Simon Cox Blog

Tuesday, 30 January 2018

Inside Evangelicalism—On Being Black and Tired… Yet Hopeful

The problem of the color line remains.

The Color Line

In his classic work The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Dubois addresses the biggest problem in America, writing, “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.”

Dubois’ words ring truer today than ever before. The color line painfully remains. Even in evangelicalism.

I have written about the color divide in evangelical spaces before. In fact, many people of color now cringe when you mention the term ‘evangelical.’ Why is that? Are these communities gospel-adverse? To borrow from the Apostle Paul, !

When it comes to minority angst surrounding the term ‘evangelical,’ it’s not a definition problem, but an identity problem.

Today, the historical meaning of the term ‘evangelical’ has given way to a political one.

And I fear the political atmosphere over the past two years has re-traced the color line. There’s been some spiritual redistricting going on in Christendom, and it’s not pretty.

On Being Black

For a Black man who is intent on pursuing racial reconciliation, what I am seeing hurts. Deeply. I grew up in the Black church, firmly entrenched in a culture of gifted orators and melodious music. I attended two of the most prestigious Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the country. I earned my undergraduate degree from Morehouse College and a law degree from Howard University School of Law—which produced the lawyers who argued the historic school desegregation case. I went on to practice law in Detroit, Michigan—a city with the highest percentage of African-American residents.

For a long time, I was a minority living a ‘majority’ experience in America—surrounding myself with other ...

from
http://feeds.christianitytoday.com/~r/christianitytoday/ctmag/~3/9iV6H6e8ygM/inside-evangelicalism-on-being-black-and-tiredyet-hopeful.html

Monday, 29 January 2018

What Is Your Story? (Part 2) [Gospel Life Podcast]

Start each week with this encouragement to show and share the love of Jesus.

What Is Your Story? (Part 2)

Christina Walker, associate director of academic programs for the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, continues her thoughts on What Is Your Story? from Podcast 40. Part of evangelism is praying for God to bring the right people into your path who are at a place of openness to the gospel. We must rely on God to lead us to these people. No matter how amazing our stories are, if people aren’t willing to listen and God isn’t working in their lives, our evangelism is pointless. So how do we find that balance of preparation and prayer? Evangelism is a both/and activity. We prepare, and then we release the results to God.

What Is Your Story? (Part 1)

Christina Walker, associate director of academic programs for the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, talks about her father-in-law’s passion for planting churches and evangelism. What keeps him excited about it year after year? “Pop” shares that first, we should tell a story. What’s our story? Why does Christ matter to us? Who are we praying for, and what opportunities will we pursue? This strategy may not be revolutionary, but it is effective.

Ed Stetzer holds the Billy Graham Distinguished Chair of Church, Mission, and Evangelism at Wheaton College, is executive director of the Billy Graham Center, and publishes church leadership resources through Mission Group.

from
http://feeds.christianitytoday.com/~r/christianitytoday/ctmag/~3/m5G8NoDNCDg/what-is-your-story-part-2-gospel-life-podcast.html

After Baptism Gone Wrong, Court Says Church Lawsuits Hinge on Membership

Oklahoma Supreme Court restricts religious liberty in tortured ex-Muslim’s suit against Tulsa church.

When churches face lawsuits, does their religious liberty hinge on whether or not their accuser is an official member? Experts are concerned that, in an unusual baptism gone wrong, a state supreme court has decided yes.

Nearly a year ago, the Oklahoma Supreme Court decided 5 to 3 that a Muslim convert to Christianity—whose baptism nearly got him killed—couldn’t sue First Presbyterian Church in Tulsa for inadvertently alerting his would-be murderers with its online announcement of the baptism.

Ten months later—in December 2017—the justices changed their minds, issuing a 5 to 4 decision that the man could, in fact, have his day in court.

This month, First Presbyterian asked the court to take a third look at the case, arguing that the justices mixed up two separate issues of law: the ecclesiastical extension/church autonomy doctrine and the ministerial exception.

The trouble started more than six years ago, when a Syrian Muslim man converted to Christianity and asked if he could be baptized by First Presbyterian. The man—who is called John Doe in court documents to protect his identity—says he asked the church to keep quiet about it, since shari‘ah law demands that converts from Islam be executed.

Later that day, the man flew to Syria to marry his fiancée. A few weeks later, while still there, he was kidnapped and threatened by Islamist extremists, including his uncle and cousin.

His abductors had discovered his conversion through First Presbyterian’s online weekly bulletin, which announced his baptism, according to his lawsuit. After three days of torture, the man escaped after killing his uncle during a struggle for a gun.

It took several months for the man and his wife ...

from
http://feeds.christianitytoday.com/~r/christianitytoday/ctmag/~3/3pQK5vhnJJY/bad-baptism-oklahoma-supreme-court-first-presbyterian-tulsa.html

A Wall of Security or a Table of Fellowship?

