwave radio. Yang partners with World Christian Broadcasting, a ministry launched by Churches of Christ in 1977, to produce the program. Through its transmitter in Anchor Point, Alaska — KNLS (New Life Station) — the ministry sends shortwave broadcasts around the globe in languages including Russian, Chinese and Korean. A second transmitter in Madagascar broadcasts in Arabic, Portuguese and more.

A Church of Christ gathers for Sunday worship in the BCC building in Seoul.

The Korean program includes a cappella worship, Scripture reading and brief devotional messages. Many North Koreans have access to shortwave receivers, which the government uses to send its propaganda programs. Hopefully, Yang says, the people of the North hear the Gospel, too.

Is anybody listening?

“Give me a hint, O Lord. If there are people in North Korea listening, would you give me a hint so that I would not be weary?”

Yang finds himself praying those words a lot. He’s talked with authorities who assure him that his broadcasts are getting through.

“We have received feedback from many countries … from Russia and China, and we have received emails of thanks from Japan, Pakistan, the United States, India and even Ukraine, which is at war.”

“We have received feedback from many countries … from Russia and China, and we have received emails of thanks from Japan, Pakistan, the United States, India and even Ukraine, which is at war.”

Nothing yet from North Korea.

But Yang sees small signs of hope. Before the 2000s, most refugees from North Korea said they had never seen a Bible. Recent studies show that about 8 percent of defectors say they have personally seen or come into contact with a Bible while in the North.

Roh Myung-kwan died in 2021, two years before the Korean broadcasts began. Yang remembers their last conversation, when Roh said, “It seems my days here are not long. I want you to know how happy I am to have met you and studied the Bible.”

@christianchronicle PAJU, SOUTH KOREA — Sang Yang, director of the Bible Correspondence Center in Seoul, visits the grave of Roh Myung-kwan at Gyeongmo Park. Roh, who fled North Korea during the Korean War, and his wife Kim Kyung-soon are buried in a cemetery for North Koreans, with their graves facing the mountains of their homeland across the Korea Demilitarized Zone. Roh was a Christian who dreamed of sharing the Gospel with his homeland. #paju #northkorea #southkorea #churchofchrist ♬ original sound – The Christian Chronicle

After visiting the Aegibong observation deck, Yang drives to Roh’s grave in Donghwa Gyeongmo Park near the town of Paju. There, a cemetery is the final resting place for hundreds of North Koreans separated from their families. Each is buried in a section named after their home province in North Korea. The graves all face the North, just like Aegi’s. In the distance stands a tall pole topped with a cross, lit at night so it can be seen from across the DMZ.

Sang Yang visits the grave of Roh Myung-kwan at Donghwa Gyeongmo Park near Paju, South Korea.

Roh is buried next to his wife. On his tombstone, written in Korean, is Matthew 5:9, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”

“Yes, he was a peacemaker,” Yang says, “and I miss him.”

ERIK TRYGGESTAD is President and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact erik@christianchronicle.org.

Featured photo (above): Konstantin Zhigulin leads his song “My God and King” at the Memorial Road Church of Christ in Oklahoma City.

AMERICAN SAMOA

TAFUNA — Christians in the United States’ southernmost territory learned to conduct one-on-one Bible studies during a House to House School of Evangelism seminar. The Lupelele Church of Christ hosted the event, which included participants from the Mountain Side and the Nu’uuli Churches of Christ.

The school is a ministry of House to House, Heart to Heart, an evangelistic publication based in East Ridge, Tenn. Tagiilima Esene, minister for the Honolulu Church of Christ in Hawaii, introduced the program to American Samoa.

“I truly did not want it to conclude,” said Luaao Soli Jr., minister for the Lupelele church. “There are numerous valuable insights that the church needs to acquire regarding effective soul-winning.”

Tagiilima Esene and Luaao Soli Jr.

CUBA

PALMA SORIANO — A Church of Christ in this small city in southern Cuba experienced 51 baptisms during 2025, minister Bryan Gonzalez said. The congregation works with Gospel Chariot/Gospel Share Missions, a global ministry that trains Christians to disciple and produce self-replicating churches.

RUSSIA

ST. PETERSBURG — The Psalom Project recently celebrated 20 years of congregational music ministry, founder and composer Konstantin Zhigulin said.

“Psalom” is a transliteration of the Russian word for Psalm. The ministry produces hymns — in English and Russian — using biblical texts including “My God and King” based on Psalm 84 and “In the Shadow of Your Wings” based on Psalm 63. The ministry provides videos and sheet music on its website, psalomgroup.ru. The Cole Mill Road Church of Christ in Durham, N.C., collects funds for the work.

“We believe these ancient texts contain a priceless treasure for all time,” Zhigulin said, “and we strive to make them resonate in the musical language of our time, while preserving the traditions of academic musical harmony.”

UKRAINE

TERNOPIL — Ukraine continues to endure “widespread destruction, long power outages and disruptions to water and heating in many cities,” minister Alexander Kolosha said. The circumstances present ministry challenges “far removed from what we would consider a normal life.

“Yet, we have endured, we continue to persevere, and we enter the new year with hope.”

Alexander and Olya Kolosha

Kolosha and his wife, Olya, serve a Church of Christ in Ternopil in western Ukraine, where thousands of Ukrainians have fled during the nearly four-year-old Russian invasion. The couple recently hosted a support session for those displaced from their homes. “This time, more people joined, including both regular participants and newcomers,” Alexander Kolosha said. “Once again, Olya brought positive energy, a friendly atmosphere and heartfelt conversation to the gathering. As usual, the event was accompanied by aromatic tea and treats.”

Featured photo (above): Wedding negotiations commence in the village of Bomet, Kenya.

CÔTE D’IVOIRE

ZOUAN-HOUNIEN — A mission team of 27 women representing nine Churches of Christ in this West African nation conducted a campaign in four villages, resulting in 10 baptisms and two new congregations.

“We were supervised by two local evangelists who baptized those who accepted the Gospel,” said Madeleine Sétin, the wife of a preacher in the city of Soubré. The evangelists will provide teaching and training for the new congregations. Sétin said that 43 people attended the inaugural service of a congregation in the village of Douatoueu.

“Seeing the receptivity to the Gospel in this area, we are planning to go back there in January — with God’s help,” Sétin said. Barry Baggott, a longtime missionary to French-speaking Africa, published Sétin’s report in a recent newsletter.

KENYA

BOMET — In Kenya, marriages begin with commitments of love, promises of faithfulness and a fair bit of bartering.

Recently, members of a Church of Christ in the town of Kericho in western Kenya traveled to Bomet for “wedding negotiations,” including the determination of a dowry price as a young couple from the two towns prepared for their nuptials, said Kevin Koech, a minister in Bomet.

During the gathering “I had the opportunity to share love and the Word of God,” Koech said. “It was truly a blessed moment of fellowship.”

Wedding negotiations commence in the village of Bomet, Kenya.

NIGERIA

UYO — Aside from a few “hair-raising” road trips and a bout of malaria, Dan Goodyear’s 63rd mission trip to Africa was a good one.

After all, the 79-year-old missionary said, the visit to Ghana and Nigeria resulted in 27 baptisms.

Goodyear, a member of the Southwest Church of Christ in Tigard, Ore., has worked in Africa for 31 years. During his most recent trip, he preached and taught the Gospel in rural villages, prisons and schools, including Ghana Bible College in Kumasi, Ghana, and CAO Essien Bible College in Uyo, Nigeria. He also distributed hygiene kits and solar-powered audio players loaded with the Bible and hundreds of hours of Bible lessons.

Dan Goodyear does street preaching in Nigeria.

He taught a graduating class at the Essien college, which takes its name from one of the first Nigerians converted through a correspondence ministry that later became World Bible School. The Southwest church helped to launch the school. Goodyear said that the schools where he taught are partners of Texas-based Sunset International Bible Institute, which also coordinates the solar player distribution project.

“I attended three graduations of (Sunset) partner schools,” Goodyear said. “There were 71 graduates from the schools. This really helps the church to have more men available to preach.

“I believe it was a great trip,” he added, “although it was very tiring, which, I think, means this old body is catching up with me.”

POLAND

WROCLAW — This city in southwestern Poland has known uncertain times. During World War II the city endured Nazi occupation and a siege by Russian forces, which destroyed half of the city and resulted in 18,000 people freezing to death during an attempted evacuation. Eighty years later, 88 Christians from across Europe and locales including the Middle East discussed “God’s Certainty in Uncertain Times,” the theme of the 2025 European Vision Workshop. The annual gathering is a joint venture of Sunset International Bible Institute, Partners in Progress and Healing Hands International.

UKRAINE

MYKOLAIV — Nearly four years since Russia’s full-scale invasion began, Christians continue to meet, pray and study the Bible in this southern Ukrainian city near the front lines.

Sergei Shupishov, a minister in the city of Irpin, near the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, visited a Church of Christ in Mykolaiv recently to bring relief supplies. Shupishov also met with the church’s youths and participated in a time of prayer for a member whose husband recently was mobilized for military service.

“Some meetings took place during sudden power outages,” Shupishov said, “but the congregation continued to study God’s Word even with flashlights. This has become a reminder that the light of Christ does not go out under any circumstances.”

Christians study the Bible in besieged Mykolaiv, Ukraine.

“Although I am a Christian and firmly oppose all forms of war, I cannot deny that my heart feels a sense of hope at the possibility of justice being served in Venezuela,” Yhonatan Parada told The Christian Chronicle Saturday morning, after U.S. forces seized Maduro and his wife. 

Yhonatan Parada stands next to the podium of the Aldea Suyapa Church of Christ in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. He sang with the Baxter Institute choir for the congregation in May 2025 and called it “one of the best experiences Baxter has given me.”

“And it is precisely because of my Christian faith that I do not celebrate the downfall of a person,” Parada said, “but rather the longing for peace, freedom and restoration that is now beginning to awaken in the soul of our people.”

Parada is a fourth-year student at the Baxter Institute, a ministry training school in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, associated with Churches of Christ. He is among the 7.9 million Venezuelans who have left the South American nation in the past decade, amid a failing economy, rising gang violence and political repression. 

The attack follows a months-long campaign by the U.S. against Maduro’s government, which President Donald Trump accuses of narco-terrorism. Since September, U.S. forces have destroyed and seized Venezuelan vessels in the Caribbean Sea. The capture operation, which lasted less than 30 minutes, took place in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas.

“The rest of the country is normal — scared but normal,” Jesús, who ministers for a Church of Christ in Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela, said in an early Saturday message to the Chronicle. The port city is about four hours east of Caracas. For security reasons, the Chronicle is withholding the minister’s full name.

“People are doing their shopping to stay safe at home,” Jesús said. “The brothers and sisters of the church in Caracas are safe, thank God.”

Members of Churches of Christ in the U.S. that support evangelists in Venezuela told the Chronicle that they’re receiving reports of long lines for food and fuel across the country. Some U.S. churches are sending funds to help.

A child in Venezuela’s Cojedes state receives a meal paid for by Churches of Christ during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The note on the child’s box reads, “How are you? I hope you are well in spite of what is happening. Have faith and hope in God.”

As they watch their TVs and social media, Venezuelans see a flood of messages from their country’s government — especially Diosdado Cabello, Venezuela’s interior minister, who Jesús described as “one of the most difficult and hardest-hitting leaders.” Cabello called the capture of Maduro “a criminal, terrorist attack.”

“Continue praying for the situation,” Jesús said. “The tension remains high.”

Churches of Christ have found fertile soil in the oil-rich nation, which had the largest number of congregations and members on the continent in the early 2000s. Then President Hugo Chávez launched what he called a “Bolivarian Revolution,” strengthening government control of Venezuela’s oil industry and implementing social programs to expand access to healthcare and education. Chávez formed partnerships with Cuba and socialist-leaning governments. Oil revenues declined, and scarcity increased.

Chávez died from cancer in 2013, and Maduro became president. Opponents have accused Maduro of vote rigging, and anti-government protests have resulted in deaths and thousands of arrests. Meanwhile, the country’s economic crisis has deepened. Power outages are common. Unemployment and gang violence are on the rise. So is inflation.

In Santiago, Chile, Cici García talks about her exodus from Venezuela during a 2019 interview with The Christian Chronicle. In the middle of her story, she gets a hug from Raúl Fernández, an elder of a Church of Christ in Santiago. Garcia and other Venezuelan refugees were staying in Fernández’s home at the time. “I tell all our daughters, ‘This house doesn’t belong to us; it belongs to God,’” said Susanna Vasoalto, Fernández’s wife. “I can’t replace their moms, but I teach them, I get onto them, I love them all. They are my kids.”

An exodus followed Maduro’s rise to power as Venezuelans poured into neighboring Colombia. A Church of Christ planted in the border city of Cucuta, Colombia, by a team from Great Cities Missions became a ministry of refuge and relief for hungry Venezuelans, the Chronicle reported in 2017. As the Venezuelan diaspora expanded around the globe, Churches of Christ across Latin America, the U.S. and Europe welcomed refugees. In recent years, the Chronicle has visited and profiled ministries serving Venezuelans in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Florida.

Now, expatriate church members anxiously watch the news and wait to receive messages from relatives in their troubled homeland.

“We’ve been talking about it since 3 a.m. when there were a lot of people on TikTok reporting detonations in Caracas,” said Odalis Vásquez, who moved from Venezuela to the Uruguayan capital, Montevideo, in 2015. Vásquez — with her husband, Eduardo, and their two teenage children — worship with a Church of Christ composed of immigrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Peru and other Spanish-speaking nations. 

Eduardo and Odalis Vásquez stand by the first letters of their names on Montevideo’s Rambla, an avenue on the Río de la Plata, in 2024.

The Vásquezes have since heard from their family members in Venezuela, who are safe. 

“There are a lot of mixed emotions,” Odalis said, “Hope that was almost gone came back. Joy of seeing Venezuela free, but frightened for innocent lives that may suffer.”

Evangelist Manuel Herrera, a native of Venezuela, prays after leading the hymn “Èste es el Día” (“This is the Day”) during the Montevideo Church of Christ’s Sunday worship service in 2024.

Gabriel Damalis, a church member in Buenos Aires, Argentina, is watching the news with visiting family members from his native Venezuela.

“Venezuelans are happy and gathering across the globe to celebrate the capture of a person that has caused so much suffering and oppression,” Damalis told the Chronicle. “As Venezuelan Christians, we are often asked how we reconcile the command to love our enemies with the immense relief we feel today. My answer is clear: What we are feeling is not hatred for a man. It is the joy of justice for a nation.

Gabriel Damalis with his wife and daughter in Argentina.

“Reading Proverbs 11:10, it tells us that ‘when the wicked perish, there are shouts of joy.’ This is a public relief that an obstacle to peace has been removed. For years we lived what Proverbs 29:2 describes. The wicked have ruled, and the people have groaned. Today, that groan has started to turn into gratitude. We celebrate because God has heard the cry of the oppressed and has acted as a righteous judge to set a limit on evil.”

Damalis stressed that Maduro’s capture “is not the end of our challenges, but rather the beginning of a long and difficult road toward stabilizing and rebuilding our country.”

In Honduras, Yhonatan Parada echoed those sentiments.

“I celebrate the hope that the weary Venezuelan people are breathing once again, and I rejoice deeply in the experience of faith that many are having who, for years, cried out to God for peace and freedom for our nation,” the ministry student said. “Today, those hearts know that their prayers were not in vain, that God heard their cry and that He continues to work, even when the road seems long.”

Carrying small bags filled with food and medicine, Venezuelans walk across the Tachira River from Cúcuta, Colombia, to San Antonio del Tachira, Venezuela, in 2017.

Parada cited Psalms 34:17, “The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears them; he delivers them from all their troubles.”

“My faith teaches me that God is not indifferent to the suffering of people,” Parada said, “and that justice, peace and hope always find their ultimate source in him.”

A sign in Cucuta, Colombia, points the way to the border crossing into Venezuela.

I’ve spent the last 20 of those with The Christian Chronicle.

The best part: I still love what I do.

My colleagues and I travel across the U.S. and around the globe to report real news that honors God. And you, kind reader, make it all possible. If you’d like to help us keep fulfilling the Chronicle’s mission, it’s easy to donate.

As I reflect back on 2025, here are 10 Sunday church visits on the road (and the related stories) that I’ll remember:

1. Farris Church of Christ in southeastern Oklahoma: 2025 marked the five-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The timing seemed appropriate to tell for the first time the story of my brother-in-law’s miraculous — as our family sees it — survival.

Tod Dillard, second from left, with his wife Tracie, sister Tamie and brother-in-law Bobby at the Farris Church of Christ in southeastern Oklahoma.

While at Farris with my family, I got to witness the baptism of an 80-year-old former Super Bowl champion named Carl McAdams.

2. Winterfest Way Out West in Flagstaff, Ariz.: Worship on this Lord’s Day occurred in a hotel ballroom 150 miles north of Phoenix.

Then — after a weekend spent reporting on the new teen event — I jumped in my rental car to head back to the airport.

A bonus: I interviewed Winterfest entertainer Hoss Ridgeway about his dual role as a preacher and a stand-up comedian.

3. Lincoln Avenue Church of Christ in Pasadena, Calif.: This Southern California congregation helped neighbors and trusted God after wildfires devastated its community.

My experience there prompted me to write about the positive side of reporting on way too many disasters.

Bobby Ross Jr., center, poses for a photo with minister Rodney Davis and his wife, Lejuene, at the Lincoln Avenue Church of Christ in Pasadena, Calif.

4. Arlington Church of Christ in Virginia: I traveled to Washington, D.C., to moderate a panel discussion at the Religion News Association annual meeting.

While in the nation’s capital, I visited the Arlington church and learned about its effort to make the Lord’s Supper more meaningful.

5. Lake Orion Church of Christ in Michigan: A feature on a faith event at a Detroit Tigers game brought me to the Motor City.

While in the area, I caught an Uber to the Lake Orion church and heard B.T. Irwin, the Chronicle’s podcast director and host, preach.

Bobby Ross Jr. watches his favorite team, the Texas Rangers, play the Detroit Tigers at Comerica Park in Detroit.

6. Fifth Ward Church of Christ in Houston: Believe it or not, the deacon who oversees the Fifth Ward church’s visitors ministry is also an NFL head coach.

I interviewed the Houston Texans’ DeMeco Ryans after he preached on a Sunday night. By the way, Ryans’ team is headed to the NFL playoffs for the third straight season.

DeMeco Ryans discusses his faith during an interview with The Christian Chronicle’s Bobby Ross Jr.

7. Northwest Church of Christ in Fort Worth, Texas: Back in January, I wrote a column about the closing of the rural Greenwood Church of Christ near Decatur, Texas, where my father, Bob Ross, preached for almost 23 years.

My parents, Bob and Judy, later placed membership with the Northwest church. I visited that congregation — along with my brother Scott and sister Christy — on Mom’s birthday in June. Preacher Robert Dodson even wished Mom a happy birthday and gave the Chronicle a shoutout from the pulpit.

Bobby Ross Jr. at the Northwest Church of Christ in Fort Worth, Texas, with his father Bob, mother Judy, brother Scott and sister Christy Fichter.

8. Green Bay Church of Christ in Wisconsin: Herald of Truth is working to share the Gospel with the nation’s fast-growing Hispanic population.

I witnessed the ministry’s Mission: Evangelize Spanish America emphasis up close in Green Bay.

9. Midvale Church of Christ in Idaho: Some of the best faith stories can be found off the beaten path.

I traveled to western Idaho to write about a 144-year-old congregation that nearly died — but instead survived and thrived.

10. Chapelle de Fuveau Church of Christ in France: My wife, Tamie, and I worshiped with the French-speaking congregation during a 10-day reporting trip to the Western European nation.

