When Jesus entered the dark night of His soul on Calvary’s cross, He had these same songs on His heart. He quoted from the Psalms, expressing both His despair in the words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Ps. 22:1), and His hope when He finally said, “Into your hand I commit my spirit” (Ps. 31:5). Friend, if your Lord needed these words at His blackest hour, so do you. When you do not know what to say or pray, when you have groaning too deep for words, when the darkness falls, then turn to the songs in the night the Lord Himself used, and that He still provides for you.

When believers enter “the dark night of the soul,” those times when God’s mysterious will, worked out through difficult providence, makes the Lord appear veiled and unapproachable, what should they do? As we look at Scripture, one conclusion is apparent. They should sing. For the biblical testimony is that God provides “songs in the night”—lyrics to bring to Him in times of great heart distress.

We would not, at first thought, naturally reason that a time of struggle, suffering, or pain is also a time for singing, especially when God seems absent and hidden. It can almost seem cruel to suggest that a hurting, disillusioned soul should sing. Crying, wondering, and groaning seem more fitting. But singing? Is not lifting our voice in song for happy times? Certainly, but singing is also for trying times. Indeed, perhaps especially so.
Christian songwriter Michael Card has noted that in the book of Psalms, sixty-five of the 150 songs found there, or more than 40 percent, contain lamentations. As His people live in this sin-cursed world, God knew that they would need help pouring out their souls to Him in distress. So, He provided them with songs to sing at those times—songs in the night.
Job’s younger friend Elihu testifies to this truth when he acknowledges that God “gives songs in the night” to those in distress (Job 35:10). Likewise, the psalmist, so troubled in soul that he says he moans when he remembers God, stirs himself with the words, “Let me remember my song in the night” (Ps. 77:3, 6). He then goes on to sing five agonizing lines of a song that, stated in questions, describe how spiritual midnight truly feels. “Will the Lord spurn forever, and never again be favorable? Has his steadfast love forever ceased? Are his promises at an end for all time? Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger shut up his compassion?” (vv. 7–9).
One such song in the night is Psalm 42.

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Like many Americans, Latinos find themselves seeking stability in an uncertain time. Growing numbers are leaving the Catholicism in which they were raised—and they face unique cultural challenges and have distinct cultural affinities that make Islam attractive. Hispanic women in particular find themselves drawn to Islam. 