Bobby Ross Jr., with his wife, Tamie, while reporting in La Chapelle au Riboul, France, about 160 miles southwest of Paris.

In France’s second-largest city, the Chapelle de Fuveau church is transforming an abandoned monastery into a Christian outreach center.

I’m excited to see where the news takes me in 2026.

First up: a trip to Nashville, Tenn., on the first weekend of the year. I’ll save the specific details of that story for later, but I can’t wait for you to read it.

If you have ideas for the Chronicle’s coverage in 2026, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

BOBBY ROSS JR. is Editor-in-Chief of The Christian Chronicle. Reach him at bobby@christianchronicle.org.

For the past six years, I’ve enjoyed asking some of the nation’s top religion journalists to share their favorite or most important story from the previous 12 months.

More than 60 of my Godbeat friends — representing a wide variety of secular and faith-based publications — responded to my 2025 survey.

In case you’re curious, here are the picks made by Chronicle journalists:

Elvis Rangel and his children, Hannah and Isaías, share their experience of emigrating from Venezuela only to lose their status and begin searching again for a safe home.

• Cheryl Mann Bacon: Venezuelan family waits, prays and fights its fear, from Abilene, Texas, published April 17.

Read all of Cheryl’s stories.

A Forever His camper arrives at the Karns Church of Christ with his family.

• Calvin Cockrell: A camp where everyone belongs, from Knoxville, Tenn., published Sept. 30.

Read all of Calvin’s stories.

Jack Evans Jr. preaches to the gathering of Christians.

• Hamil R. Harris: Crusade for Christ a blessing in person and online, published Aug. 20.

Read all of Hamil’s stories.

• B.T. Irwin: Lorraine Smith has hand-written cards for almost 7,000 new Christians in two years, aired May 14.

Listen to all of B.T.’s podcasts.

Students watch a boy outside of the Professor Humberto González School Center gate in San Salvador, El Salvador.

• Audrey Jackson: In the land of ‘The Savior,’ Bibles are welcomed, from San Salvador, El Salvador, published July 16.

Read all of Audrey’s stories.

Not Your Average Joe is a nonprofit organization that offers customer-facing meaningful employment for people with disabilities.

• Kenzie James: More than ‘the least of these,’ from Oklahoma City, published Sept. 11.

Read all of Kenzie’s stories.

Tall buildings in the crowded core of downtown Nashville, Tenn., flank the Nashville Church of Christ, formerly the Central Church of Christ.

• Ted Parks: Historic Nashville church building languishes amid lawsuits, from Nashville, Tennessee, published June 5.

Read all of Ted’s stories.

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti speaks outside the U.S. Supreme Court after the oral arguments in U.S. vs. Skrmetti.

• Kenneth Pybus: Christian at center of big case has ‘this sweet spirit,’ published April 23.

Read all of Kenneth’s stories.

The sun sets over the South Walker Church of Christ building.

• Andrew Reneau: A Spanglish church where all are welcome, from Oklahoma City, published Aug. 13.

Read all of Andrew’s stories.

Graffiti and street art adorn an old bobsled track from the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, including a cartoon cat embracing a heart painted the colors of the Ukrainian flag.

• Erik Tryggestad: In Search of Shalom — the struggle toward divine reconciliation, from around the world, series published beginning in August.

Read all of Erik’s stories.

Missionary Craig Young speaks to American mission team members in the century-old chapel of the abandoned Betheline monastery in Marseille, France.

• Bobby Ross Jr. (hey, that’s me!): Faith in France: Exploring spiritual renewal in a secular country, from France, series published in November and December.

Read all of my stories.

Be sure to check out my full column on the best religion journalism of 2025.

BOBBY ROSS JR. is Editor-in-Chief of The Christian Chronicle. Reach him at bobby@christianchronicle.org.

It’s still dark outside in this medieval French city, famous for its Gothic cathedral.

In fact, I’m exploring the sidewalks around the cathedral right now. As I do so, I’m rolling a 50-pound suitcase and toting a lighter computer bag.

Faith in France: Read all the stories in the special series

I’m a bit frazzled because this early-morning walking tour is unplanned. I don’t normally wander about a foreign city — where I don’t speak the language — in the middle of the night. 

At least I have company: My wife, Tamie, is with me and maneuvering an equal amount of luggage.

After a 10-day reporting trip to France, we are flying home on this recent Friday morning. We spent an enjoyable final night in Chartres, about 60 miles southwest of Paris. We arranged for a rideshare driver to take us to the airport.

The view in Chartres, France, as Bobby and Tamie Ross searched for their rideshare driver.

But the old part of town where we stayed is undergoing street repairs. It’s full of roadblocks. Each day new sections are closed, seemingly without warning.

“Hello, I am your driver,” reads the text I received earlier. “I inform you that I have arrived. I am on the main road. I do not know where you are exactly. See you soon.”

Twenty minutes later, we still can’t find him. 

In moments like these in my Christian Chronicle travels, I often ask myself: How in the world did I end up here?

In this case, the answer is easy: Blame Dan Cooper, retired longtime minister for the Pitman Road Church of Christ in Sewell, N.J.

Actually, credit him — because this story has a happy ending, which I’ll explain.

Bobby Ross Jr., with his wife, Tamie, while reporting in La Chapelle au Riboul, France, about 160 miles southwest of Paris.

Earlier this year, Dan told me about the Chapelle de Fuveau Church of Christ in Marseille — in the south of France — buying an abandoned monastery to transform into a community outreach center. He thought this might make a great story, and I agreed. 

In case you missed reading that story on the front page of the Chronicle’s December print edition, be sure to check it out. Also from Marseille: my profile of Algerian immigrants Khaled and Djedjiga Hassani, the former monastery’s caretakers; and my reporter’s notebook feature on the love in many languages I discovered at the Chapelle de Fuveau church.

Bobby Ross Jr., right, interviews missionary Craig Young in Marseille, France.

Journey of a lifetime

Because of her battle with autoimmune diseases, Tamie can’t travel with me often. However, she’s always wanted to visit Europe. 

So persuading her to go along with me to France did not require much effort. We bought her a ticket (with personal funds) and prayed that she’d feel like going.

Even though she broke a foot a few weeks before the trip, I thanked God when the plane took off with her beside me. We flew from Oklahoma City to Atlanta and then all night from Atlanta to Paris before a quick connecting flight to Marseille.

Besides the story Dan suggested, Erik Tryggestad, the Chronicle’s president and CEO and roving international correspondent, told me about Jerry and Zoobi Jones buying an old convent school in northwestern France. 

Their dream: to open a Christian university serving members of Churches of Christ in Europe.

The Joneses’ place in the sleepy village of La Chapelle Au Riboul is about 600 miles from Marseille. So midway through our trip, Tamie and I rode a train to Paris and then caught another train to Le Mans, where Jerry picked us up. 

That leg of our trip turned into a challenging episode itself as we got lost in the Paris subway system. We found ourselves lugging our bags up and down steep concrete staircases. And did I mention that Tamie broke her foot before this trip?

Fortunately, a few nice French people along the way helped us find the right station — with no time to spare. 

And we had a wonderful time visiting with the Joneses and hearing their story, which the Chronicle published this week. After our time there, Jerry drove us back to Le Mans. We boarded one more train and made our way to Chartres for a bit of rest and sightseeing.

Also online today: my profile of Sherry Pogue, who bought a small castle in eastern France to launch a ministry serving missionaries; and my interview with Arlin Hendrix, who is celebrating 50 years as a missionary to France. We didn’t get to visit Pogue or Hendrix in person, but I enjoyed talking to both of them.

Read the entire series from France at this link.

Dan Cooper visits with Tamie Ross at the Chapelle de Fuveau church in Marseille.

Tamie Ross rides a train from Le Mans to Chartres during the trip to France. If she looks tired, she was.

Exhausted and exhilarated

Oh, I should finish the Chartres story.

Just as Tamie and I worry that we’ll never find our driver, he shares his location. He’s parked only a few minutes away. Whew!

“Please stay put,” I text, hoping my English translates. “On our way.”

When we catch up with him, he’s friendly. He places our luggage in the trunk. We slide into the back seat.

I doze off on the hour-long ride to the airport. But Tamie stays wide awake and holds on for dear life. Zigging and zagging along a major highway, she prays as the driver exceeds 100 mph. 

Thankfully, he delivers us in time to make our flight. Which is promptly delayed.

Tamie Ross explores an old Catholic church in La Chapelle Au Riboul, France.

But eventually, we take off.

Exactly 24 hours after searching for our driver, we walk in our front door in Oklahoma City. It’s 9:45 p.m. in our time zone. 

We are exhausted. We are exhilarated. We won’t soon forget our adventure in France.

BOBBY ROSS JR. is Editor-in-Chief of The Christian Chronicle. He traveled to France to report this special series. Reach him at bobby@christianchronicle.org.

It’s a small castle, the American Christian emphasizes.

In 2016, Pogue and her late husband, Alan, acquired the 6,000-square-foot Château Claire Fontaine — with four levels and 12 bedrooms — to launch the Restored & Renewed Ministry. Château is the French word for castle.

Faith in France: Read all the stories in the special series

“It has a tower and everything,” Pogue, 69, said of the residence, which originally served as a Paris mayor’s country getaway in eastern France. “We jokingly say that it’s more shabby chic, but it’s very habitable.”

Built in 1870, the château in a 75-person village now welcomes Christian missionaries and their families from around the world. They stay for free and enjoy rest and restoration. 

“Our goal is to keep missionaries on the field,” said Pogue, who works alongside two life coaches and a poodle named Teddy. “In all of the world, our missionaries are burning out.

Sherry Pogue at Château Claire Fontaine, the small castle she bought in eastern France.

“They are not all Church of Christ,” she added. “We decided we could not limit it that way for a lot of reasons. Once you’re outside the Bible Belt, you realize that if you find people who are actually following Jesus and loving Jesus and telling others about Jesus, you have to encourage them.”

Especially for larger missionary families, any kind of vacation can be extremely expensive, Pogue said.

“So we have the facilities,” she said. “We have almost 2 acres, and we’re out in this beautiful rolling hills place, so there’s biking and walking and hiking.”

Sue Foster, a missionary for 17 years with the Ghent Church of Christ, a Flemish- and English-speaking congregation in Belgium, praises Pogue and the Restored & Renewed Ministry.

They have “been a tremendous blessing to a great many missionaries around the world, including myself!!” Foster said in a Facebook message. 

“Sherry provides personalized rest and counseling services, if requested, to each missionary who crosses her threshold,” added the newlywed, who is transitioning to a new role as an elementary school religion teacher. “It can be difficult, at times, for missionaries to find a ‘safe space’ where they can just relax and pour out their hearts.”

“It can be difficult, at times, for missionaries to find a ‘safe space’ where they can just relax and pour out their hearts.”

Luk Brazle, a fellow missionary in Ghent, describes the “peace and quiet of Sherry’s place” as a welcome relief.

“A place where we could sleep, be cooked for and nothing was expected of us was healing,” Brazle wrote. “My wife Holly’s favorite part was the peaceful village setting and that she was not expected to be social.”

His children formed an easy bond with a missionary family visiting from Africa.

“It was fun to watch Third Culture Kids connect so easily,” Brazle said.

A view from Château Claire Fontaine, the small castle Sherry Pogue bought in eastern France.

‘God was obviously directing it’

Pogue earned master’s degrees in educational administration and counseling from Harding University in Searcy, Ark. Before moving to France, she spent her career as a teacher, principal and counselor at K-12 Christian schools, including Central Arkansas Christian.

The mother of three and grandmother of eight became interested in international missions when her husband served on the ministry staff of the Levy Church of Christ in North Little Rock, Ark. — now one of the Restored & Renewed Ministry’s supporters.

“Being on the missions committee is really what made me aware that we don’t always do a good job taking care of our missionaries,” Pogue said. “So I just started asking questions and observing and asking more questions. At the same time, I was training to become a counselor.”

“Being on the missions committee is really what made me aware that we don’t always do a good job taking care of our missionaries.”

Along the way, God gave her a vision, she said, for the ministry she founded in this Western European nation.

It just so happened that she started taking French classes in junior high.

She kept studying the language in high school and as an undergraduate elementary education student at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Okla.

“It’s one of those things,” Pogue said, “where you can look back and say that God was obviously directing it.

“I’m certainly not fluent,” she added. “I’m becoming far more fluent in words I didn’t want to know, like plumbing and electricity. But I now have my 10-year visa, so I’m considered a permanent resident here in France.”

The table at Château Claire Fontaine is set for a Thanksgiving dinner with missionaries from Guatemala, Morocco and Germany.

‘Hey, there is hope for France’

Like most villages in France, the one where Pogue lives has an old Catholic church. But like a lot of worship places in this secular nation, it’s mostly closed. It has no priest. 

The government took over the church during the French Revolution, so the local mayor controls who can use it. For several years, Pogue has helped organize a community Christmas service there.

And multiple times, the village has welcomed French students from Harding to sing at the church during annual summer tours of French-speaking Europe.

French students from Harding University in Searcy, Ark., sing in an old Catholic church in a village in eastern France.

“We had over 100 people each time that came,” said Robert McCready, who has taught French at Harding for 25 years. “We would talk about the Lord between songs. … Then they would make desserts and other things and stay and talk to us for an hour or two afterwards.

“It was very encouraging, even to the point where two years ago the mayor made me an honorary citizen of the community,” added McCready, a 20-year missionary to France before becoming a professor. “They’re very simple people but very sweet. And it tells you, ‘Hey, there is hope for France.’”

“They’re very simple people but very sweet. And it tells you, ‘Hey, there is hope for France.’”

For her part, Pogue worships each Sunday with whoever happens to be visiting.

“It’s sometimes right here at the castle,” Pogue said. “And sometimes, if the weather is gorgeous, we meet up at the 11th century fortress ruins, literally at the top of my street. 

“It’s different people every Sunday,” she added. “There is not a Church of Christ within three hours of me in any direction.”

BOBBY ROSS JR. is Editor-in-Chief of The Christian Chronicle. He traveled to France to report this special series. Reach him at bobby@christianchronicle.org.

 Hendrix, 78, and his wife, Judy, moved to Lyon, about 250 miles southeast of Paris, in 1975. They came to teach anyone who’d listen about simple, Bible-based Christianity.

After Judy died of cancer in 1988, Hendrix later married Pamela Whitesell, who has served alongside him ever since.

Faith in France: Read all the stories in the special series

“This feels like a tremendous run and an example of faithfulness in a context that can be really challenging,” said Bob Turner, lead minister for the White Station Church of Christ in Memphis, Tenn., Arlin and Pamela’s sponsoring congregation.

Before going to France, Arlin earned a bachelor’s degree in Bible at Harding University in Searcy, Ark., and a master’s degree in Christian doctrine at Harding School of Theology in Memphis.

The Christian Chronicle talked to Arlin about his half-century of service in France’s third-largest city. Lyon, with a population of about 520,000, encompasses a metro area of 1.8 million. 

These highlights from the interview have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity:

Missionaries Arlin and Pamela Hendrix on their terrace in France.

On becoming a Christian

“I grew up in California in a Christian family. I was in a period of rebellion in my teen years. At 17 — at a Bible camp, so I’m very hip on Bible camps — I was baptized.

“That’s when I decided to give up my plans to be a veterinarian and become a missionary. 

“I’ll put it this way: When I was converted, I wanted to serve.”

On what has kept him in Lyon so long

“In preparing for mission work, I had Philip Slate as a professor at the grad school. He was my mentor in many ways. And then there was Winfred Wright, who was my French teacher at Harding and had been a missionary in France.

“The two of them both encouraged long-term mission work. Whereas in my studies of mission history in Europe, many times the workers were here for a period of time and then left after five, 10 or 15 years. I just decided that I’d like to plan on making this a lifetime commitment. 

“When we were raising support and trying to find a sponsor, people asked us, ‘How long do you plan to stay?’ I said, ‘Well, probably a lifetime, if it’s possible.’ So that’s where we are.”

Ekel Jean teaches a Sunday morning Bible class for the Lyon Church of Christ in 2014.

On his congregation’s fluctuating numbers

“At the Lyon Church of Christ, we’re down. We had several families move recently. And we’ve had a lot of young adults that are students or workers who have moved. So we’re at about 20 right now, whereas in the past we’ve been in attendance up as high as 80.

“We are an international city with over 190,000 students. So we have lots of students, and a number of them have been taught and baptized and returned to their countries.

“And a lot of businesses are trying to move out of Paris into other cities, and they move here. So we get a lot of businesspeople, Christians coming from the States or otherwise, that come here.”

On the difficulty winning souls in secular France

“One of the questions people have asked us over the years is, ‘Why not go to a more fertile field? Why stay in Europe?’ And my response to that is, ‘I think we need to be here for a time when something will change.’  

“France is in a crisis right now (with political upheaval at the national level). And our prayers over the years have always been, ‘Father, whatever it takes to turn people to you, may it happen.’

Arlin Hendrix strolls through the ruins of the Amphitheater of the Three Gauls in Lyon.

“I teach the same message here in Lyon that I do on mission trips to Africa or the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe or the French-speaking island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. But the same message gets a much larger response in those countries than here.

“So even though we’re not getting a lot of growth here, there is growth in other places.”

Members of the Lyon Church of Christ fill their plates at an after-church potluck in 2014.

On his desire for a spiritual awakening in France

“That’s a constant prayer. That’s not just us. All the different congregations pray that.

“Of course there’s a lot of immigration. There’s a lot of crossroads of nationalities and races and so forth. 

“We pray for the French because a lot of times the people from other countries are more receptive than the French people.”

On welcoming a special guest next summer

“Our granddaughter Judy Johnston, who is a 19-year-old student at Harding, is coming to France as an apprentice missionary next summer. She’s a nursing major, and she’s got a heart for serving, so we’re looking forward to that.

“She’s coming with a campaign group first of all, and then she’ll spend eight to 10 weeks, we hope, working with the congregations in Colmar, Marseille and Lyon and with the Bible camp (at Centre Bonnefoi).

“We just got a message that she’s recruited a young lady to come with her, and they’ll both be in Harding French professor Robert McCready’s group (which makes an annual tour of French-speaking Europe).”

An aerial view of Lyon, France.

On bringing new missionaries to Lyon

“Pamela and I are alone right now, as far as full-time workers, and I’m not getting any younger. We would really like to recruit full-time workers for the congregation.

“We’re looking for a couple or two couples or individuals. We’re looking for Christians who speak French and will make at least a five-year commitment.”

BOBBY ROSS JR. is Editor-in-Chief of The Christian Chronicle. He traveled to France to report this special series. Reach him at bobby@christianchronicle.org.

But his British wife, Zoobi Jones, gave a quick, succinct reply to his suggestion that the couple use their savings to buy La Maison de Perrine — “The House of Perrine” in English.

“No,” she said.

Undeterred, Jerry — a longtime minister for Churches of Christ in England and California — brought God into the conversation.

“Don’t you think we should pray about it?” he asked.

Faith in France: Read all the stories in the special series

How could she say no to that?

“We did pray,” Zoobi recalled in an interview with The Christian Chronicle. 

“And I was saying, ‘Please, Lord, don’t let this happen.’ And he was saying, ‘Please, Lord, if it’s your will, let this happen.’”

This wasn’t the first time the Joneses found themselves on different pages.

Zoobi and Jerry Jones in the courtyard of La Maison de Perrine in La Chapelle Au Riboul, France.

No ‘free ride’ for the American

Opposites attract.

“He’s the big visionary,” Zoobi, 73, said of her husband of 47 years. “I’m the practical one that nails it down. You need both. It’d be no good if we were both huge dreamers.”

In 1977, the American theology student met the British law graduate — she grew up two doors from future Beatle John Lennon in Liverpool — at England’s Oxford Church of Christ.

“The first Sunday I was there, I walked about 5 miles from outside of Oxford to find the Church of Christ,” said Jerry, now 71. “And she saw me, and I said, ‘Hey, can you give me a ride back?’ She said, ‘I’ve got a lunch appointment, and I can only take you half the way there.’

“It was true,” he added. “But it was also her way of saying, ‘I’m not going to let some smooth American just get a free ride.’”

The couple married the next year.

Caroline is Zoobi’s given name. Her nickname traces back to her childhood affection for Looby Loo, a character on the classic British children’s TV series “Andy Pandy.”

As a girl, Zoobi enjoyed vacation trips that took her family through France. So in 1992, the couple bought a summer farmhouse in northwestern France — about 20 minutes from the former convent they’d later own. 

At the time, Jerry served as the evangelist for the Oxford church. Their three children — Oliver, Bethany and Austin — were all under age 10.

American Jerry Jones ministered for Churches of Christ in England and California for 40 years.

Jerry, who earned degrees from the University of Southern California and Yale University Divinity School and did additional study at the University of Oxford, used extra income from teaching theology courses to pay for the second home.

The farmhouse soon became a place both to make memories with their young family and host Vacation Bible Schools for area children.

“The whole village would show up to see their kids, their neighbors’ kids, their grandkids act out David and Goliath or Daniel and the lion’s den,” Jerry said. 

The path to La Maison de Perrine

In 1995, the Jones family relocated to California.

For two-plus decades, Jerry served in various ministry roles in the Western state. For eight years, he also taught as an adjunct professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu.

Zoobi, meanwhile, chose to teach high school French instead of practice law. She began taking her California students on annual educational trips to the couple’s French farmhouse. Host families familiar with Jerry and Zoobi from VBS opened their homes to the students.

Zoobi Jones in the dining room of La Maison de Perrine in La Chapelle Au Riboul, France.

“As the host families’ children grew up, and they no longer wanted to host people, we had to think, ‘Well, what should we do?’” Zoobi said. “So we thought of buying a place where they could all come.”

That search is how Jerry came across the listing for La Maison de Perrine.

For three centuries, the convent school served as a center of education in La Chapelle Au Riboul, shaping generations of girls in the rural village about 165 miles west of Paris.

The institution took its name from Perrine Thulard, born in 1654. At age 18, she followed her parents’ wishes and married a man named René Thulard.

“She obeyed, as one did in the 17th century, even though she really wanted to lead a life of celibacy as a nun,” Jerry and Zoobi Jones wrote in a brief history of La Maison de Perrine.

When the wealthy René died at 26, his young widow pursued the religious and charitable work she longed to do, caring for the sick and educating girls in the village.

The first school building went up in 1682 but only lasted until 1730, when a fire claimed everything except three arched stone doorways. The following year, the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Evron, the religious community Perrine founded, rebuilt the school. The reconstruction was finished in 1731, four years before Perrine died.

The gravestone for Perrine Thulard, founder of the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Evron, can be seen at La Maison de Perrine in La Chapelle Au Riboul, France.

The French Revolution halted the school’s operations in 1794 when the government seized property and expelled the sisters. According to local historical accounts, two of the order’s members — Françoise Trehet and Jeanne Véron — refused to denounce their faith and were executed by guillotine. The surviving sisters came back in the early 1800s when they regained the property, resuming the work Perrine began.

A 20,000-square-foot quadrangle surrounding a courtyard anchors the property. The main three-story building is a labyrinth of 24 bedrooms, six staircases, multiple classrooms, a large conference room, a chapel, a library, a recreation room, a banquet hall and a dining room. Many, many hallways connect them all.

A nearby four-story building — constructed in 1958 for agricultural studies after the convent school became coed — offers additional space for instruction and living quarters. Another two-story building on the 3-acre site features two classrooms, stables and a garage, and it also encompasses a carriage house. 

Ornamental and vegetable gardens, fruit trees and berry vines frame the property and occasionally provide room for the laying hens to roam.

Chickens provide fresh eggs for La Maison de Perrine in La Chapelle Au Riboul, France.

A perfect fit

Jerry knew La Maison de Perrine would be a perfect fit to house students for Zoobi’s summer school program.

But he had a bigger dream: a new Christian university for members of Churches of Christ in Europe.

Thanks to wise investing by his late father and himself, Jerry said, he had financial resources to devote to such a project. But the amount the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Evron sought was more than Jerry and Zoobi had to spend.

Jerry still wanted to submit a bid. Eventually, Zoobi gave him her blessing — only because she knew the sisters would reject it.

Or she thought she knew.

“Go make your offer,” she told him. “I’ll make dinner, and life will go on.”

When Jerry met with the order’s representative in December 2017, he was informed the sisters had a higher bid.

Then the woman paused.

“I’m thinking, ‘OK, we’re going to do something else with our retirement,’” Jerry said. “And then she said, ‘But because you are Christians … and you are both educators, we choose your offer.’ And, folks, that is a God moment.”

A view outside a back window of La Maison de Perrine in La Chapelle Au Riboul, France.

No more money worries

Jerry and Zoobi declined to disclose the purchase price. 

They took ownership in August 2018 and — with the help of mission groups from the A&M Church of Christ’s Aggies for Christ in College Station, Texas, and the Legacy Church of Christ in North Richland Hills, Texas — began making repairs. 

A new roof for the main building cost $125,000, they said.

“I used to worry about money and stuff like that,” Zoobi said. “I honestly don’t worry about it anymore because I know God’s behind it. And that’s a really relaxing, calming sort of feeling.”

Jerry said that doesn’t mean the Joneses are rich, but rather, “We’re very careful with our money.”

One example: They rely on old cars for transportation.

A plaque in a memorial garden celebrates the 300th anniversary of La Maison de Perrine in 1982.

He drives a 1994 Nissan Sunny with 187,000 miles and no power steering on rural French roads that twist and turn.

“I’m not sure how happy I am about that (lack of power steering),” Jerry joked after picking up a Chronicle writer in Le Mans — a city known for its 24-hour auto race and frequent sightings of fast, expensive cars.

A view inside the library of La Maison de Perrine in La Chapelle Au Riboul, France.

‘Loving restoration’

Seven years of “loving restoration by the current owners with a little help from their friends” — as Zoobi described it — has brought La Maison de Perrine to a point where the Joneses plan to open the Christian university with 26 students in 2026. 

While the property has no debt, the Joneses said, they’ve exhausted their own funds. They need an estimated $400,000 to renovate the former agricultural building.

Even as they prepared to welcome students, the Joneses housed 18 Ukrainian refugees for months after the war with Russia started in 2022. 

Pilgrims on walking journeys through the French countryside often call to inquire about staying the night and are delighted when the couple not only feed and house them but also spend time getting to know them.

Trevor Williams, a longtime minister for Churches of Christ in England, is among those praying for what the Joneses have dubbed the International Institute of Arts and Sciences. (If that name sounds generic, Jerry said he’s hopeful a namesake benefactor will buy into the vision.)

“The Joneses have a dream that can improve the minds and lives of young people,” said Williams, a leader of the Ilkeston Church of Christ in the East Midlands of England.

Neighbors and friends enjoy lunch with the Joneses at La Maison de Perrine in La Chapelle Au Riboul, France.

Like Williams, Sid Walker, an elder of the A&M church, has spent time with the Joneses at La Maison de Perrine, which is just south of the Normandy region and a two-hour drive from the U.S. cemetery where 9,400 World War II soldiers are buried. 

“They not only have the heart and the soul and the vision,” Walker said of Jerry and Zoobi, “but they also have the experience.”

“They not only have the heart and the soul and the vision, but they also have the experience.”

Mary DeMuth, a Texas-based literary agent and author of more than 50 Christian books, visited La Maison de Perrine recently. 

She came away impressed both with the Joneses and the rural setting.

“It definitely feels like village life,” DeMuth said. “You’re not getting, like, the cosmopolitan French experience. It’s definitely more countryside.”

Jerry Jones leads a tour of an old Catholic church across the street from the former convent school in La Chapelle Au Riboul, France.

New life for old school

La Maison de Perrine sits across the street from an aging Catholic church where a roving priest — assigned to multiple parishes because of religion’s decline in France — celebrates Mass each Thursday.

Jerry and Zoobi worship each Sunday in the chapel of the former convent school. The Church of Christ service draws anywhere from eight to 25 guests and neighbors, depending on the time of year.

The Joneses seek recently retired Christian professors or those on sabbatical to donate time to the new school. They expect to charge about $12,000 per year in tuition and fees. 

The chapel at La Maison de Perrine where Jerry and Zoobi Jones worship with guests and neighbors each Sunday.

And they’d love to hire a full-time president with extensive Christian higher education experience to oversee the university, which will offer studies in English but teach French to every student.

The school will offer courses in literature, languages, history, business, education and Bible, according to Jerry. As is typical with French universities, the institution will award a three-year undergraduate degree known in France as a “licence.” Jerry has had preliminary discussions about accreditation with an education ministry official. 

An avid sports fan, Jerry also intends to incorporate athletics into the program. After all, he coached American football at Oxford for four years.

“We never lost to Cambridge, so I am legendary at Oxford,” he joked.

If young men and women meet and fall in love — as tends to happen at Christian universities — he and Zoobi are cool with that, too.

But their biggest goal is this: training students who can return to their home congregations in the more than 40 European countries and help lead the work of Churches of Christ.

“Atheism and secularism and materialism have gone so far in Europe that we need to have really well-educated members,” Jerry said. 

Regardless of each student’s field of study, he said, “They’ll be able to teach a Bible class at their church. So when they go back to Switzerland or head off to Ireland, they’ll be able to say to the preacher, ‘I’m going to give you a break. You can take the next six weeks off, and I’m going to teach on Philippians.’”

Convent school founder Perrine’s spiritual testament was “to preserve charity, simplicity, unity and humility.”

Three centuries later, the Joneses pray that they can fulfill God’s mission in their own lives.

Jerry and Zoobi Jones have big plans to turn a former convent school into a Christian university for members of Churches of Christ in Europe.

BOBBY ROSS JR. is Editor-in-Chief of The Christian Chronicle. He traveled to France to report this special series. Reach him at bobby@christianchronicle.org.

How to help

The Joneses are accepting donations to help with the renovation of La Maison de Perrine.

La Maison de Perrine in La Chapelle Au Riboul, France, has a history dating back to the late 1600s.

A few months back, minister Mit Vikraman invited me to this bustling, business-minded city-state in Southeast Asia to celebrate with his congregation, the Moulmein Church of Christ.

The church had paid off a large debt it incurred while reconstructing its building. Its members also were hosting a somewhat-surprise retirement party for my good friend Dave Hogan. (He found out about it, party pooper.)

I asked if they’d let me preach on Sunday during my visit. I was eager to share stories from our new “In Search of Shalom” series about Christians around the globe crossing geographic, ethnic and economic barriers to serve as instruments of peace.

Sure, Mit said. Did I want to pick my own text or follow the lectionary they’ve been using?

“Oh, the lectionary, for sure!” I said, after which I clandestinely turned to my phone and googled, “What is a lectionary?” I learned that it’s basically a list of Scripture readings for each Sunday of the year. If you want to cover a variety of topics in a calendar year, it seems like a good idea.

Erik Tryggestad shares a story about Ukrainian refugees during his sermon.

Or it seemed like a good idea until I saw the Scripture I’d been assigned to go with my sermon on Christian peacebuilding. It was Luke 12:49-56, in which Jesus says, “Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division.”

Too proud and stubborn to renege on my lectionary promise, I started praying and reading.

How can we, as Christ-followers, be peacemakers in a world intent on tearing itself apart when Jesus himself said that following him would create division? Are we called to live in perpetual conflict with all who refuse to believe as we do?

“How can we, as Christ-followers, be peacemakers in a world intent on tearing itself apart when Jesus himself said that following him would create division?”

I was taking an online course called “Introduction to Christian Peacebuilding For Church Leaders” at the time, so I put the question to my fellow students. It’s a free study offered by Peace Catalyst, a nonprofit with connections to Churches of Christ and independent Christian Churches.

My class represented a variety of faith groups working all over the globe — the United Kingdom, Cameroon, Nigeria, even Jordan.

They pointed me to Autherine Lucy, a young woman who disrupted the peace on Feb. 3, 1956, when she enrolled as a graduate student in library science at the University of Alabama. She was the first African American ever admitted to a White public school in the state. The Ku Klux Klan burned crosses nightly on campus. Riots broke out. Lucy feared that the mob would kill her. She locked herself in a room in the university library and prayed for strength.

Autherine Lucy desegregated the University of Alabama.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a sermon about how Lucy “disrupted the peace.” He quoted a sister passage to the one in Luke in which Jesus says, “I come not to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). What Jesus is saying, according to King, is “I come not to bring this peace of escapism, this peace that fails to confront the real issues of life, the peace that makes for stagnant complacency. … Yes, it is true that if the Negro accept his place, accepts exploitation and injustice, there will be peace. But it would be an obnoxious peace.”

The “obnoxious peace” of Jesus’ day was the Pax Romana, a 200-year period known for sustained Roman imperialism, prosperous stability, hegemonic power and relative peace and order. Those who dared disrupt the Roman Peace were nailed to pieces of wood near city entrances to serve as cautionary tales for everyone else.

Many of those who opposed the early church weren’t as concerned about its teachings as they were about its potential to disrupt the Pax Romana. In the city of Ephesus, a silversmith started making problems for Paul and the church because they endangered his idol-making business. A comical shouting match followed as people flooded into the city’s theater — most of them without a clue as to why they were there. (Half of them thought it was about the Cracker Barrel logo.) Finally, the city clerk stepped in and told the people “we are in danger of being charged with rioting” (Acts 19:40).

As the church moved into the Roman capital, so did the disruptions. Roman historian Suetonius wrote about Emperor Claudius, who ruled from A.D. 41 to 54. “Since the Jews were constantly rioting under the leadership of Chrestus, he (Claudius) expelled them from Rome,” Suetonius wrote in “Lives of the Twelve Caesars.”

Members of the Moulmein Church of Christ study a Chinese-language lesson provided by the Alpha ministry.

The historian thought that someone named Chrestus, a common Roman name, was behind the disturbances.

I’m pretty sure he was confusing that name with someone else.

Eventually, the Jews returned to Rome, and they found the church very different from when they left. It was full of Gentile Christians. To help them find common ground Paul wrote them a letter that we now call Romans.

“The peace for which Paul advocates in Romans isn’t merely the absence of conflict. It’s shalom — the deep, abiding peace of equality to which Jesus calls us.”

Emphasizing that point, Paul opens his letter by combining a Greek greeting (charis) with one in Hebrew (shalom) — “grace and peace.”

The peace for which Paul advocates in Romans isn’t merely the absence of conflict. It’s shalom — the deep, abiding peace of equality to which Jesus calls us. It’s a state of wholeness, completeness, wellbeing and flourishing that’s robed in grace and justice. It’s a peace that allows believers to dwell and work together when the world tells them they should be enemies.

But what of this “division” Jesus talks about in Luke 12? Just after these words, he warns that “they will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother.”

I’ve seen this. A few years ago, as refugees from the Middle East flooded from Turkey into Greece and, from there, across Europe, I traveled to Vienna, Austria. I worshiped alongside brothers and sisters who read Farsi-language Bibles. They had left the relative peace of the Islamic Republic of Iran because they had visions of the cross.

Following Christ caused massive disruptions in their lives — and division. One couple had their first child on the way. I asked them if they thought their parents would ever get to meet their grandchild. The wife burst into tears, and I regretted asking the question.

Thankfully, these new Christians had a family of faith there in Vienna, with believers from across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Erik Tryggestad sings hymns alongside Thailand missionary Robert Reagan and church members from across Asia during the “Bricks to Blessings” banquet hosted by the Moulmein Church of Christ.

Jesus is a disturber of the peace — the obnoxious peace of stagnant complacency that accepts injustice and maintains the us-versus-them status quo.

Division from that imperfect peace is a necessary step toward shalom — real peace that passes understanding.

That’s the peace for which I pray.

ERIK TRYGGESTAD is President and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact erik@christianchronicle.org.

And he’s not going anywhere.

Hogan and his wife, Debbie, were guests of honor at a double-purpose celebration hosted by the Moulmein Church of Christ. Church members transformed the basement room they use for Sunday worship into a banquet hall, complete with candles and gold balloons. Christians from across Singapore, a prosperous city state in Southeast Asia, and foreign countries joined the church as it recognized a milestone — the payoff of its $5.6 million facility.

The rebuilt meeting place of the Moulmein Church of Christ stands between a Buddhist temple and a Hindu community center in Singapore.

Hogan, the son of missionaries Gordon and Jane Hogan, grew up in Pakistan and Singapore. He graduated from Four Seas Bible College in Singapore and Harding University in Arkansas. In 1987, he became a minister for the Moulmein Church of Christ in Singapore. Hogan’s family has worked with the church since 1968 when they moved from Pakistan to Singapore.

In its 70-year history, the congregation became known as Southeast Asia’s “giving church.” Moulmein helped to plant five Churches of Christ in Singapore and contributed funds for church buildings in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. The church sponsored mission efforts in Indonesia, Cambodia and the Philippines and trained new generations of Asian church leaders. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Moulmein’s attendance has rebounded to about 110 worshipers per Sunday.

As Dave Hogan, a U.S. citizen, considered stepping back from full-time ministry, he found that Singapore’s stringent immigration laws likely would not allow him to stay. He and Debbie considered moving “home” to America, a country that Dave hadn’t considered to be home since childhood. Instead, he decided to move into full-time work as director of the Academy of Solution-Focused Training, a program he and Debbie co-founded in 2004. Debbie Hogan, who holds licenses with multiple multinational coaching organizations, is the academy’s program director.

Dave Hogan speaks to a group of fathers during a workshop sponsored by Singapore’s Centre for Fathering in 2010.

“We have opportunities to train and equip leaders in schools, universities, government, hospitals and local businesses,” Dave Hogan said. Though his new role is secular, it has “opened far more doors for kingdom service than I ever could have imagined when we first came to serve in 1987,” he said.

The Hogans follow a longstanding tradition of the Moulmein church, whose members have filled a variety of service roles in Singapore, from establishing a “DADs for Life” fathering initiative to serving as chaplains in communities of migrant workers. The church also makes prolific use of its facility, a retrofitted, pre-World War II structure that stands between a Buddhist temple and a Hindu community center. In its humble, three-story facility, the church hosted Vacation Bible Schools and gospel meetings.

Kim Kai Chan listens to a presentation during the “Bricks and Blessings” celebration.

“It was a place of learning, laughter, hospitality and love,” said Kim Kai Chan, administration minister. But by 2015, “there were times when things literally fell from the ceiling.” Unable to bring the building up to code, the congregation opted to tear it down and start over. The result: a five-story facility with nearly twice the square footage of the church’s previous building and housing for guests.

The church met in a nearby hotel during construction and moved into the new facility in 2017. In the midst of the pandemic, the church used its new building to house health care workers, shelter the homeless and provide spaces for returning students to quarantine. “It became a place of healing and hope,” Chan said.

The church raised $4.1 million from its own members for the construction and $1.5 million from other churches and donors abroad. Although Singapore has become one of the wealthiest nations on the globe since World War II, “it would be a mistake if it were thought that the people gave out of their plenty,” Chan said. “The majority of people who contributed … made a lot of sacrifices.”

Mit Vikraman plays Moulmein building trivia with guests.

During the banquet, dubbed “Bricks to Blessings,” youth minister Mit Vikraman wowed attendees with trivia questions about the facility and the church’s fundraising efforts. The church building has a combined 23 sinks, and a combined 470 members, families, friends and sister congregations contributed money to the rebuild. The church received its first donation toward the project on Oct. 13, 2013, and paid off its debt 4,190 days later. The largest contribution was a half-million Singapore dollars. The smallest: $2.