In 2014, the PBS program Religion and Ethics Newsweekly visited the Islamic Center of Greater Miami in Miami Gardens, Florida, to cover a growing phenomenon: Latino converts to Islam. Many were raised Catholic, but felt more at home in their new faith. “The Trinity was very confusing to me,” one woman said. “I didn’t understand how God was a man or how a man could become a god.”
The report said that around 50% of the converts of Hispanic origin at the time were women, and many were choosing to wear head coverings. “The reason I wear the scarf is because I expect to be respected by the opposite gender,” said another Latina convert. “I don’t want to be catcalled and I don’t want to be judged by my appearance. In fact, I want to be judged by my intellect.”
In the past decade, the number of Latino converts to Islam has grown—and so has the proportion of those converts who are women.
Today, in Miami, as in the United States at large, a substantial number of converts to Islam are Latino—about 9% nationwide according to a 2020 survey, an increase from 5% in 2017. Estimates of the Latino Muslim population in the United States range from 50,000 to 70,000. Many are of either Mexican or Puerto Rican descent, but conversion to Islam is a phenomenon across Latin America, where multigenerational Lebanese and Palestinian migrant communities have settled. This phenomenon reflects shifting U.S. Latino attitudes toward religion, culture, and gender roles in the 2020s.
Like many Americans, Latinos find themselves seeking stability in an uncertain time. Growing numbers are leaving the Catholicism in which they were raised—and they face unique cultural challenges and have distinct cultural affinities that make Islam attractive. Hispanic women in particular find themselves drawn to Islam. Anecdotally, and according to reports from Islamic centers around the country, Latinas today constitute the clear majority of converts in the U.S. According to the findings of the Latino Muslim Survey published in 2017, the overwhelming majority (73%) of 560 Latino Muslims across 33 states who responded were women.
Those women, said author Ken Chitwood, who has written about and researched the Latino Muslim community extensively, “are right at the forefront and often, you might say, pioneras—they’re pioneers in that community.”
The golden-colored domes of the Islamic Center of Greater Miami shone in the afternoon sun on a recent Friday, crowning the horizon of a landscape that is clustered with apartment complexes and strip malls. The mosque itself is surrounded by tall, lush privacy hedges and palm trees. When I arrived after Friday prayers, except for the imam’s used 2017 Hyundai, the parking lot had mostly cleared out. Crossing the welcoming courtyard with a graceful murmuring fountain at its center, I was greeted by two older men who had stuck around to chat under the shade of a colonnade.
Abdul Rashid and Ifran Khan are both grandfathers, who beamingly showed me pictures of their grandchildren on their phones. Rashid, 72, is originally from Pakistan, and has lived in the U.S. for 50 years. In that time, he has picked up Spanish and become an unofficial translator at the mosque. He told me that because he spoke Spanish, he was the first contact for a Cuban man when he arrived at the mosque 15 years ago, a man who he said has since “reverted” to Islam. (Muslims speak not of conversion but “reversion”—humanity is born Muslim, and when a person chooses Islam, they are returning to their original state.) Both men assured me that there is a substantial Latino revert population at the Islamic Center of Greater Miami, most of whom are not recent immigrants but longtime U.S. residents. And it’s not just Latinos, the men told me, saying that there is a reversion almost weekly. A man converted earlier that very day by publicly reciting the Shahada, the Islamic profession of faith, in Arabic and English: “I bear witness that there is no God but Allah, and I bear witness that Muhammad is his last messenger.” This kind of output, however, is not the result of a grand missionary project. “We’re not really doing any work,” Rashid said. “It’s God.”
“My family was very devout Catholic,” said Latina Muslim convert Monica Traverzo in a November 2020 episode of the podcast Mommying While Muslim. But in her recollection, this devoutly Catholic family didn’t attend church often. “My family was still very rooted in their Catholicism, but it was more of like an agnostic approach.”
Traverzo tried out different Christian denominations before converting to Islam in college. “It was just attractive to me to live a God-conscious lifestyle,” she said. While she said her family was “taken aback” when she began wearing hijab, in other respects they were very pleased with the positive changes they saw taking root in her life. Culturally, she saw a lot of overlap that she thinks helps explain the number of Latinas coming over to Islam. “I feel like Islam has this sense of family that Latinos really admire because Islam teaches us about having these healthy, nurturing family life environments,” she said. “That’s also part of Hispanic culture.”
A March 2020 episode of the podcast Me & My Muslim Friends featured two Latina converts, Kathia Guerrero and Shirley Puente. Puente comes from a Peruvian background and converted in 2011. She describes her religious upbringing as culturally Catholic. “I wouldn’t say that we were super religious,” she said. “We weren’t the type that went to church every Sunday.”
Like Traverzo, Puente experimented with different religions before converting to Islam after befriending a Muslim girl in college. Seeing her friend moved to tears when speaking about her faith, Traverzo was intrigued. “I was like, you know what?” she said. “I kind of want that type of spiritual connection. Like, I don’t have it. I don’t feel any type of, I guess, emotion when I talk about Christianity like that.”
Guerrero is a single mother who converted in 2015. Her family came to the United States from Mexico when she was 10 years old. Guerrero’s father was a Christian pastor, and her family was very religious growing up. Music, pants, makeup, jewelry were all forbidden. She said that after her father left the family when she was 13, “my family just kind of fell apart completely,” once her mom went to work full time. She began engaging in risky behaviors.
“The time that I decided to convert was in a time when I was down. I was very depressed. At that time, I was not practicing anything,” she said. Guerrero came to Islam through independent study, watching Muslim prayers on YouTube, and practicing Ramadan on her own. “I fasted and it gave me the peace that I was looking for,” she said. “And a month later I converted.”
When I described these women’s stories to Rashid, he was unsurprised. The converts who come to his mosque are affected by the same institutional decline as everyone else. “When the marital institution fails, the society fails, and that is the fortress for the child,” he said. The materialistic culture of instant gratification are not American values, he said, but “Satanic values.” His daughter, he said, is a counselor for lower-income families, many of whom are Latino. He said she regularly encounters families dealing with domestic abuse and the consequences of absentee fathers.
Rashid’s theory is that wider cultural forces are bringing people in. He likens the wider cultural forces—of materialism, instant gratification, failing institutions, and the deterioration of the traditional family—to a hurricane. “A hurricane affects everybody,” he said. “We are all in the same boat.” And although even Muslim youth are not immune to these pressures, Rashid said, Islam still has what he calls “social pressures” that provide social structure and expectations to ground its adherents.
He suspects that the emphasis on religion and family in Islam is what attracts Latinos and Latinas, who may have been raised in large, religious families. They are searching for strong religious and family networks of the kind they enjoyed growing up, but which they now find falling away for various reasons. “There is an emptiness,” Rashid said, and they are “not getting the answer at church.” In Catholicism, the faith in which the majority of Latinos are raised, believers go through priests for sacraments—baptism, confession, communion. By contrast, Rashid said, he observes that Latinos are attracted to the direct connection to the Creator they find that Islam offers (prayer—a direct relationship between the believer and God—is one of the five pillars of Islam, along with a profession of faith, fasting, almsgiving, and the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca).
The sermon that Rashid and Khan had just heard that Friday was on the importance of reading in the Islamic tradition. The affable, youthful preacher, originally from Yemen, conducted his sermon in English. “A brother asked me the other day about how to handle the problems in the Muslim community with the youth,” he said. “Issues like mental health, issues like identity challenges, [in] the Muslim American space, people who are born and raised here.” He responded with four characteristics of a successful community: a strong family, next, a strong faith community with shared norms and values, then investment in education, and finally, an understanding of the law and of dominant culture, which he defined as “a way and style of life.”
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This downgrade involves compromise on theological levels such as complementarianism (roles of men and women in the church), ecclesiology (the office and function of elder), and most important of all is the gospel (the social justice movement has replaced theology with victimology—resulting in the rise of a new religion). For that reason, our church which is 180 years old and predates the SBC by three years, has determined by a 100% congregational vote led by the elders who voted in a 100% eldership vote to lead the church away from the SBC due to such compromise. The SBC has failed. The leaders have compromised. 