Dave and Debbie Hogan watch a video of Gordon Hogan, recorded just weeks before his death, during the “Bricks and Blessings” celebration.

The celebration was not completely without surprise for Dave Hogan. After a night of dinner, music and trivia, Vikraman played a video tribute to the longtime minister that included testimonials from Christians who were mentored or influenced by Dave and Debbie during their decades of service.

The final testimony came from Dave’s parents, whom Chan had interviewed in Arkansas just a few weeks before Gordon Hogan’s death on July 22 at age 97. Gordon talked about the difficult decision he and Jane made to return to the U.S. When he learned that his son and daughter-in-law wanted to continue the work, “I was happy as I could be,” he said.

To carry on the work, Gordon said, “I can’t think about anything that would be more wonderful than a son.”

Dave Hogan reacts to a video of his late father, Gordon.

ERIK TRYGGESTAD is President and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact erik@christianchronicle.org.

On April 29, 1975, a rocket attack at the air base claimed the lives of U.S. Marines Charles McMahon, 21, and Darwin Lee Judge, 19, the last of the more than 58,200 American soldiers to die in the Vietnam War. The attack rendered the runways useless, so frightened evacuees huddled on building tops, waiting for helicopters to deliver them as Saigon fell.

Fifty years later, crowds of hundreds stand in long lines at the Tan Son Nhat International Airport, waiting to get into the former Saigon, renamed for the communist leader of the northern forces, known to most here as “Uncle Ho.” The visitors come from all over Southeast Asia, Europe and North America to navigate the Can Gio mangrove forest, relax on the beaches of Vung Tau or sip from tall glasses of iced coffee and big bowls of pho.

Hai Huynh

On the other side of the immigration counter, Hai Huynh waits patiently for his guest from The Christian Chronicle to clear customs. The 39-year-old was born in a unified Vietnam, nearly 15 years after the war ended. In school he studied about the occupation of his homeland, first by the French, then by Americans. The war claimed the lives of some 882,000 Vietnamese, including his grandfather and uncle — simple rice farmers who got caught in the crossfire.

The pain of those losses endures, Huynh says, but “it’s all history, the story of the Americans and Vietnamese.”

Huynh grew up in a humble neighborhood in Can Tho, a city in the Mekong Delta about 100 miles southwest of the airport.

The few American visitors he encountered seemed rich, aloof, “high level,” he says. Then his cousin introduced him to “brother Tom.”

Tom Tune

Myles Thomas Tune, who served in the U.S. Navy during the final days of World War II, spent part of the Vietnam War years preaching the Gospel in nearby Hong Kong. He worked a variety of ministry jobs in the States, including a stint as part-owner and business manager of the Chronicle, before returning to the seas in 1979 aboard the Dorcas Sue, a 45-foot sailboat he named after his daughter. He sailed to South America, the Mediterranean and the South Pacific, preaching and planting churches.

He came to Ho Chi Minh City to supervise construction of The Ship of Life, a medical mission boat that would bring healing and hope to impoverished communities along the Mekong River in neighboring Cambodia. Tune met kids from impoverished families who hung around the docks. He found sponsors to pay the children’s school fees and taught Bible lessons to anyone willing to listen. Huynh and several of his family members became part of his ministry, dubbed Tom’s Kids.

“He really loved us, though we were strangers,” says Huynh, who grew up nominally Buddhist. Intrigued, he asked Tune why he was so motivated to help others. The answer: Jesus.

Tune worked closely with Stephane Phomasone, a graduate of Sunset International Bible Institute in Texas whom Tune nicknamed Frenchy. Phomasone served small groups of Christians in Vietnam with support from the West Ark Church of Christ in Fort Smith, Ark. As Tom’s Kids and their families studied the Bible with Tune and Frenchy and were baptized, new Churches of Christ sprang to life in Ho Chi Minh City and Can Tho.

Tom Tune reads Scripture during a church service in Ho Chi Minh City

In 2013, Tune died from heart disease at age 83. His son, Mike Tune, then preacher for the Church of Christ in Falls Church, Va., took up the work.

Tom’s Kids grew up. One earned a business degree and launched an English school. Huynh and his brother learned to preach, training at Four Seas Bible College in Singapore. Now they lead a congregation 60 members strong — and growing.

Following Christ in a communist, predominantly Buddhist nation isn’t easy, Huynh says, but “I have a commitment just to God, and I believe that Tom wants me to continue to take care of the work here.”

‘Triumphs and Tragedies’

From the airport, Huynh and his hired driver wade into a sea of motorbikes amid the afternoon traffic. They pass the War Remnants Museum and its collection of captured and abandoned Huey helicopters and M48 Patton tanks. Massive skyscrapers and construction cranes tower above memorials to the victorious People’s Army of Vietnam. Banners alternating between a single yellow star and the communist hammer and sickle, both on a red field, hang from lampposts next to coffeehouses, 7-Eleven stores and McDonald’s.

A banner over the entrance to the Reunification Palace (formerly the seat of government for South Vietnam) celebrates the April 30, 1975, fall of Saigon, known in Vietnam as Southern Liberation Day.

Churches of Christ existed in southern Vietnam before Tom Tune’s arrival — and the arrival of the People’s Army. Two church members, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Joe Hale and Air Force Staff Sgt. Ken Wilson, were assigned to the U.S. embassy in Saigon in 1962. Missionaries Maurice Hall and Phil Carpenter followed, planting churches in Saigon, Da Nang and small villages in the south.

A Church of Christ in Vietnam retains copies of “Songs that Glorify the Lord,” a hymnal from 1964 produced by Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Wilson. The cover includes text from Colossians 3:16 about “psalms, hymns and spiritual songs.”

Hall and his wife, Marie, traveled to Oklahoma Christian College (now University) in 1963 to recruit Christians to work with a church-sponsored childcare program and the English American Vietnamese International School. Ralph and Gladys Burcham were among the 32 young believers who answered the call. They arrived on a steamy August afternoon in 1966.

Teachers stand outside the American-Vietnamese International School in 1966. They are, from left, Ralph and Gladys Burcham, Arlan Ewing, Paulette Wright, Diane Powell, Gene Conner, Leeica Bruce, Jim and Betty Casey, Patti Alley, Judy Colvin and Phil and Sophie Nhon.

“Some of our friends and loved ones thought I had lost my mind to take a family into a war-torn country,” Ralph Burcham wrote in his memoir, “Vietnam: Triumphs and Tragedies.” “Without a doubt, we believe God called us to share the Good News of Christ with a people who had struggled for so long for political freedom, yet, we believe the inner struggle for every person is for spiritual fulfillment. It is good that God allows us to live a day at a time without knowing what the future holds. Yet we knew, without a doubt, who holds the future!”

Ralph Burcham, second from left, visits a badly wounded soldier at a hospital in Saigon during the Vietnam War.

In the following two years, the team worked with children and studied the Bible with U.S. servicemen and Vietnamese adults. The Tet offensive of 1968 forced them to leave Vietnam. During the chaotic evacuation of 1975, the Burchams helped refugees find safe passage and settle in the U.S.

“We believe God called us to share the Good News of Christ with a people who had struggled for so long for political freedom, yet, we believe the inner struggle for every person is for spiritual fulfillment.”

After the war, many soldiers who fought for the southern Vietnamese army spent time in jail or reeducation camps. Minh Ho was one of the lucky ones. His family, like many in southern Vietnam, was divided during the war years. Some fought for the south, but others fought for the northern army or supported the National Liberation Front, the southern communist guerilla force that American soldiers referred to with the slang term Viet Cong. As a result, Ho avoided incarceration, he says.

Skyscrapers fill the skyline of metropolitan Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam in 2025.

Huynh and the Chronicle visit Ho and his family at their multi-level apartment home in Ho Chi Minh City. Ho, 73 and confined to a wheelchair after a recent traffic accident, shows them the small, tiled-floor room where a small Church of Christ meets. A Vietnamese Christian shared the Gospel with Ho in 1989, and he’s preached ever since. His son, Ho Nha Ca, grew up hearing his dad’s sermons and decided to follow in his footsteps. Nha Ca graduated from a program of Sunset International Bible Institute housed in the building of the Pasir Panjang Church of Christ in Singapore.

In recent years, Vietnam’s government has allowed greater freedom of religion, Huynh says, but winning souls for Christ in the booming metropolis of Ho Chi Minh City is a challenge, and the congregation here is small. The Ho family conducts gospel meetings outside the city and has experienced some success. Jesus’ parables, including the story of the prodigal son, resonate with people here, Nha Ca says. Congregations nearly disappeared during the final years of the war, but now small Churches of Christ exist in Da Nang, Phan Rang, Vũng Tàu and Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi.

The Ho family gathers in a room in their in Ho Chi Minh City home.

“I want to share with people and tell them that God’s the one who knows everything,” Nha Ca says. “We can trust him, and he is the one who leads us to the right way.”

Floods and umbrellas

Before returning to Can Tho, Huynh stops by an apartment complex on the western outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City. It’s a brand-new facility with a pristine, white facade, though the pavement outside bears cracks from the 7.7 magnitude earthquake that struck Myanmar, 1,300 miles from here, in March.

The Bitexco Financial Tower in Ho Chi Minh City, complete with helipad, often is referred to by visitors as “the Avengers tower” due to its resemblance to the fictional Stark Tower in Marvel films.

Two more of Tom’s Kids, Vinh Duong and Nam Nguyen, work with a small Church of Christ that meets here. Mike Tune, now retired from full-time preaching and living in Tennessee, joins them by internet on Sundays to share Bible lessons. The small group of believers praises God quietly, respecting their neighbors.

“I’m Vietnamese, so I understand how the government thinks about churches,” Huynh says. In the past, the leaders of some denominational groups have dealt dishonestly with church members, especially in financial matters. Huynh says he works to be transparent with fellow Vietnamese Christians and respectful of their government.

Duong and Nguyen grew up in poor Catholic families. Tom Tune helped them with school fees and food. They studied God’s Word with Tune and Frenchy.

Vinh Duong and Nam Nguyen

“I knew about the Bible, but we had never read it before,” Duong says as Huynh interprets. “I saw, more and more, the wonderful things in the Bible.”

Sharing the wonders he’s found in Scripture is difficult, he adds. Even in a communist country, the lure of materialism is strong. As Ho Chi Minh City grows, physically and economically, busy city dwellers have less and less time for spiritual matters as they pursue financial gain.

Duong loves Christian evidences — stories from nature that affirm his faith. He’s studied ancient literature and scientific journals that tell of a great flood, a story he knows from Scripture. In a country where monsoons drench the streets for months at a time, the flood narrative resonates, he says.

“If you want the rain, before you do the prayer, you need to bring the umbrella.”

Nguyen’s favorite Bible story is Jesus walking on the water in Matthew 14. When Peter, Jesus’ disciple, attempts to join his master, he becomes distracted by and afraid of the mighty winds and begins to sink. The story shows the importance of faith, Nguyen says, faith that endures decades of occupation, warfare and the peace that follows.

Landmark 81, a 1513-foot skyscraper, towers above the streets of Ho Chi Minh City.

“If you want the rain,” he says, “before you do the prayer, you need to bring the umbrella.”

Prayer has yielded tidal waves of blessings in Vietnam, Huynh says. When people follow Christ’s teachings, they become less anxious about their money, their jobs — all of life’s material concerns.

In a land scarred by decades of conflict, Huynh says, only Jesus can bring peace.

“History happened, (but) we always love people, respect them,” he says. “We don’t keep the past in our heart.”

A sign in Ho Chi Minh City celebrates the 50th anniversary of Vietnam’s unification.

ERIK TRYGGESTAD is President and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact erik@christianchronicle.org.

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Featured photo (above): Mutinta carries her grandson and a supply of infant formula provided by Namwianga Mission.

CAMBODIA

SAMLOUT — Camp Khmer Kindness, a youth camp sponsored by Churches of Christ, yielded 10 baptisms during its latest session, said minister Phanat Ouch. Cambodian Christians raised all of the funds needed to operate the camp. “This is something to celebrate,” Ouch said, “because it’s the first work (during 18 years of my mission here) to be fully funded by Khmer Christians!”

Phanat Ouch stands between two of the young people baptized during Camp Khmer Kindness.

SIERRA LEONE

FREETOWN — Ministers and church members from 10 African countries and the U.S. gathered in this West African capital for the Africans Claiming Africa for Christ conference. “The event featured inspiring lecture sessions, panel discussions, meal fellowships, networking opportunities and sightseeing tours … including the Sierra Leone Peace Museum,” said Mojima Etokudo, a minister in Ukunafun, Nigeria. Nine people were baptized during or soon after the conference, including three police officers who worked at the venue. The next ACAC conference is scheduled for 2027 in South Africa.

Mojima Etokudo, left, presents books to one of the police officers baptized during Africans Claiming Africa for Christ.

SOUTH AFRICA

TAFELKOP — “This was a battlefield,” students at Southern Africa Bible College said of their mission trip to this community 140 miles northeast of Johannesburg, “a battlefield where we had to stand firm for two weeks through the unforgiving rejections, emotional and physical exhaustion, self-doubt, cold mornings, hot afternoons and constant traveling.”

The 12-student team worked with the 150-member Tafelkop Church of Christ, which planted the 50-member Luckau Church of Christ, a congregation that has sent several students to the Bible college. The team did door-to-door evangelism, morning and evening devotionals and workshops on youth ministry, women’s ministry, public speaking and retention of new converts. Team members also spoke on a local radio program. The Makua and Masemola families hosted the students.

The work yielded 23 baptisms, the students reported in the college’s newsletter. “Many congregational leaders were also equipped to minister in their area more effectively.”

ZAMBIA

KALOMO — A grandmother named Mutinta in this southern African nation has a healthy and growing grandson thanks to The Haven, an orphan care ministry overseen by Namwianga Mission, which is associated with Churches of Christ. Mutinta’s daughter died just days after giving birth. “Every time I looked at my grandson I would break down and cry,” she said. “I had no clue how I was going to raise the boy.” In rural Zambia, infant formula is hard to find and too costly for most families.

A doctor at Namwianga Mission told Mutinta about the Milk Fund, a program of The Haven that provides formula to 85 caregivers. Mission staffers also check each baby’s health and growth. Support continues until the babies are ready for solid food.

Mutinta carries her grandson and a supply of infant formula provided by Namwianga Mission.

It’s just one of thousands of decaying religious structures scattered throughout France.

In a society once dominated by Catholicism, people increasingly profess no faith affiliation at all.

Faith in France: Read all the stories in the special series

“When you look across about 200 countries and territories … France is up near China, the Czech Republic and North Korea in the share of people who are unaffiliated and likely atheists,” said Stephanie Kramer, a global religious demography expert for the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C.

Yet on a recent weekday, sunlight streamed through the stained-glass windows of the former monastery’s century-old chapel — as Christians who came to clean up debris, repair vandalism and trim 17 years of tangled brush in the outdoor prayer garden sang praises to God. 

A cappella hymns such as “Sing Hallelujah to the Lord,” “God Is So Good,” and “Unto Thee, O Lord” echoed off the stone walls as members of Churches of Christ — from France, the U.S. and elsewhere — celebrated a new beginning for the Betheline. 

“Father, we are so grateful to be together and praise you in this place,” prayed missionary Craig Young, who has taught the Gospel in this Western European nation for 35 years. “Lord, you were at work to prepare this place for us before we even knew it existed.”

Missionary Craig Young holds up a French/Arabic New Testament as he speaks in the century-old chapel of the abandoned Betheline monastery in Marseille, France.

After seven years of searching for a site to open a Christian outreach center, the Chapelle de Fuveau Church of Christ — a French-speaking congregation launched by American missionaries in 1991 — bought the Betheline for $1.9 million in November 2024.

Three current and former Marseille missionary families — the Dauners, the Hutchinsons and the Youngs — contributed financially to the project, along with other American and European supporters.

“By what we believe to be a miraculous act of God, he kept it for us and gave us the opportunity to purchase it at just the right time,” Craig Young said of the former monastery.

A drone image provides an aerial view of Marseille, France’s second-largest city.

‘It’s God’s timing’

About a 15-minute drive from the Betheline, the Chapelle de Fuveau church worships in a converted auto body shop.

There, the 100-person congregation — a diverse body reflecting Marseille’s status as a Mediterranean melting pot — organizes homework help for children and language lessons for immigrants. 

In a neighborhood split equally between French and Arabic speakers, Muslim women feel comfortable entering the church fellowship hall beside the main auditorium.

“They just walk right in, and they stand there, and they chitchat,” said Katie Young, Craig’s wife and missionary partner. “There’s like a constant welcome at our church. People come in, sit and talk over a cup of coffee and build relationships.”

But limited space prevented the church from expanding small evangelistic endeavors like music and drama classes or starting larger ones like a Christian school and medical clinic.

In recent years, the congregation in southern France looked at “other smaller options” that made sense for boosting community engagement, Katie Young said.

Members and guests visit outside the Chapelle de Fuveau Church of Christ in Marseille, France, before a Sunday morning worship assembly.

But acquiring the Betheline seemed unfathomable: It’s a three-story, 16,000-square-foot structure where an estimated 80 priests lived a half-century ago, producing milk, cheese and vegetables to sell to neighbors and support themselves. 

“God giving us this, it was more than we could ever imagine,” Katie Young said. “I laughed at it really. I thought that it couldn’t be possible. But if it were to be possible, God would do all of it.”

As the missionaries prayed about the idea, the agricultural part of the property sold to a different buyer. A developer kept the monastery itself, holding out hope for permission to demolish the old building and construct a lucrative new apartment complex. 

“God giving us this, it was more than we could ever imagine.”

But concerns arose about France’s second-largest city — with a population of about 870,000 — becoming a concrete jungle and losing its charm. Marseille officials refused to grant a zoning change. 

Eventually, the owner agreed to sell the Betheline to the Christian Service Association, the church’s nonprofit entity. Funding for the purchase came together quickly, although about half of the estimated $800,000 renovation cost still needs to be raised.

“We came along at just the right time,” Craig Young said. “It’s God’s timing.”

A view inside the chapel of the former Betheline monastery in Marseille, France.

‘Why not go to a more fertile field?’

Churches of Christ are tiny in number in France.

In the nation of 68.5 million people, the fellowship counts just a half-dozen known congregations, according to longtime church leaders. Those houses of worship — including two in Paris — comprise roughly 300 total members.

Still, signs of spiritual renewal can be seen in the secular nation — from Jerry and Zoobi Jones buying a former convent school in northwestern France to start a Christian college to Sherry Pogue transforming a small castle in eastern France into a place for missionary rest and restoration.

Geographically, France covers an area not quite the size of Texas, a U.S. state with nearly a quarter million members of Churches of Christ.

“One of the questions people have asked us over the years is, ‘Why not go to a more fertile field? Why stay in Europe?’” said Arlin Hendrix, a missionary for 50 years in Lyon, France’s third-largest city. “And my response to that is, ‘I think we need to be here for a time when something will change.’

“France is in a crisis right now,” he added, referring to the political upheaval and repeated resignations of prime ministers since President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the National Assembly in June 2024. “And our prayers over the years have always been, ‘Father, whatever it takes to turn people to you, may it happen.’”

Max Dauner, a missionary in France for 54 years, worked alongside Hendrix in Lyon before joining the work in Marseille.

Dauner believes the time for change has come. He voices hope for a spiritual awakening in his adopted home country.

“To me, this is historically and symbolically very important,” he said of the Betheline project. “To me, it’s a sign of the rebirth of the Christian faith in France.”

Missionary Craig Young gives instructions to American mission team members working at the former Betheline monastery in Marseille, France.

A spiritual connection

Dan Cooper, retired longtime minister for the Pitman Road Church of Christ in Sewell, N.J., has led short-term mission groups to France since 2007.

In past years, the groups helped with projects at Centre Bonnefoi, a church-owned mountain retreat center — about 160 miles north of Marseille — where Christians operate youth Bible camps. 

While in France, the Americans connect with participants in the Chrétiens en Mission (Christians on Mission) program, a yearlong spiritual internship based in Marseille and known as CEM.

Members and visitors at the Chapelle de Fuveau Church of Christ in Marseille, France, snap photos of a new group of Chrétiens en Mission (Christians on Mission) program interns.

“Since I first learned of this church 25 years ago, the growth has not been rapid by any means, but it’s been slow and steady, genuine,” Cooper said of the Chapelle de Fuveau congregation. “They are not baptizing people just to impress people with records. They are discipling people, and they are reaching the young generation, Muslims, nonpracticing Catholics, atheists. They are reaching across the board.”

With the purchase of the Betheline, the Pitman Road elder organized 25 Christians — representing Churches of Christ in at least seven U.S. states — to work at the site. Among their tasks: demolishing walls, removing fixtures and furniture, taking down paneling and ceiling tiles and cleaning windows that had gone untouched since the monastery’s closing in 2008.

In an email, Craig Young described the team’s work as “the first major step towards impacting lives and generations (we pray!) through the mission of the Betheline Christian Outreach Center.” 

He’s hopeful other groups will follow.

American mission team members Paula Pancoast, Dan Cooper and Shannon Carey help clean up the former Betheline monastery in Marseille, France.

Chapelle de Fuveau church member Patricia Hézard prunes a tree in the prayer garden of the former Betheline monastery in Marseille, France.

Despite theological differences with Catholics, several of the Restoration Movement Christians who traveled to Marseille said they felt a spiritual connection with the priests trained at the monastery.

“I could almost feel the presence of the monks,” said Lois Gerst, a member of the Tabernacle Church of Christ in New Jersey, who worked to restore the garden. “I’m sure they came out here to pray.”

Kathy Ashton, a Pitman Road member, pointed to the sacrifice many priests made as they completed their training and left France to care for needy children in Papua New Guinea.

“We’re working hard, but we’re not sacrificing our whole lives like they did,” Ashton said.

Shannon Carey, a member of the Pioneer Valley Church of Christ in Chicopee, Mass., snapped a picture of old shoes and boots left behind by the clergymen.

“As I was carrying these shoes outside belonging to these precious men who dedicated their whole lives to God, I said, ‘Thank you for your service,’” Carey said.

Dusty shoes and boots left behind by the priests who lived at the Betheline monastery in Marseille, France.

Younger generation ready to serve

Now, a new generation prepares to serve at the Betheline.

“It’s because of 35 years of hard work that we’re starting to see a lot of fruit with this generation,” said Maël Duquesne, a 25-year-old Chapelle de Fuveau member. “It’s because of 35 years of Craig and Katie and Max and (Max’s wife) Prisca planting seeds and watering and working hard.”

Ten children in the congregation under age 5 provide an indication of the preponderance of young families.

A children’s book about the lost sheep is seen in a Sunday school classroom at the Chapelle de Fuveau church in Marseille, France.

Sarah Bingham, 26, who grew up Methodist, first became familiar with the work in Marseille when Diana Hutchinson taught her eighth-grade French class in New Jersey. 

Garth and Diana Hutchinson, Katie Young’s sister, worked as missionaries in Marseille for 19 years. The Hutchinsons returned to the U.S. to care for Diana and Katie’s aging parents.

Ultimately, the seeds Diana planted inspired Bingham to move to France and join the CEM program.

“I decided I wanted to stay in Marseille because I felt that God was speaking to me the most at this church,” Bingham said. “The singing a cappella in French was something I really liked to do, and I ended up getting baptized at the end of that year.”

Bingham is now engaged to Duquesne, who was raised Catholic in northern France, 600 miles from Marseille near the border with Belgium. 

At age 10, he began attending the Harmony Bible Camp at Centre Bonnefoi, which draws children from Christian and non-Christian households alike.

Christians work on the cleanup effort at the abandoned Betheline monastery, which the Chapelle de Fuveau church plans to use as a Christian outreach center.

“I really met Jesus in this camp,” said Duquesne, who later moved to Marseille for the CEM program. 

Duquesne and Bingham plan to marry in Betheline’s chapel next June, if the renovation is far enough along.

Both work in education.

Their prayer: to start a Christian school in the former monastery.

“The idea,” Duquesne said, “is to have something open to the world, just to say, ‘Here, there is light, and there are children who learn about Jesus, who love Jesus. Whoever you are, you can come.’”

Another Chapelle de Fuveau member, Dr. Simon Richard, just finished his general practitioner residency. 

His wife, Anna, works as a midwife.

The Richards’ desire: to open a medical clinic at the Betheline.

“I always pictured myself doing family medicine but as a part of a mission for the church,” he said. “I did not want to have my job, and then on the weekend, I go to the church activities, and they are two separate things. I’ve always wanted to merge them.”

The Chapelle de Fuveau congregation prays on a recent Sunday.

He wants to use his talents in an environment where he can offer spiritual and medical guidance.

As the daughter of missionaries, Hannah Hostetter, 18, has lived in Ghana, Cameroon, the U.S. and France. 

One of five new CEM participants introduced on a recent Sunday, she intends to study engineering after her internship ends.

Chrétiens en Mission (Christians on Mission) interns celebrate with cake featuring the CEM initials. Pictured, from left, are Jon-Emmanuel Zamord, Nathan Dauner, Hannah Hostetter, Rafael Reis and Elie Subarayadu.

Hostetter chose that major, she said, because mission works often need engineers “to create the wells or build the orphanages or organize things.”

“That way I can be like a tent-making missionary,” she said, “like supporting myself but also working for God.”

Talk of the former monastery housing a school and clinic brought an immediate thought to Hostetter.

“Oh, maybe they’ll need an engineer.”

BOBBY ROSS JR. is Editor-in-Chief of The Christian Chronicle. He traveled to France to report this special series. Reach him at bobby@christianchronicle.org.

Missionary Craig Young speaks to an American mission team in the chapel of the former Betheline monastery in Marseille, France.

How to help

The Chapelle de Fuveau church is accepting donations to help with the renovation of the former Betheline monastery.

A view outside the former Betheline monastery in Marseille, France.

At the other end, friends and strangers alike find a “house church.” 

That’s how missionary Craig Young describes the informal welcoming presence of Khaled and Djedjiga Hassani, the former monastery’s caretakers.

Faith in France: Read all the stories in the special series

“The door is always open, the coffee is always hot, and lives are always being touched,” Young said of the immigrant couple’s simple living quarters, where a small needlepoint portrait of Jesus hangs on the wall.

“There’s hospitality as a word,” the missionary added, “and then there’s what they do, which is a different level.”

On a recent morning, the former Muslims served a Kabyle omelet — a sweet, spongy cake made with eggs, flour and baking powder — as they welcomed a small group of visiting American church members.

Khaled and Djedjiga Hassani serve as caretakers for the former Betheline monastery, which is being renovated as a Christian outreach center.

While offering cups of tea and coffee, the hosts invited the guests to drizzle honey on the omelet and spread fig jam — homemade from trees on the Betheline grounds — on bread.

As Marseille’s Chapelle de Fuveau Church of Christ works to transform the dilapidated former monastery into a Christian outreach center, the Hassanis provide a mix of physical labor and spiritual encouragement.

“Khaled is a mechanic,” Young said of his best friend. “His father taught him mechanics in Algeria and taught him how to work on tractors, so now he just works on anything. He could probably do just about anything to a motor with a piece of wire.”

Djedjiga maintains the kitchen, drawing rave reviews for her culinary skills.

At age 8, she started cooking with her grandmother, preparing meals in a tiny casserole pot. Decades later, she has no problem feeding a handful of people — or three dozen.

“I grew up in a big family, so 30 people for us is nothing,” she said through a French interpreter. “I can make enough for them. It’s really not a big deal.”

Djedjiga Hassani enjoys cooking and serving groups large and small.

An answered prayer

As ethnic Berbers, an Indigenous people group in North Africa, Khaled and Djedjiga spoke Kabyle growing up.

An arranged marriage brought the two together a quarter-century ago.

As a young man, Khaled, now 55, served as a soldier in Algeria. He immigrated to France in 2001, a few months after the couple’s wedding. Djedjiga followed him to the Western European nation shortly afterward.

Soon after Khaled’s arrival in Marseille, he met people from the Chapelle de Fuveau church. A dinner invitation and a bowling outing led to him visiting the church and developing relationships with Christians, including missionaries Garth and Diana Hutchinson.

A discussion between Garth and Khaled turned to the differences between Christianity and Islam.

“It was getting a little tense,” Garth said of the conversation before a meal at the Hutchinsons’ home.

An arranged marriage brought Khaled and Djedjiga Hassani together. They consider it a match made in heaven.

Lightening the mood, the missionary told his Muslim friend, “I’m going to pray that one day you preach the Gospel in Algeria.”

Khaled laughed heartily at the suggestion.

For eight years, Khaled wrestled with what to make of Christianity.

If his children wanted to become Christians, he decided, that would be OK.

“But it’s not for me,” he told himself.

Later, he contemplated becoming a Christian but not telling anybody. Or maybe, he thought, he could be a Muslim and a Christian.

“But Jesus says you can’t serve two masters,” he said. “And there’s only one choice. I prayed as a Muslim about my decision to become a Christian.”

Finally, he gave his life to Jesus — despite the rift his conversion caused with extended family.

Khaled thanked the Christians in Marseille for their patience with him.

A small needlepoint portrait of Jesus hangs on the Hassanis’ living room wall.

But he’s far from alone. 

“Any (evangelistic) work in France is a long haul,” Diana Hutchinson said. “It took eight years for Khaled, but it’s just as long for other French people. They’re very suspicious, and they distrust religion. Because of the history of all the religious wars in France, they have a good reason for that.”

After Khaled’s baptism, Djedjiga told her husband, “I’m going to see if this Jesus changes anything.”

“I’m going to see if this Jesus changes anything.”

He changed everything.

“Khaled’s personality, his behavior, his patience all changed,” Djedjiga said. “He learned to listen, and now he has a heart for God.”

Besides needing to see Khaled’s transformation, Djedjiga required a better understanding of the Bible. As her French improved, the sermons she heard made more sense.

Some of the meals made by Djedjiga Hassani during a recent mission trip by American Christians to Marseille, France.

“It took me about 10 years,” she said, “to realize that God is God, Jesus is Jesus, and Jesus is my Savior.”

Two years after Khaled’s immersion, Djedjiga followed him into the baptistery.

Later, Khaled traveled to Algeria for his father’s funeral. While there, he visited a church not far from his village. The minister asked him to preach.

“As I was standing up, I thought about what Garth said,” Khaled said of his missionary friend’s prayer.

Immigrant Khaled Hassani and missionary Craig Young, pictured at the former Betheline monastery in Marseille, France, are best friends.

The meaning of forgiveness

Even as Khaled became a leader in the Chapelle de Fuveau church, his faith journey brought trials.

A decade ago, a car struck the Hassanis’ daughter Lili — the third of their four children — as she walked home from school. 

Then 10, Lili suffered serious injuries and required multiple surgeries.

“See what happens when you leave the Muslim faith,” he remembers some people telling him.

The woman whose inattention caused the collision never apologized. Khaled’s anger burned against her, and he sought compensation from her in a tribunal court.

But when an officer asked Lili in a legal proceeding if she wanted the woman to pay for what she did, the child replied, “I forgive her because I’m a Christian.”

“I forgive her because I’m a Christian.”

A hush fell over the hearing room, and Khaled had to decide quickly whether to continue with the case. 

“I realized I had spent eight years thinking about the decision to be baptized and then another eight years as a Christian,” he said, “but I hadn’t understood forgiveness.”

However, his daughter had.

“I told the officer, ‘You can just write down what she said.’”

Khaled Hassani, trained by his late father as a mechanic, can fix tractors and just about anything with a motor, missionary Craig Young says.

Khaled Hassani speaks at the Chapelle de Fuveau Church of Christ in Marseille, France.

A foundation laid

The Hassanis view their work at the Betheline as a calling.

In the renovation efforts, Djedjiga said, she sees God in action daily.

“It’s as if I’m reading the Bible,” she said, “and it’s happening live in front of me.”

A small group prays in the home of Khaled and Djedjiga Hassani, the former monastery’s caretakers.

As Khaled sees it, the outreach center — aimed at reaching lost souls — will build on a foundation already laid.

“I’m the fruit of a project like this,” he said. “I’m already that person.”

BOBBY ROSS JR. is Editor-in-Chief of The Christian Chronicle. He traveled to France to report this special series. Reach him at bobby@christianchronicle.org.

Melanie van der Vorst, a social worker from the Netherlands, speaks Dutch, English and a bit of German.

But not French.

Faith in France: Read all the stories in the special series

That language barrier presented a slight challenge as van der Vorst, a Christian, looked for a place to worship during a trip to this Western European nation.

The challenge was one, though, that she overcame.

A little internet searching and a phone call preceded van der Vorst’s visit to the Chapelle de Fuveau Church of Christ, the Marseille congregation where I met her on a recent Sunday morning.

Melanie van der Vorst from the Netherlands visited a French-speaking congregation in Marseille, France, on a recent Sunday.

“I work with children with severe behavioral problems and trauma,” she told me, explaining the circumstances that brought her to France. “And one client, she is cycling up a mountain with a team, and I wanted to come to support her.”

Van der Vorst stayed in Mollans-sur-Ouvèze, a village about 90 miles north of Marseille, a seaside port that is France’s second-largest city.

“While being here, I thought, ‘Let’s explore the south of France,’ and I wanted to go to church,” van der Vorst said as we talked at a fellowship meal after worship.

A member of the Eindhoven Church of Christ at home — nearly 700 miles north of Marseille — she was pleased to find a sister congregation in this Mediterranean melting pot.

She called before visiting to see if an English interpretation of the Sunday service might be offered.

Dolores Dauner, wife of Chapelle de Fuveau minister Philippe Dauner, answered the call.

Dolores Dauner grew up in Belgium. Flemish, a dialect of Dutch, is her native language. She also speaks French and English.

“I already saw a video on their website of their singing,” van der Vorst said. “I mean, just as a small church, their singing ability was amazing. Like, it was so well harmonized, and I really appreciate that.”

In the phone call, Dolores Dauner and van der Vorst were able to communicate in Dutch.

Dauner explained that the congregation provides earphones that allow English-speaking guests to follow the Scripture reading, singing, sermon and communion thoughts.

Members and guests visit outside the Chapelle de Fuveau Church of Christ in Marseille, France, before a Sunday morning worship assembly.

“And she knows some people from my church and my region,” van der Vorst said of the immediate connection. “So that was like, yeah, it’s a small world.”

I had the same feeling when meeting van der Vorst.

We, too, know some of the same people — mutual friends in Churches of Christ.

Among them: Paul and Carol Brazle, missionaries in Antwerp, Belgium, with whom I stayed during a 2009 reporting trip.

So van der Vorst got up before sunrise and made the two-hour drive. She arrived early enough to use her drone to snap beautiful photos of Marseille.

I was excited when she shared the images with me.

“Melanie is a lovely young woman,” Carol Brazle told me, “and I am not a bit surprised that she went out of her way to meet with Christians.”

A drone image captured by Melanie van der Vorst shows the Notre Dame de la Garde basilica in Marseille, France.

Trilingual, bilingual or … American?

I traveled to Marseille to report on the Chapelle de Fuveau church’s work to transform an abandoned monastery — one of thousands of decaying religious structures in France — into a Christian outreach center.

Despite three years of high school Spanish, I speak only one language fluently: English.

I’m reminded of this old joke: What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual. Two languages? Bilingual. One language? American.

But time and time again in France, I found myself impressed by those who — unlike me — master multiple languages.

Rafael Reis would like to learn Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic to understand the Bible’s original languages better.

Portuguese is the native language of Rafael Reis, a 26-year-old Brazilian who just started a yearlong mission training internship with the Chapelle de Fuveau church.

In addition, Reis speaks English and a bit of Spanish. He’s working to learn French.

“I love this intercultural (connection) and the language stuff and all. I always like that,” he told me. “One day, I want to learn Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek to understand the Bible better.”

One woman I met, Mila Nataliya Govorukha, is a philologist who actually studies the history of languages.

A Ukrainian refugee and Chapelle de Fuveau member, Govorukha left Kharkiv — close to the Russian border — a few weeks before the war started in 2022.

“My first language is Russian,” Govorukha said. “At some point I had to learn Ukrainian, of course, because I’m Ukrainian, and English because I did missionary work.

“Most of the (missionary) projects were international,” she added. “And I was six years in Bosnia, so I speak Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian. … And now I’m learning French.”

Khaled and Djedjiga Hassani, ethnic Berbers who immigrated to France from Algeria, spoke Kabyle growing up.

The former Muslims, who converted to Christianity in Marseille, can converse in various dialects of Arabic and learned French after moving here.

Khaled understands quite a bit of English, too, but lamented to me that his mastery of my language wasn’t better.

“Your English is much better than my French,” I assured him.

Khaled and Djedjiga Hassani serve as caretakers for the former Betheline monastery, which is being renovated as a Christian outreach center.

A hug and a promise

An American mission team came to help with the monastery renovation project and wanted to show its appreciation to its French-speaking hosts.

So the team enlisted the help of Esther House — the French-born daughter of American missionaries Craig and Katie Young — to learn the French version of the hymn “I Love You With the Love of the Lord.”

The Americans sang it as a thank you on the group’s final work day in Marseille.

American mission team members, from left, Kathy Ashton, Krista Jacoby, Lois Gerst and Dan Cooper practice singing “I Love You with the Love of the Lord” in French

Like me, Krista Jacoby — one of the mission team members — enjoyed meeting Melanie van der Vorst.

Jacoby, who attends the Glen Rock Church of Christ in Pennsylvania, flew 4,000 miles to help with the monastery project.

“I love it,” Jacoby said of the diverse group of people she met in Marseille. “We do tend to think everything’s in English in the world, and everybody should speak that. But it’s fun to come here and see how God’s love pours out in different languages.”

Jacoby, who is learning French, hugged van der Vorst as they said goodbye after the fellowship meal.

The two expect to see each other again, in heaven if not sooner.

“It’s very encouraging to meet Christians from all over the world,” Jacoby told van der Vorst, “and someday we’ll all be together.”

BOBBY ROSS JR. is Editor-in-Chief of The Christian Chronicle. He traveled to France to report this special series. Reach him at bobby@christianchronicle.org.

In the Western European nation of 68.5 million people, the fellowship counts just a half-dozen known congregations, according to longtime church leaders. Those houses of worship comprise roughly 300 total members.

Still, signs of spiritual renewal can be seen in the secular country, which covers a geographic area not quite the size of Texas.

Read all the stories in The Christian Chronicle’s special series:

Missionary Craig Young speaks to American mission team members in the century-old chapel of the abandoned Betheline monastery in Marseille, France.

• In secular France, Christians work to bring new life to old monastery

Missionary characterizes $1.9 million purchase as ‘a miraculous act of God.’

Khaled and Djedjiga Hassani serve as caretakers for the former Betheline monastery, which is being renovated as a Christian outreach center.

• Bonjour! How an Algerian immigrant couple found their calling in France

Members and visitors at the Chapelle de Fuveau Church of Christ in Marseille, France, snap photos of a new group of Chrétiens en Mission (Christians on Mission) program interns.