One of the great joys of my life has been serving as the pastor of three different churches that have been affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. I currently serve the church where my wife and I grew up as children on the west side of Atlanta—Pray’s Mill Baptist Church. Although our church is 180 years old and predates the SBC, our congregation has maintained a longtime affiliation within the SBC. However, in recent days we came to the conclusion that there was no profitable path forward for us within the SBC and we made the decision to officially separate.
Over the last few years, there has been a great deal of transition and change within the Southern Baptist Convention. That’s a nice way of describing the devious deconstruction plan that has been at work for many years behind the scenes. Along the way, we have witnessed scandals, controversies, and division. It is not my desire in this article to add fuel to the fire, however, as a lifelong SBC member and pastor I believe it’s necessary to provide a reason for our church’s decision to officially separate from the SBC effective on January 1st, 2022.
The Commendable
What I will say in this article should not be seen as a denial of the fact that there are many good and gifted professors who are serving in the SBC entities and doing a good job of training men for the pulpit and church planting. When I look back on my time at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, I am grateful for many of the professors who invested in me and helped prepare me for the work of gospel ministry.
Alongside professors are many good pastors and local churches who have been healthy and profitable in supporting Christian education and church planting for many years within this network that we know as the SBC. Therefore, we can be thankful for these gifted individuals and churches who have sacrificed much to accomplish much for the glory of God.
But, all is not well within evangelicalism and that also includes the SBC. In recent years, we’ve witnessed quite a transformation take place within the once beloved SBC that has necessitated separation for what I believe is far more than preference matters.
The Downgrade
Over the past decade or more, things began to shift with the SBC leadership that moved the once theologically conservative denomination in a leftward direction. The biggest catalyst to this leftward movement undoubtedly was the acceptance of the social justice agenda which has resulted in the greatest downgrade in our modern era of church history. Any denial of this downgrade is simply a refusal to report the facts about where the SBC is today, where the SBC was yesterday, and where the SBC is moving tomorrow.
While this shift did not take place overnight, it began to pick up the pace drastically over the last 4-5 years. Back in 2018, I was part of a group who assembled in Dallas, Texas for a meeting regarding the problems of social justice. As we assembled, I was concerned but hopeful. Little did I know that our meeting and subsequent Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel would not only serve as a means of confirming what was already in motion beneath the radar, but it would expose many people and institutions within the SBC and their involvement in this devious movement.
Sadly, the top tier SBC leaders continue to double down on their positions. They have sought to deflect charges of theological capitulation and rigorously work to protect their positions through cultural virtue signals and theological word salads.
During this downgrade we have witnessed once trusted voices and institutions accept the ideologies of the social justice movement and platform notable voices within their hallways, classrooms, and conference circuits. They came together under the banner of the gospel only to embrace a social justice gospel that resulted in confusion, division, and in some cases—a complete derailing altogether. This must not be overlooked. If left unchecked, the social justice agenda will leave an indelible mark upon preachers who will be sent out into local churches to serve as pastor.
The SBC once fought a war on the inerrancy of Scripture during what has become known as the “Conservative Resurgence.” After claiming a victory over the “Battle for the Bible” the SBC has moved into a new era where this once theologically conservative denomination has adopted the controversial “Resolution 9” at the 2019 SBC in Birmingham. How could the SBC who openly champions inerrancy at the same time adopt a resolution stating that we need to employ Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality (CRT/I) as “analytical tools” for gospel ministry? This was done, in all reality, without much public debate and through sly political schemes.
Moving beyond the 2019 SBC, after a break in 2020 due to COVID-19, the SBC reconvened in Nashville in the summer of 2021 to discuss business and make decisions as a group of churches. During the meeting, there were multiple attempts from the floor to call upon the SBC to openly renounce the teachings of CRT/I. At each juncture, all of these attempts were rejected and generic language was adopted in place of specific language that openly rejected CRT/I.
One must ask the honest question as to why there was such an open refusal from the SBC leaders at this point? In the past, the SBC openly challenged Disney and eventually boycotted Disney in 1997. One must ask why the SBC was willing to boycott the gospel according to Disney but failed to boycott the gospel according to social justice?
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