• Love in many languages

Diverse Christians connect in Mediterranean melting pot.

The chapel at La Maison de Perrine where Jerry and Zoobi Jones worship with guests and neighbors each Sunday.

• A dream for Christian higher education in Europe

Jerry and Zoobi Jones have big plans for an old convent school in France.

The table at Château Claire Fontaine is set for a Thanksgiving dinner with missionaries from Guatemala, Morocco and Germany.

• ‘Shabby chic’ French castle welcomes missionaries for rest and restoration

Ministry started by a grandmother combats burnout on the mission field.

Arlin Hendrix strolls through the ruins of the Amphitheater of the Three Gauls in Lyon, France.

• ‘A lifetime commitment’

A half-century ago, an American missionary moved to France. He came with the intention of staying— and did.

The view in Chartres, France, as Bobby and Tamie Ross searched for their rideshare driver.

• Inside Story: Roadblocks and roller bags

About the journalist

Editor-in-Chief Bobby Ross Jr., with his wife, Tamie, while reporting in La Chapelle au Riboul, France, about 160 miles southwest of Paris.

BOBBY ROSS JR. is Editor-in-Chief of The Christian Chronicle. Since joining the Chronicle in 2005, he has reported from all 50 U.S. states and 20 nations. He writes the Weekend Plug-in column for Religion Unplugged. Reach him at bobby@christianchronicle.org.

The slow-moving storm was the first ever to strike Jamaica as a Category 5 hurricane, with sustained winds of 185 mph.

Carlton Graham, a native of Jamaica, works in his office at the Hindsbury Road Church of Christ in Bridgetown, Barbados.

“They are going to be battered. There’s going to be devastation,” Graham told The Christian Chronicle. “It doesn’t really look good. We can only pray that lives will be spared and that the impact will not be as was projected.”

Graham’s siblings and his father, age 90, live in Jamaica. The family hails from the small town of Faith’s Pen in St. Ann parish. He graduated from the Memphis School of Preaching and returned to Jamaica, where he worked in ministry before moving with his wife to Barbados about two years ago to minister for the Hindsbury Road Church of Christ. 

“It’s not easy” being away from home when disaster strikes, Graham said.

In Jamaica, church members boarded up buildings and barricaded themselves in their homes as Melissa approached.

“Heavy winds, heavy rains, flooded roads, some deaths … and Melissa arrives later today!” Gladwyn Kiddoe wrote in a WhatsApp message from his home in Jamaica’s capital, Kingston.

After Hurricane Beryl in 2024, a member of the Bull Savannah Church of Christ stands outside her destroyed home and speaks with a relief worker from Kingston.

Kiddoe, director of the Jamaica School of Preaching and Biblical Studies International, and fellow Christians coordinated relief efforts after Hurricane Beryl struck Jamaica’s southern coast in late June 2024. The school’s faculty and church members made multiple trips to the hard-hit community of Bull Savanna to help storm survivors rebuild.

Kiddoe and Francis Yorke, deputy director of the preaching school and evangelist for the Braeton Church of Christ, assembled a relief team to serve in the aftermath of Melissa. Ministries associated with Churches of Christ, including Healing Hands International and One Kingdom also plan to respond.

The home of Delgado Francis, the first convert of the Bull Savannah Church of Christ, sustained damage from Hurricane Beryl in 2024.

Christopher Fong participated in the relief efforts after Hurricane Beryl. A native of Jamaica, Fong was completing a master’s in education at Harding University in Searcy, Ark., at the time. As hurricanes intensify and become more frequent in the Caribbean, Churches of Christ should be ready to respond rapidly, build back stronger and show “the church at its best,” Fong said. 

Fong, who lives in Virginia, told the Chronicle he plans to travel to Jamaica as soon as it’s possible.

“We should be there,” Fong said. “The first thing they should see is us.”

For more information about relief efforts, contact Gladwyn Kiddoe at gladwynkiddoe@yahoo.com or Francis Yorke at francis_averell@yahoo.com. Check back with the Chronicle for updates.

Featured photo (above): Bill Warren baptizes Victor Kouakouble in Abidjan.

AUSTRIA

SEEFELD — Nine Muslims, who came to Europe as part of a wave of refugees from the Middle East, traveled from this small village in western Austria to Salzburg to meet with a Church of Christ there. They made the three-hour trip regularly for three months. Recently Bill and Marie-Claire McDonough, who work with the Salzburg congregation, went to Seefeld to launch a Bible study group there.

“We are hoping to show them how they can meet together, using study guides we provide, and continue their study even when we can’t go to be with them,” the McDonoughs said in a recent newsletter for their nonprofit, Partners in Progress. “Please pray for this new effort.” See partnersinprogress.org.

COLOMBIA

MEDELLÍN — A church-planting team in Colombia’s second-largest city recently celebrated its fourth anniversary with songs of praise and baptisms. The four-family team, assembled by Great Cities Missions, moved into a facility near apartments that serve as shelters for people recovering from drug addiction and refugees from neighboring Venezuela.

“By the grace of God, it has been four years of blessing and victories,” church members said in a social media post. See greatcities.org.

Christians worship during a fourth anniversary celebration in Medellín, Colombia.

CÔTE D’IVOIRE (IVORY COAST)

ABIDJAN — Eight workers with Church of Christ Plants traveled to this French-speaking West African nation to work with students in the World English Institute program, which teaches English using Scripture.

About 200 students signed up for a reception with the teachers, but only 51 were able to attend. “The students who did show up traveled for many hours within the city limits just to get to the hotel conference room,” team members said. “All future receptions will be conducted in big city central locations so our students will have easier access to us.”

The team conducted 71 hours of Bible studies, which resulted in two baptisms. The team worked with the II Plateaux Church of Christ, which will conduct follow-up ministry. The Wynne Church of Christ in Arkansas oversees Church of Christ Plants. See churchofchristplants.net.

Bill Warren baptizes Victor Kouakouble in Abidjan.

SWEDEN

STOCKHOLM — A recent community event, “Sweden Proclaims the Name of Jesus,” brought hundreds of Christ-followers to a downtown park in this Scandinavian capital and gave members of the country’s Churches of Christ the chance to talk about “the Lord’s church, the only true church known to mankind,” said church member Gabrielle Opoku.

“There were a lot of interesting encounters, discussions and debates,” said Opoku, who serves alongside her husband, George, in a small Church of Christ in the Stockholm suburb of Åkersberga. “Prayers and participation are appreciated as we continue. … The work is plentiful but the workers are few.”

George Opoku talks about the Gospel during the “Sweden Proclaims the Name of Jesus” event.

“Welcomed by and spoke to this sea of kids … about 500 last night,” Lee Hodges said in a social media post during his visit to Niger in 2022. “Amazing to hear them praising God with all of their hearts.”

Hodges, director of Hope Springs International, planned to see a newly opened health center that the nonprofit constructed near the town of Soura. But the local commuter airline canceled all of its flights from Niger’s capital, Niamey, to an airport close to Soura for the duration of Hodges’ visit in late 2022.

Thankfully, a ministry called Serving in Mission, or SIM, volunteered to “stand in the gap,” Hodges said. An affiliate of SIM, Missionary Flights Global, arranged for a round-trip flight on a small Cessna for Hodges and his African coworkers from Niamey to Maradi, a town close to Soura.

Missionary Flights Global’s plane sits in its hangar in Niamey, Niger, in 2022.

The pilot, Kevin Rideout, “was a true professional,” Hodges recalled. “He was well-known by those on the ground.” 

Nearly three years later, Hodges asked for prayers after learning that Rideout was abducted from his home in Niamey by three armed men on Oct. 21. Rideout, 48, has served in Niger since 2010, providing support for missionaries and humanitarian groups during transportation shutdowns in the landlocked nation.

Kevin Rideout makes preflight checks before transporting a team from Hope Springs International in Niger.

A State Department spokesperson told CBS News that the U.S. Embassy in Niamey is working with local authorities to locate Rideout and secure his release. The embassy also issued a security warning that American citizens “remain at a heightened risk of kidnapping throughout Niger, including the capital city.”

Hodges said, “The security situation (in Niger) has deteriorated significantly since I was there in 2022.” More than 98 percent of Niger’s 27 million people claim Islam as their faith. In 2023, military leaders deposed President Mohamed Bazoum and placed him under house arrest in the presidential palace, which is about 100 yards from the site of Rideout’s abduction, CBS reports. The military leaders cited increased activity among jihadist groups as a reason for removing Bazoum. The military has clashed with armed groups linked to al-Qaeda and ISIL, Al Jazeera reports, and this year Niger has experienced a spate of kidnappings. 

A group of mothers in rural Niger show off the nutritional aids they received from the Jordan Health Center II. In its first year of operation, the center treated more than 6,300 patients — nearly half of them children suffering from malnutrition.

Hope Springs International sponsors projects that provide clean water, education, health care, training in agriculture and micro finance in the African nations of Nigeria and Chad. Hodges and several of the nonprofit’s board members and volunteers worship with NorthField Church in Gallatin, Tenn., a congregation with roots in Churches of Christ.

Farmers in rural Niger show a crop of corn produced through Hope Springs International’s water programs.

In 2021, Ayouba and Sieleide Moussa contacted Hodges about expanding Hope Springs’ work to Niger, which borders Nigeria and Chad. The Moussas founded Amor et Compassion du Christ in 2012 as an outreach to children and teens in Soura. The couple hoped to provide health care to their community of about 16,000 people. Hope Springs raised support to construct the Jordan Health Center II, which opened two months before Hodges’ visit in 2022. Hope Springs also sponsors water well drilling programs in Niger and works closely with Ayouba Moussa’s brother, Zak, who oversees the work.

Thankfully, Hodges said, the wave of abductions and attacks by jihadist groups has not yet affected the Christians in Soura.

Women wait in line to receive treatment at the Jordan Health Center II in Niger.

Fans flooded into Zagreb’s Hippodrome to see singer Marko Perkovic, whose stage name, Thompson, refers to the weapon he used during what people here call the Homeland War — Croatia’s fight for independence from Yugoslavia in the 1990s, which claimed 20,000 lives.

More than half a million people bought tickets for the concert, organizers said, making it the largest paid concert in history — far larger than crowds that came to the Hippodrome to see Metallica, Ed Sheeran and The Rolling Stones in years past.

As Thompson took the stage, lighted drones arranged themselves into images of the Virgin Mary, the cross and the Croatian flag. In his opening number, “Čavoglave Battalion,” the Croatian singer proclaimed “Za dom!” (“For homeland!”). The audience yelled back “Spremni!” (“Ready!”).

Critics note that the phrase originates with the Ustasha, a Croatian nationalist group that became a puppet regime of the Nazis during World War II. But Thompson’s fans say that his music doesn’t promote fascism or animosity toward Serbs, the ethnic group that largely made up the army that fought the Croats during the war. Rather, fans say, Thompson promotes Croatian patriotism and the country’s predominant faith, Catholicism.

Mislav Ilić baptizes a new believer in the bathtub baptistery of a downtown Zagreb apartment.

On that same Saturday, a few miles from the Hippodrome, a much smaller crowd of non-Catholic Christians gathered in an apartment to celebrate their faith as they welcomed a new sister into their family. In an unassuming, caramel-colored bathtub, minister Mislav Ilić immersed one of his Bible students into Christ.

Since the early days of the war, when Zagreb’s first Church of Christ began meeting in the apartment, the bathtub baptistery has birthed hundreds of Christians. Minister Mladen Jovanović — who was himself baptized in a bathtub in 1971 by missionary Bud Pickle — guided the young church through the war years. As the Yugoslav army and Serbian militias seized cities to the east, including Petrinja and Vukovar, the church took in refugees and distributed relief.

Mladen Jovanović stands with his wife, Dragica, after his baptism in 1971. “There was no baptistery or church building, so someone’s large bathtub did the trick,” Dragica wrote in her autobiography, “Our Life Adventure.” “It was a moment of humility for Mladen. At the time, I wasn’t even aware of what was happening, and to some extent, Mladen also wasn’t aware of the significance or weight of that decision.”

After independence, Jovanović became a nationally known leader among evangelical Christians in the new nation. The church moved to a bigger facility on Zagreb’s Kušlanova Street and launched a theology school.

Ilić, Jovanović’s hand-picked successor, became pulpit minister for the Kušlanova Church of Christ after Jovanovic’s death at age 68 in 2013. About two years ago, Ilić stepped down from that role to focus on in-depth, one-on-one Bible studies with Croatians. The Saturday afternoon baptism was the latest fruit of that effort.

@christianchronicle ZAGREB, CROATIA — Goran Medved, an instructor at the Biblical Institute Zagreb, talks about the first baptisms that took place at the apartment meeting place of the first Church of Christ in Croatia. #churchofchrist #baptism #croatia #zagreb #croatianchristian #bathtubbaptism ♬ original sound – The Christian Chronicle

‘Good soil for reconciliation’

Croatia, a C-shaped country with about 3.9 million people, sits at the western edge of the southeastern European region called the Balkans, though many Croats dislike the word. Some Croatians equate it with their old enemies, the Ottomans, and many outsiders associate “the Balkans” with images of warfare and destruction.

Croatia is home to 12 Churches of Christ with a total membership of about 500. Combined, all non-Catholic Christian groups represent less than 1 percent of Croatia’s population.

Ilić, his wife Snježana and the newly baptized believers they serve in Zagreb could become a new congregation. They meet for Sunday worship most weeks, but with the uncertainty of crowds and traffic they decided not to gather in Zagreb the day after the concert.

Mislav Ilić, bottom left, takes a selfie with the growing group of Christians in Zagreb that he and his wife, Snježana (last on right, second row) mentor.

Instead, Mislav Ilić drove a Christian Chronicle reporter to Varaždin, a city about 90 minutes northeast of Zagreb, where a Church of Christ was celebrating the conclusion of its summer youth camps, conducted by the church with assistance from a U.S.-based ministry, Next Generation for Christ. 

When asked about Thompson, Mislav equated the singer with U.S. musicians Bruce Springsteen and Lee Greenwood. At the Varaždin Church of Christ, several Christians echoed Mislav’s sentiments. Most Croatians see Thompson’s music as patriotic — not nationalistic or evocative of the Ustasha regime, they said.

On Sunday morning, preacher Mladen Dominic speaks to members of the Varaždin Church of Christ and the families of children who participated in the church’s youth camps.

Some noted that Thompson’s most ardent fans don’t even live in Croatia. In 2013, Croatia joined the European Union, allowing its citizens to live and work in member states across the continent. Since independence in 1991, Croatia has lost nearly 20 percent of its population due to a declining birth rate and fleeing skilled workers who find high-paying jobs in Ireland, Germany and countries outside the EU. Croatians came to Thompson’s concert from as far away as the U.S., Canada and Australia.

Some church members expressed concern for the nationalistic and religious themes blended into Thompson’s performances. 

Sara Crnčec

“He says some good things about God that I really agree with,” said Sara Crnčec, a member of the Varaždin Church of Christ who served as a translator during the youth camps. “But so many of his songs are based on Catholic beliefs,” she added, and tend to equate Croatian identity with the Catholic Church — in contrast to ethnic Serbs, who mostly are Orthodox.

Evangelical churches, including Churches of Christ, provide “a good soil for reconciliation” among people who tie their ethnic identity to Catholicism or Orthodoxy, said Mislav, an ethnic Croat whose wife, Snježana, is of Serbian descent. Mislav and Snježana’s grandfathers fought on opposite sides during World War II. “So we broke the generational curse,” Mislav said.

Crnčec, 19, grew up hearing stories about the Homeland War, in which her father served. It was a complicated, multifaceted conflict, she said. 

And it’s in the past.

“As a younger generation, we’re trying to put all of those opinions aside and start a new page,” she said. “I’ve met a lot of Serbian people, and they are Christians like me. Their faith is beautiful. … We shouldn’t judge the book by its cover, based on nationality. (We should) really respect our brothers and sisters in Christ.”

“As a younger generation, we’re trying to put all of those opinions aside and start a new page. I’ve met a lot of Serbian people, and they are Christians like me. Their faith is beautiful. … We shouldn’t judge the book by its cover, based on nationality.”

‘We are the bad guys’

If Croatian nationalism is the price of freedom, it may be a price worth paying, Dragica Jovanović said.

“Here, nobody was openly able to talk about faith and religion and God for 30 years,” said the widow of Mladen Jovanović, a pioneer among Churches of Christ in Croatia. She and her husband were baptized and began their ministry when the country was part of communist Yugoslavia. They lived under fear of persecution and arrest by the country’s secret police.

Mladen and Dragica Jovanović in a photo from Dragica’s book, “Our Life Adventure.”

Dragica spoke with the The Christian Chronicle at her home near Lučko, southwest of Zagreb. The frontlines of the Homeland War were 10 kilometers (6 miles) from here.

“I learned to recognize the type of weapons by their sound,” she said. “When they started doing their work, our windows were shaking.”

The terrible conflict had roots reaching back to World War II and earlier, Dragica said. Josip Broz Tito, who led the Yugoslav Partisans against the Axis powers, became the country’s dictator and held its many factions together through Yugoslavia’s years as a nonaligned, socialist republic.

As a result, Croatia never had a national reckoning with its Ustasha past and the ethnic hatred that fueled the regime, Dragica said. After Tito’s death in 1980, ethnic tensions resurfaced, contributing to the wars of the 1990s and the rising tensions now.

Dragica Jovanović in 2025.

“We never solved that problem from 80 years ago,” Dragica said. “Serbians still call us Ustasha. We are the bad guys.” Some Croats still call Serbs Chetniks, referring to Serbian nationalist militias who alternatively fought against and sided with the occupying Axis powers during World War II.

Despite decades of animosity, Christians on both sides of the Homeland War found unity in the midst of conflict, Dragica said. Even as the mortar rounds fell, members of Churches of Christ in Zagreb met with their Serbian counterparts from Belgrade at a wooded park near Baja, a city in neutral Hungary.

“We would have prayers and prayers and prayers,” Dragica said. “And that was so powerful for us, that we understood God’s love and Christian love, no matter what terrible things were going on.” Croats and Serbs may take sides, but “Christians stay on God’s side.”

Sharing the same story

Back in Zagreb, Church of Christ members want new generations of believers to experience the unity demonstrated by Croatian and Serbian Christians during the war years — and to help heal the divisions that contributed to the conflict.

“Reconciliation can only come when two parties really have the same story, the same interpretation of the same event,” said Ervin Budiselić, director of the Biblical Institute of Zagreb. The institute, established in 1999, trains church leaders and publishes resources for congregations. 

Nino Brozinčević, a lecturer in New Testament Greek at the Zagreb Biblical Institute, shows a copy of a Croatian-language New Testament written in Arabic and Cyrillic script.

Budiselić and other faculty members gave the Chronicle a tour of the institute’s facilities, which include classrooms in the Kuslanova Church of Christ building and an expansive theological library housed in two downtown Zagreb apartments — including the first meeting place of the Church of Christ and its bathtub baptistery. 

Over lunch, the institute staffers discussed the resurgent nationalism in their country. Increased civic pride among Croatians could be a good thing, they said, especially if it results in community involvement and charity. But it becomes dangerous if you “start thinking of yourself as much higher than other nations,” Budiselić said.

“I don’t believe that reconciliation can come on the state level,” he added. “But on the micro level, God can really change people’s hearts.”

Ivan Karadža, a minister in Zagreb, shows a copy of “Bratski Vjesnik” (“Brothers’ Newsletter”), a church publication from 1968. The Biblical Institute of Zagreb houses historic church documents in an apartment that once was the meeting place of the city’s first Church of Christ.

Disciple-making — training believers after their baptisms to follow Christ and make new disciples — plays a key role in changing Croatian hearts, Mislav Ilić said. That’s a focus of his work with Bible students in Zagreb. When they meet for worship, they use one of the downtown apartments owned by the Kušlanova church.

“There’s a big table in the middle of the room that we gather around,” Ilić said. “Spiritually and literally, we gather around the table. It is so important for people to share their lives and not just come to sit in rows and watch a performance.” 

Ervin Budiselić

Recently, Budiselić took a team of professors from the Biblical Institute of Zagreb to an evangelical retreat on Croatia’s Dalmatian coast. There, believers from across the Balkans worshiped together in multiple languages — Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian and Roma. The professors conducted workshops of Bible reading.

Evangelical churches in the U.S. often sponsor such gatherings, Budiselić said, but this one was conceived and coordinated by Christians in the Balkans.

“Everybody was so hugely blessed by the fellowship that we can express, regardless of our background and nationalities,” Budiselić said. “And it was … a huge testimony that, across Montenegro, Slovenia, Serbia, all of the countries of the former Yugoslavia, we came together to worship Christ.”

A machine gun can bring half a million people together for a concert, he said, but “only Christ can gather people from many nations.” 

A statue of Josip Jelačić stands in downtown Zagreb. Jelačić was “Ban” (a viceroy and military office) of Croatia from 1848 to 1859. He is remembered for his military campaigns during the revolutions of 1848 and for his abolition of serfdom in Croatia.

The Gros Islet Church of Christ meets in a small building on the leeward side of St. Lucia.

Inside, church members hug each other and take their places on padded folding chairs. Young men carefully place small porcelain sauce bowls — each containing a tiny cup of grape juice and a perfectly round wafer — on silver trays and cover them with lace doilies for the Lord’s Supper.

Preacher Dilian J. Bellot speaks over the sounds of an air conditioner and oscillating fans. He quotes Scripture after Scripture, Old Testament and New, about God’s eternal truth. He references the debate over transgender issues and the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk as he laments the divided state of the world. “At what point did the truth change and no one told me?” he asks. “The scope of truth is universal. Truth is not relative to St. Lucia.”

Dilian Bellot teaches a Sunday morning Bible class on “Worshiping God in Spirit and in Truth.”

More members and visitors arrive as the Bible class ends and worship begins. A 14-year-old, Desean Louis-Fernand, leads a cappella hymns from well-worn song books — “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” “Holy, Holy, Holy” and “Give Me the Bible.”

@christianchronicle GROS ISLET, ST. LUCIA — Members of the Gros Islet Church of Christ and visitors from across the Caribbean and U.S. worship on the Sunday morning before the Botham Jean Foundation’s Red Tie Gala. Desean Louis-Fernand, a 14-year-old cousin of Botham Jean, leads singing. #bothamjeanfoundation #churchofchrist #stlucia #redtiegala ♬ original sound – The Christian Chronicle

His cousin, Botham Jean, used to lead singing for the L’Anse Road Church of Christ, a few miles south of here. Known here as Bo, he was a standout student at St. Mary’s College before he moved to Arkansas and earned an accounting degree at Harding University, which is associated with Churches of Christ. He landed a job with the prestigious PricewaterhouseCoopers firm in Dallas.

When Desean was 6, he visited Bo in Texas with his grandmother, Gloria Charles, and Bo’s mother, Allison Jean. Bo took Desean to his favorite fast food joint, Whataburger, and “taught him how to eat burgers,” Desean’s mother, Desma Charles, recalls with a giggle. Desean looked up to his cousin, who talked about returning to St. Lucia someday.

Desean Louis-Fernand, a 14-year-old cousin of Botham Jean, leads “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” during the Gros Islet Church of Christ’s Sunday worship.

Less than two years after that visit, on Sept. 6, 2018, Botham, 26, was fatally shot by an off-duty Dallas police officer who mistook his apartment for hers. Desean remembers his mother’s screams of agony when she got the phone call from the U.S.

A small boat navigates the waters of Rodney Bay near Pigeon Island in northern St. Lucia.

The family established the Botham Jean Foundation, dedicated to supporting causes that were important to Bo — from providing school funds for at-risk youth to caring for neglected seniors. Since 2018, the nonprofit has hosted an annual Red Tie Gala in the Dallas metro. This year, for the first time, the foundation moved the event to St. Lucia, which brought visitors including Emory and Dianna Kay Tease to the island. Bo led singing at their congregation, the Dallas West Church of Christ, and his death, “it hit us, just ‘Boom!’” says Emory Tease, one of the church’s elders. “We were the focal point. And, man, it was tough.”

The killing of a young Black professional by a White female police officer thrust the church into a glaring media spotlight. But the tragedy also built bridges among Churches of Christ.

Christians who worship with large, predominantly White congregations “had no idea there were so many Black (churches) right there in Dallas,” Emory Tease says. “They said, ‘We didn’t know y’all exist!’” Now Black and White congregations meet quarterly for joint worship services and cooperate in community projects.

That’s Bo’s legacy, Emory says, and it’s brought the couple 2,600 miles — from Dallas to the Caribbean — to celebrate his life.

Emory Tease leads the opening prayer at the Red Tie Gala in St. Lucia.

‘A national tragedy’

The celebration is a few hours later and about 3 miles north of the Gros Islet church building. In a ballroom of the Sandals Grande St. Lucian, the sold-out gala is a sea of red ties, jackets and ball gowns. Couples pose for photos in front of a wall of roses as a duet plays Caribbean-infused pop on a steel drum and electric ukulele — including Wham’s “Careless Whisper” and Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud.”

@christianchronicle GROS ISLET, ST. LUCIA — Chazzi Desriviere (steel pan) and Elmo Norville (ukulele) perform a Caribbean-infused rendition of Wham!’s “Careless Whisper” during the Botham Jean Foundation’s 2025 Red Tie Gala at Sandals Grande St. Lucian. #carelesswhisper #wham! #georgemichael #bothamjeanfoundation #bothamjean ♬ original sound – The Christian Chronicle

Rowan Seon is surprised by the number of people he doesn’t recognize. The retired principal of St. Mary’s, the preeminent boys’ school in St. Lucia, seems to know most of the island’s 180,000 residents. But many came from off-island, due to Bo’s involvement with Churches of Christ in the U.S. and song leading at the annual Caribbean Lectureship.

Cordell John, an elder of the Kings Church of Christ in Brooklyn, N.Y., sits with a contingent from the congregation, where Bo’s sister, Allisa Charles-Findley, and her family worship. Bo led singing for the church during his brief time in New York.

“He devoted his life to the service of the Lord,” says Lystra Johnson, a native of Trinidad and member of the Kings church. She’s thankful that she and her fellow New Yorkers get to experience the island where Bo grew up.

Bertrum Jean, left, and other Red Tie Gala guests speak with Gloria Charles, Botham Jean’s grandmother.

They also learn a few things they didn’t know about Bo from Seon, who began his time as St. Mary’s principal when Bo started attending school there in 2003. Seon remembers looking up from his desk one day to see a student in Form 3 (the equivalent of eighth grade) frantically waving at him from down the hall.

“I want you to come to the classroom now,” the boy told Seon. “There’s no teacher and the classroom is in chaos!”

“Well, are you the class prefect?” Seon asked, to which the student replied, “The prefect is part of it, too!”

Seon asked the young man his name. “He said, ‘Jean, Botham Jean,’ like he was James Bond!”

Rowan Seon, Botham Jean’s former principal, shares stories about his former student during the Red Tie Gala.

Seon retired in 2018, the same year Bo died. In his years as principal, he trained future business leaders, government officials and Nobel laureates. Bo could have been one of them, he says, and his death “is certainly a national tragedy.”

St. Lucia’s former prime minister, Stephenson King, agrees. Principals are good judges of character, says King, who held the country’s highest office from 2007 to 2011 and continues to serve in the cabinet. After hearing about the young man’s passion, drive and determination, King says, “I think Botham was set to become one of our greatest leaders.”

‘To be to others kind and good’

During the gala, organizers distribute red baseball hats emblazoned with “Botham’s Army.” King proudly dons one. “I must commend the Botham Jean Foundation for being so resilient,” he says, “and to be able to reach out to the world.” King and other St. Lucian government officials attended the gala at the invitation of Bo’s mother, Allison Jean, one of the island’s 11 senators. She and her husband, Bertrum, shed tears during the dinner but also smile as they watch a video highlighting the foundation’s accomplishments.

On the video, young children in peach and checkerboard uniforms stand in rows at St. Lucia’s Carmen Renè Memorial School, reciting their class motto: “Help us to do the things we should, to be to others kind and good.” For the past five years, the foundation has provided scholarships and laptop computers to top-performing students, says principal Cyiana Norley-George.

In June, the foundation brought together mothers who have lost children to acts of violence, accidents and disease for a seminar on therapy, meditation and healing. The foundation also serves outside of St. Lucia. Last year, members of the Kings Church of Christ gave Thanksgiving turkeys to needy families in New York with support from the foundation.

At the Red Tie Gala, members of Botham Jean’s family (from left, aunt Desma Charles, father Bertrum Jean, mother Allison Jean, sister Alyssa Charles-Finley and brother Valdez Franklin) watch a video about the Botham Jean Foundation’s recent accomplishments.

St. Lucia is the only nation in the world named after a woman — St. Lucy of Syracuse, a fourth-century Christian martyr. Recently, the Botham Jean Foundation launched an outreach program at Saint Lucy’s Home, a community for the island’s impoverished seniors.

The foundation supports causes that were close to Bo’s heart, says Dr. Linda Lucombe, a family medicine specialist in Naples, Fla., who works with the foundation’s medical initiatives. “One of the most important was his compassion for the elderly. As a result, we place our focus on preventative health care with special emphasis on serving the elderly population.” Lucombe traveled to St. Lucia to announce this year’s Be Like Bo awards for health care workers who have shown compassion for the elderly.

Dr. Linda Lucombe presents the “Be Like Bo” awards during the Red Tie Gala.

Across from Bo’s parents, Desean Louis-Fernand watches the speakers talk about his cousin’s legacy. “I didn’t think it would be so big internationally,” he says of the foundation, which has made “such a big impact.”

Many of this year’s attendees are first-timers from outside Churches of Christ. Enda Myers and Andrea Wilson work in St. Lucia’s tourism industry. Bo’s death was national news here.

Enda Myers and Andrea Wilson enjoy the Red Tie Gala in St. Lucia.

“We don’t deal with many racially charged issues in St. Lucia,” Myers says. She and Wilson are glad “that his family was able to take such a tragedy and turn it into something positive for both people at home in Saint Lucia and in the States.”

The work of forgiveness

Although Bo’s legacy lives on, “I don’t think we’ll get one like him again,” says Eugenie Descartes. “I’m so sad that he’s gone from this earth.”

Descartes, a friend of the Jean family who attended the gala, works at the Castries airport. There, between the runway and the Caribbean Sea, is Bo’s final resting place.

Alyssa Charles-Finley visits her brother’s tomb in St. Lucia.

The day after the gala, on what would have been Bo’s 34th birthday, his parents and sister visit the cemetery. Alyssa Charles-Finley is the first to reach the tomb, newly painted in bright blue. She touches it gently and sheds tears as waves crash in the distance.

She’s still working on forgiving Amber Guyger, who received a 10-year prison sentence in 2019 for her brother’s murder. “It comes and goes,” she says. “Sometimes, I’m at peace with it, and then sometimes, around this time of year, the anger comes back, but I’m actively working on it.”

As part of her faith journey, she’s authored a book, “After Botham: Healing From My Brother’s Murder by a Police Officer.”

@christianchronicle HAPPY BIRTHDAY BOTHAM JEAN CASTRIES, SAINT LUCIA — On what would have been Botham Jean’s 34th birthday, his family visits his tomb in his birthplace, the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia. Bertrum Jean, Botham’s father, talks about his son’s legacy. One night earlier, the Botham Jean Foundation hosted its annual Red Tie Gala in Botham’s honor. It was the first time the Gala was hosted in Saint Lucia. Botham, a graduate of Harding University, was killed in his Dallas apartment in 2018 by an off-duty police officer who mistook Botham’s apartment for hers. #bothamjeanfoundation #bothamjean #hardinguniversity #saintlucia #stlucia ♬ original sound – The Christian Chronicle

Bertrum Jean, Bo’s father, makes regular visits here. He sits on his son’s tomb, occasionally singing Bo’s favorite hymns, “Our God, He is Alive” and “Let it Rise.” He hopes one day to study the Bible with Guyger, who is eligible for parole next year.

Bo’s younger brother, Brandt Jean, stunned the world when, during the victim impact statements portion of the 2019 trial, he forgave Guyger and told her that God would forgive her, too. With the judge’s permission, he hugged his brother’s killer.

The act of compassion unleashed waves of keyboard warriors who lauded and decried his actions online. In the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, some — even in Churches of Christ — were critical. “For strangers to just … be so harsh, hateful. I couldn’t understand,” his sister says.

Botham Jean’s younger brother Brandt Jean hugs convicted murderer and former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger after delivering his impact statement.

She wasn’t familiar with Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA who cited his Christian beliefs as he voiced support for conservative politics and Donald Trump.

“I feel for his wife, his children,” she says of Kirk’s Sept. 10 assassination, “because I know what it is to get that call. It traumatizes you. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. It sent me into shock.”

She doesn’t understand the calls for retribution toward the political left in the wake of Kirk’s assassination. “I don’t see this as, ‘the right did this’ — or the left. It makes no sense to me.”

Botham Jean sports a red tie in a photo taken before his death in 2018.

Rather than dwelling in a place of grief and anger, she chooses to keep Bo’s memory alive by doing good works. That’s the mission of the foundation that bears his name — and the purpose of the Red Tie Gala, which takes its name from Bo’s favorite color.

“It’s always good to do the work,” she says. At the gala, “to sit back and see it on the screen, it’s a good feeling. I wish Botham could see it. I think he would be proud of the work. … It’s not anything that I’m doing or we’re doing. Botham started this. He laid the blueprint. We’re just following it.”

ERIK TRYGGESTAD is President and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact erik@christianchronicle.org.

That’s a good summary of what happens when I travel for The Christian Chronicle. I often find myself explaining exactly what I’m doing wherever I am — and explaining how to pronounce my last name.

The sun sets over the volcanic beach near Beachcomber’s Hotel on the southern tip of St. Vincent.

I don’t exactly preach, although I always include Scripture. And I don’t exactly report. I focus on the spiritual lessons I’ve learned in my 24 years of experience with the Chronicle. It’s a weird mish-mash. Call it “evanjournalism.”

I was in St. Vincent, a beautiful, volcanic island in the eastern Caribbean, after attending the Botham Jean Foundation’s Red Tie Gala in nearby St. Lucia.

Joel Jack, my minister friend in St. Vincent’s capital, Kingstown, was going to be in Kenya during my visit. He connected me with Mark Charles, a hard-working, part-time minister who graduated from International Bible College (now Heritage Christian University) in Florence, Ala. Mark preaches for two Churches of Christ in St. Vincent and works in the insurance business. He’s got a heart to reach people in his home nation with the Gospel, so he asked me to do a presentation focused on ideas for evangelism.

@christianchronicle CALLIAQUA, ST. VINCENT AND THE GRENADINES — Members of Churches of Christ across the Caribbean island of St. Vincent sing during a Wednesday night Bible class hosted by the Calliaqua Church of Christ. #caribbean #stvincentandthegrenadines #churchofchrist #acappella ♬ original sound – The Christian Chronicle

About 40 folks attended the Wednesday night class, representing six Churches of Christ. I spoke for a few minutes with Katra Walker about the work she’s doing in women’s prison ministry. She’s the daughter of Jimmy Bracken, a Vincentian minister who did mission work in nearby Barbados.

Fourteen congregations are spread across St. Vincent and the small islands to its south, the Grenadines. Churches started here in the 1960s through the work of missionaries including Ralph Wharton and Bob Brown. Back in 2009, I wrote a news brief about Walter Hackshaw, who ministered on the islands for 50 years before retiring. (On this trip, I met Hackshaw’s son on the Grenadine island of Bequia.)

Erik Tryggestad visits with the son of longtime preacher Walter Hackshaw on the northern Grenadine island of Bequia.

Recently, I wrote about a volcanic eruption in St. Vincent that damaged two church buildings and displaced hundreds of people. One congregation, Sandy Bay, still is unable to rebuild. Last year, Hurricane Beryl damaged a Church of Christ on Union Island in the southern Grenadines.

But the real challenge for Churches of Christ in this nation of about 100,600 souls isn’t weather or seismology. Churches that once had 100-plus members are in decline. Young people are leaving. There’s competition from denominational groups, especially Seventh-day Adventists.

Church members from across St. Vincent sing hymns during a Wednesday night Bible study hosted by the Calliaqua Church of Christ.

It’s easy to feel small here — on islands that you have to squint to see on most maps. I shared with the Christians a story from a trip I took to another island nation nearly 10 years ago — Vanuatu, in the South Pacific. Eric Brandell, then a missionary in Vanuatu, took me around the main island and introduced me to members of Churches of Christ. Some worshiped with congregations of 10 to 12 people. I asked them about their faith, their church and the challenges they face reaching lost souls for Christ. They sat silent, stonefaced.

Eric, who translated for me, said that they were confused as to what I was doing there. (Like I said, this often is a problem for me.) The people of Vanuatu didn’t understand why I flew across an ocean to ask them about their tiny churches on their tiny island. They felt like, in the grand scheme of things, they didn’t really matter.

Erik Tryggestad presents lessons from his travels around the globe during a Wednesday night Bible class in St. Vincent.

Of course, everyone matters to God, I told my new friends in St. Vincent. And when you think you’re too small to make a difference on your own, that’s when God can use you. I told the Old Testament story of Gideon from Judges 7. Gideon (after a great deal of convincing) answered God’s call to raise up an army against the Midianites. He gathered 32,000 men, which God said was too many. So he got rid of 22,000 of them. “That’s still too many,” God said, and he whittled Gideon’s force down to 300 — against a force of 135,000. God didn’t want there to be any doubt that he, not Gideon and his troops, defeated the Midianites.

I shared some evangelism ideas I got from Churches of Christ in Africa that I’ve visited over the years. I talked about Ethiopia, where the government said it would deny entry to a mission team from our fellowship unless they did something to help the community. So the missionaries found an underserved population in Ethiopia, the deaf, and built schools for them. Who are the underserved among us?

Wearing his Georgia Bulldogs cap, Erik Tryggestad follows a group of new believers to a pond in rural Burkina Faso to witness their baptisms in 2009.

I talked about the West African nation of Burkina Faso, where church members wrote their own hymns, one of which roughly translated as “Children of Christ, a visitor has come to our church. We greet you in the name of Jesus Christ! Go to them, and let’s grab them!” “Grab” basically means to shake hands, but visitors are likely to be put to work. The Burkinabe Christians ask their guests to help chop vegetables for the fellowship meal and perform other tasks. This may seem inhospitable, but it’s a way to give potential new Christians an immediate sense of ownership in the Lord’s work.

Adriano Lopes, a minister in the island nation of Cape Verde, discusses evangelism with fellow Portuguese-speaking preachers during a breakout session at the the Luso-Africa Global Mission Gathering in Angola in 2023.

I mentioned a recent evangelism workshop I attended in Angola for Portuguese-speaking African churches. My friend from South Africa, George Funk, taught the Four Fields Discipleship Method he uses in his ministry, Gospel Chariot/Gospel Share. His co-trainers, Christians from Ghana, talked about how their end goal as evangelists used to be getting people into the waters of baptism. But that’s just the beginning of the Christian’s journey, not the end. Discipleship training can produce churches that will grow and plant new churches.

On Vanuatu’s most populated island, Efate, members of the Etas church remove their sandals for worship as Erik Tryggestad gives a devotional with the subject “You Matter to God” in 2015.

I finished by returning to Vanuatu and sharing the wonderful sermon illustration I found on the south side of the main island. There, I saw a bunch of old piles of dirt that, from my eye level, didn’t look all that important. But, from up above, those dirt piles spelled out “USA.” Nearby was an old airstrip used by U.S. forces during the Pacific campaign in World War II. From our earthly perspective, we can’t see how important we are to God. But his perspective is far higher, far greater.

After my presentation, Chad Kizer stood up to say the closing prayer. An 18-year-old member of the Calliaqua congregation, he preaches on occasion. I hoped that, between brother Maxwell’s earlier prayer and Chad’s, the folks had discerned the message I was trying to bring them.

Chad Kizer leads the closing prayer after a Wednesday night Bible study in St. Vincent.

“Lord, it doesn’t matter if I baptize 50 people,” Chad said. “It’s not about ‘I.’ It’s about you. … There doesn’t have to be a million of us. There doesn’t have to be a thousand men. One man with God is everything.”

Next time I tell my Vanuatu story, I’m throwing that in.

A seabird flies over the island of St. Vincent, as seen from a ferry that travels between the island and the northern Grenadine island of Bequia.

ERIK TRYGGESTAD (pronounced “Trig-es-tad”) is President and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact erik@christianchronicle.org.

I wrote that the people streaming out of a theater in Plano, Texas, north of Dallas, “looked as if they’d just attended a wake — and many said they felt as if they had.”

The brutal, bloody nature of Gibson’s 2004 portrayal of Jesus’ death on a cross drew both fans and critics — and mixed reviews.

Podcast: Listen to our interview with Dallas Jenkins

In 2027, a new feature-length presentation of the Crucifixion will hit the big screen. It’ll mark the culmination of the much-anticipated Season 6 of the worldwide phenomenon “The Chosen.”

What should viewers expect?

Will it be similar to — or different from — “The Passion” version?

I welcomed the opportunity this week to ask such questions of Dallas Jenkins, the creator, executive producer and director of the hit religious drama, which premiered in the spring of 2019 as a crowdfunded project.

I talked to the evangelical filmmaker at Oklahoma Christian University, my alma mater, where he spoke Monday as part of the McBride Lecture for Faith and Literature.

“You, my friend, are lifting up the name of Jesus in such a powerful, powerful way,” Oklahoma Christian President Ken Jones said in welcoming Jenkins to campus.

Ariel Howarth, an 18-year-old freshman from Portland, Oregon, was among hundreds of fans of “The Chosen” who came to hear Jenkins.

“It’s a fun opportunity that we’re able to meet him and hear him speak,” the Oklahoma Christian student said.

“I really like how it brings all the characters to life,” she said of the first multiseason drama about the life of Jesus, “and it gives them personalities that I wouldn’t have thought about otherwise.”

These highlights from my interview with Jenkins — son of Jerry B. Jenkins, co-author of the “Left Behind” books — have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity:

Dallas Jenkins speaks to students during a chapel assembly at Oklahoma Christian University.

On why filming Season 6 was so difficult

“Season 6 was by far the hardest season we’ve ever filmed, one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It included filming in Utah, Texas and Italy. We were in Italy for a month.

“I think Season 6 was meant to be hard. It was the longest season of filming, the hottest, the most physically challenging.

“Season 6 really captures around 24 hours of Jesus’ final hours — and I think God wanted us to get a little taste of some suffering and sacrifice for the purpose of capturing this. I think a lot of the strain and challenge and even at times desperation that we had while we were filming comes out on the screen.

“I think it was very visceral, and I think it’s going to turn out to be our best season as well. But it was definitely our hardest.”

On why Season 6 won’t debut until late next year

“The separation between the previous season is longer because it took longer filming, and our hope is to translate this into several dozen languages and release it all at once in those multiple languages. And that takes a long time.

“So a lot of times we’ve just released it in English and Spanish maybe, and then the rest of the languages catch up, and we really want to do it at the same time.

“The first six episodes will come out to streaming, and then the finale is a big, kind of supersized theatrical experience. So that’ll be released all over the world at the same time in early 2027.”

Dallas Jenkins, creator of “The Chosen,” answers questions from The Christian Chronicle’s Bobby Ross Jr. at Oklahoma Christian University.

On how “The Chosen’s” portrayal of the Crucifixion will compare with that of “The Passion of the Christ” 

“There are two ways that I think we’re going to be different.

“Number one, we have more tools in our toolbelt than Mel Gibson did, by the fact that we have five seasons leading up to this. So he was using a lot of violence and visual intensity to try to capture the reality of the Crucifixion and the weight of the Crucifixion. But it was a movie, so he only had a limited amount of time.

“So we don’t need to do that to communicate just how visceral and intense a crucifixion was. Because for many people, just a simple reaction from one of Jesus’ closest friends is going to break us because we’ve known these characters for so long. So, it has more emotional weight because of the backstories that we’ve had for over five years.

“For many people, just a simple reaction from one of Jesus’ closest friends is going to break us because we’ve known these characters for so long. So, it has more emotional weight because of the backstories that we’ve had for over five years.”

“The second thing is, it’s not going to be quite as explicitly violent. Mel did it already. I don’t feel like I have anything new to add to the physicality of it. We’ve seen dozens of portrayals. Mel’s was the most violent. I think we’ve got an idea of what that looks like.

“I think for this storytelling that we’re doing, we’re trying to tell a story not just of the Crucifixion but of the history of humanity. This movie is going to cover and remind you of the history from the creation of the universe all the way to the Crucifixion — to help establish the need for the Crucifixion.

“So we’re coming at it, I think, from a little bit more of an emotional journey and a spiritual journey than a physical one.”

On why Jenkins — nonetheless — expects that journey to make a powerful impact 

“As we were filming it, we couldn’t get through the days without taking turns having some sort of emotional breakdown. I had my first experience on set where I couldn’t get myself together emotionally.

“I can’t predict how everyone’s going to react. But for us — and for what I believe we’re capturing and the story that we’re telling and the truths of the Crucifixion — I think it’s going to be easily the most emotional impact our show has ever had.”

Dallas Jenkins emphasizes a Scripture displayed prominently on an auditorium stage at Oklahoma Christian University, where he spoke this week.

On filming the Crucifixion in the same general area as ‘The Passion of the Christ’

“So ‘The Passion’ was filmed in Matera, Italy, which is a city that has still preserved its thousands-of-years-old status. I mean, it’s the only place we could find where the horizon line still looked like the first century.

“And so several Crucifixion film projects have filmed there, going all the way back to ‘The Gospel According to St. Matthew,’ Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film in 1964. So there’s a reason why multiple film projects have filmed there.

“So I think our crosses were set up about 50 yards from where Mel’s were. And he’s actually filming ‘The Resurrection of the Christ’ movie (a sequel to ‘The Passion’) there as well, right?

“It’s a very, very special place, and it was clear to us that it was the only place that was right for this project.”

On learning of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination during the last week of filming Season 6

“I wasn’t close with Charlie. I knew him a little bit, and we had a lot of mutual friends.

“I think the difference between what Charlie was doing and what we’re doing is that Charlie kind of used politics as an on-ramp into discussions of Christianity. We’re kind of the other way around.

“I mean, we’re talking about the stories of Jesus. We don’t get into the political realm as a show, even though many people want us to, from both sides. The story of Jesus is oftentimes used for political purposes. One side likes to quote Jesus to support some of their political ends or policies that they’re wanting. Then the other side will use other quotes to support their policies.

“What we’re trying to do is just tell the stories of Jesus, and how people react to that is up to them — between them and God, them and their families, them and their church. We’re just trying to authentically portray the stories of Jesus as much as possible.

At the invitation of Scott LaMascus, founding director of Oklahoma Christian University’s McBride Center for Public Humanities, Dallas Jenkins signs a special chalkboard. It contains the names of prominent guest speakers who have visited Oklahoma Christian.

“I used to be a little bit more politically active on social media. Since I’ve started doing ‘The Chosen,’ I’ve dramatically slowed that down. Because I feel like by telling the story of Jesus, I want to follow his example of, ‘Hey, look, I’m here about your heart.’

“And he was always speaking to very diverse groups of people. Sometimes he was divisive in his claims of salvation, and other times he was unifying. But the unification or the division was always on a spiritual level, not a political one.

“Now, of course, he would sometimes upset people because of politics. But I just found that my job is different from other people in the public sphere. So I’m just trying to tell the stories of Jesus as authentically as I can, and then the response is not up to me.”

On his excitement over speaking at Oklahoma Christian University

“I love college students. In many ways, ‘The Chosen’ was made for the college-age me. When I was in college, there wasn’t much in the way of media — other than like VeggieTales — that spoke to my experience and my faith.

“I was always frustrated by that, and it’s taken a long time for faith media to catch up. But I feel like now what I’m excited about is being able to speak to college students and also make ‘The Chosen,’ hopefully for them.

“I love college students. In many ways, ‘The Chosen’ was made for the college-age me. When I was in college, there wasn’t much in the way of media — other than like VeggieTales — that spoke to my experience and my faith.”

“Even at 50, I feel like I can serve some media that’s going to speak to their experience as much as possible. So I love coming to college campuses because I think this is the generation that we sometimes complain about because Gen Z is so different from us.

“But this is an opportunity to perhaps learn from each other.”

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BOBBY ROSS JR. is Editor-in-Chief of The Christian Chronicle. Reach him at bobby@christianchronicle.org.

That’s the core question behind our series, “In Search of Shalom.” In the past year I have traveled to Central Europe, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean in search of answers.

The inspiration for the series was a negative experience a few years ago. A Church of Christ in Western Europe was hosting a celebration that included believers of multiple nationalities — Belgian, South African, Ukrainian and Russian. I took a photo of Ukrainian refugees standing next to a Russian Christian and, in my reporting, highlighted the way they were getting along despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, then in its second year.

Christians from Ukraine and Russia sing hymns during a 2011 conference in Crimea.

As I was fact-checking the story, one of the refugees told me that I had mischaracterized the relationship. Ukrainians are dying at the hands of Russians every day, he said. It’s not enough for Russian Christians to just say they oppose the war. What are they doing to stop it? And the photo I took of him next to his Russian brother? Please don’t use it, he said. “That was your idea. Not mine.”

I was disheartened, especially since Russian and Ukrainian church members used to be close friends. Most of the Churches of Christ in Ukraine were in the Russian-speaking east, and they often interacted with Christians from Moscow, St. Petersburg and nearby Rostov-on-Don.

Somewhere on this globe, is there a model of Christian reconciliation that Ukrainians, Russians and all of us can learn from after this terrible conflict ends? I hoped to find answers in the Balkans, a region divided by brutal ethnic conflicts three decades ago. Instead, I found that the old animosities remain — and are, perhaps, intensifying.

But I also found stories of Christians reaching past the political issues that divide them. Time and again, I encountered groups of people — people who the world says shouldn’t be together — finding unity in their love of Christ.

Here are my first steps “In Search of Shalom.”

• Finding peace ‘when there is no peace’: The Christian Chronicle explores the Balkans, where Christians struggle with a legacy of war. (Reported from Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovena)
  

  Street art in Sarajevo urges Bosnians to remember the July 11, 1995, genocide of Muslims by Bosnian Serbs in Srebrenica.

• Among outcasts, a church moves in: Christians in Albania reach out — with Bibles and basketball — to a persecuted people. (Reported from Fushë Krujë, Albania)
  

  Women visit in a Roma neighborhood in Fushë Krujë. Nearby, a Church of Christ hosts worship.

• Despised people live ‘at the heart of shalom’: Reporter reflects on inspiration for series about bridging ethnic and cultural divisions. (Insight from Fushë Krujë, Albania)
  

  A colorful illustration of the Lord’s Prayer from Matthew 6, written in the Roma language, stands in the sanctuary of a Catholic community center in Košice, Slovakia.

• Faith meets machine gun nationalism: A record-breaking concert in Croatia highlights the complicated interplay of church, ethnicity and politics. Can Christians help bring real peace? (Reported from Zagreb, Croatia)

A statue of Josip Jelačić stands in downtown Zagreb. Jelačić was “Ban” (a viceroy and military office) of Croatia from 1848 to 1859. He is remembered for his military campaigns during the revolutions of 1848 and for his abolition of serfdom in Croatia.

• A journey of forgiveness on Botham Jean’s island: The foundation honoring the legacy of the slain Christian hosts its first Red Tie Gala in his Caribbean homeland. (Reported from Gros Islet, St. Lucia)

Alyssa Charles-Finley visits her brother’s tomb in St. Lucia.

• The gospel of Vietnam: A half-century after the fall of Saigon, Churches of Christ find new life in their communist homeland. (Reported from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam)

The communist hammer and sickle hang from a banner next to a beauty parlor in Can Tho, Vietnam.

• Did Jesus come to bring division? How can Christ-followers be peacemakers in a world intent on tearing itself apart? (Insight from Singapore)

Erik Tryggestad sings hymns alongside Thailand missionary Robert Reagan and church members from across Asia during the “Bricks to Blessings” banquet hosted by the Moulmein Church of Christ.

ERIK TRYGGESTAD is President and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact erik@christianchronicle.org.

Animosities abound in southeastern Europe. Croats dislike Serbs and vice versa. Serbs distrust Albanians, who feel a strong attachment to the people of Kosovo, a region Serbia claims as its own. But there’s a mutual disdain for the Roma, an ethnic minority known around the world by the derogatory name “gypsies.”

As a result, we are all poorer in humanity.

Those words, spoken by the late Pope Francis, ring in my ears as I watch members of the Church of Christ in Albania’s capital, Tirana, play soccer with kids in this poor Roma community.

My first encounter with the Roma didn’t happen here. It happened in the Sam’s Club parking lot less than a mile from my house in Oklahoma. A short, dark-skinned woman approached me, carrying a baby and standing next to her teenage son, who was nearly her height. She asked me for money so she could buy food for her children.

I told her I didn’t have any cash (although I did, I’m pretty sure), but I would be happy to buy her some food. I figured she would move on. That’s exactly what happened years earlier when I made the same offer to another woman in another parking lot. That woman kept making excuses about needing cash instead. She pretty much ran away from me.

Yves Bilong plays badminton with Roma youths after worship in Fushë Krujë, Albania.

But this lady said, “OK.”

Taken aback, I grabbed a cart, and we went shopping. I asked her where she was from. “Romania,” she said. I bought a box of diapers, some yogurt and orange juice. It cost me nearly $80. (I forgot how expensive diapers are.)

I gave her my number and invited her to church. She waited in the parking lot until a man pulled up in an old van. They loaded multiple cartfuls of goods (more than just what I got them) and left. I later learned that some of my co-workers had encountered this woman before — and had also taken her shopping.

A year later, I was in Romania, headed toward Ukraine to cover the Russian invasion. I told the Romanian Christians about the woman, and their response was, “Yeah, gypsies.” That’s what they do everywhere they go.

After visiting Ukraine, I traveled to Košice, Slovakia, with friends from Sunset International Bible Institute in Lubbock, Texas, to learn about the church’s outreach to Ukrainian refugees there. A local politician suggested that we stop by a Catholic parish in the middle of a Roma community known as Lunik IX. This had nothing to do with Ukraine or even Churches of Christ, but the politician said we should see it.

Our driver cautioned us to secure our wallets and passports as we drove into the neighborhood of weathered, off-white apartment buildings near Košice’s garbage dump. It was eerily quiet. Few cars. I saw no discernible light from the dilapidated buildings. No power.

Two workers from the Catholic center in Lunik IX, left, visit with Brandon Price, director of the Ukrainian Bible Institute, and Peter Haluštok, who serves a small Church of Christ in Košice, Slovakia.

Right in the center of the apartment community community center. As we waited for someone inside to unlock the gate, I felt a thousand sets of eyes watching from the darkness.

The Catholic workers served us tea and talked about the food program and the community activities they offer to the Roma. They mentioned that Pope Francis himself had visited about eight months earlier. One of the workers pulled out his cellphone and scrolled through photos he had taken of the pontiff — standing in the same spot where I was.

“I think you’re the first guy I’ve ever met who had pictures of the pope on his cellphone,” I told him.

Pope Francis addresses members of the Roma community at Lunik IX on Sept. 14, 2021.

But the pope didn’t stay in the sanctuary, nor did he confine himself to the gated compound as we did. He spoke from a stage in the middle of the community, out among the people whose presence had me constantly checking to make sure my wallet was secure.

“We cannot reduce the reality of others to fit our own prepackaged ideas,” Francis told the people of Lunik IX. “All too often you have been the object of prejudice and harsh judgments, discriminatory stereotypes, defamatory words and gestures. As a result, we are all poorer in humanity.”

Here, in Fushë Krujë, the Church of Christ hosts a Sunday night service, mostly attended by children, and sponsors a basketball league where Roma kids shoot hoops alongside their fellow Albanians.

I’ve traveled to more than 90 countries in two decades with The Christian Chronicle. Believe me, kids everywhere are exactly the same. Nationality, ethnicity, language, socioeconomic status — these are meaningless to children. They love unconditionally. They laugh at potty jokes.

Racism and classism are learned behaviors — behaviors that should never be learned.

I traveled to this part of the world to see how Christians were coping with the legacies of the terrible wars of 30 years ago. Here, at the crossroads of Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Islam, ethnic and cultural divisions have haunted peoples for centuries.

A colorful illustration of the Lord’s Prayer from Matthew 6, written in the Roma language, stands in the sanctuary of a Catholic community center in Košice, Slovakia.

Amid waves of resurgent nationalism, I wanted to share stories of Christians finding ways to bridge ethnic and cultural divisions. I wanted to see churches — full of people that the world says shouldn’t be together — practicing shalom, the peace that passes understanding that’s only attainable through Christ.

This visit to Fushë Krujë was supposed to be an unrelated story, a sidebar to the series.

But it may be the best place to start. I mentioned that to Lisa Foreman, a member of the Tirana church who has been instrumental in its outreach to Roma communities.

“The Roma are right at the heart of shalom,” she said. “I think that the way we treat them reflects what we believe about ourselves. Do we really believe that God loves us gratuitously? Do we accept that we bear the image and glory of God and that we have a role to play?

“If we do, we can easily love others who are different from us but are just as valuable to the kingdom of God. It’s such a beautiful thing to see our kids become friends.”

Left, Selina Dragoti and her fellow Christians rejoice after her baptism in Berat, Albania. Right, Erik Tryggestad meets Dragoti on a reporting trip to southeast Europe.

A side note on baptisms

Usually, when I interview someone in a foreign country, I start by offering a quick explanation of what the Chronicle is. Not everyone knows.

But Selin Dragoti did. “Oh, you ran a picture of my baptism!” she said. I looked through our archives and, sure enough, there was the photo from 2022. Selin was baptized into a newly planted Church of Christ in Berat, Albania. Now she’s teaching the Sunday night Bible class for Roma kids in Fushë Krujë.

Left, Leon Premuz is baptized in Croatia in 2024 by minister Mladen Dominic. Right, Erik Tryggestad meets Premuz on a reporting trip.

Her baptism photo is one of my all-time favorites. And I love what she said just before: “I am only a few moments away from my baptism, and I’m counting the seconds as if they are long days. I’m about to become the daughter of the Most High. … Today, I’m only a step away from his glorious throne.”

It was the second Sunday in a row that I met a young Christian whose baptism we had shared in the Chronicle. The previous week I was in Varaždin, Croatia, where I spoke to Leon Premuz, whose photo we ran last year. I asked him about his first year in the faith. “It’s been beautiful, but rough at the same time,” he said. “Here in Croatia people are not used to the Christian life … but it’s so beautiful to live like a Christian.”

ERIK TRYGGESTAD is President and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact erik@christianchronicle.org.