Matthew Kaemingk makes a political and theological case for welcoming Muslim immigrants.

Osama is blind. According to an NPR report, he lost his eyesight in 2012 when a mortar shell exploded nearby, killing everyone around, except him. He, his wife, and four children were Syrian refugees in Jordan for three years before learning the US State Department had approved them for asylum. To obtain the relevant visas, however, Osama and his family required a sponsor: a family to welcome them and assist in their transition.

The sponsor for this Muslim family? A Christian congregation—Nassau Presbyterian Church in Princeton, New Jersey. The family had almost no information about the congregation. They were told only that someone would greet them. But soon enough, they received free housing and a kitchen stocked with food. A team of congregants undertook various gestures of hospitality, even inspecting the house to ensure it would be safe for a blind resident.

The family was overwhelmed by the generosity of the Nassau congregation, and the church was enriched in turn. As one congregant remarked, “the family’s presence has been a blessing to us all.” An immigrant family had need, and the church met it, in keeping with God’s Old Testament command: “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born” (Lev. 19:34).

In 2016, the United States admitted approximately 38,000 Muslim refugees, according to the Pew Research Center. This figure is up considerably from the year prior, and more than double that of 2011. One reason for the increase is the staggering number of refugees spilling out from Syria and surrounding areas, where civil war and ISIS brutality have caused a mass exodus. Refugees from Syria alone have ballooned in number over the past five years, from around ...

from
http://feeds.christianitytoday.com/~r/christianitytoday/ctmag/~3/JRb0DFqLqTk/wall-of-security-or-table-of-fellowship.html

“Family Win” and How Our Churches Care for Each Other and the World

If the whole family doesn’t win, no one wins.

A church with ten locations is a lot like a family with ten kids. There is the opportunity for great joy and also the possibility of tremendous chaos. At Community Christian Church, we have both! In an effort to make sure our family of church locations were all working together for the greater good and not just for themselves, we began talking about the “family win.”

It’s a biblically-rooted idea that we hoped would radically reorient our sense of identity, impacting how we steward the resources and the influence to which God has entrusted us.

Community Christian Church was an early adopter of the concept of a multi-site church: we are one church, with one staff, one eldership, and one overall budget, but in multiple locations. This month, we will be launching our eleventh Chicagoland campus.

For all the strengths of this model, however, it also presents a challenge: How do we help motivate people who live and worship in communities spread across a fairly large geographic area, many of whom realistically will never meet one another, to contribute sacrificially of their time, talents, and resources for the sake of the whole?

We borrowed the idea of the “family win” from Ryan Kwon, a friend and pastor of Resonate Church in California. Ryan, who grew up in a Korean-American immigrant household, described the sacrifices that his well-educated father made in coming to the U.S., where he worked a maintenance job cleaning bathrooms at LAX Airport.

Why? For the family win—so that his kids could have a better education and, ultimately, a better life than if he had stayed in Korea. Even as a child, however, Ryan was also expected to make sacrifices for his family, because “if the family didn’t ...

from
http://feeds.christianitytoday.com/~r/christianitytoday/ctmag/~3/zYGXTSFzp4A/family-win-and-how-our-churches-care-for-each-other-and-wor.html

Behavioral Science Catches Up to the Bible

Research is confirming ancient wisdom about human nature. But can it really make us better people?

The past quarter century of research into human psychology and behavior has revealed that, in many ways, we are strangers to ourselves. We are ignorant of the forces that play a major role shaping our decisions. Choices we assumed were products of free will are, upon closer observation, largely determined by biological, environmental, and social forces outside of our control or awareness.

In many cases, this research has overthrown common assumptions about human nature. For example, according to a 1997 study by social psychologist Robert Baron, the smell of Cinnabon and Mrs. Fields cookies in a shopping mall doubles the likelihood that we would help someone in need. We might prefer to think of ourselves as compassionate people, when in fact we were summoned to action by carbs and sugar!

Such findings can be frightening, in that they force us to rethink the idea of sin and human responsibility, even the nature of our personality. We are far more influenced by our environment, and much else besides, than we would ever wish to admit. One neuroscientist, David Eagleman, even proposes upending our legal system: We should no longer consider people responsible for crimes they commit, now that we know how deeply our environments influence our behavior.

Surprising and enlightening as much of this research is, very often it merely confirms what we ought to know already, either by intuition or by paying attention to Scripture. For example, a study by Cornell psychologist Dennis Regan found that after being made to feel guilty, people are nearly four times as likely to offer help to someone with a problem. But preachers and parents have been known for millennia the power of guilt to spur action.

So perhaps the real benefit from all these ...

from
http://feeds.christianitytoday.com/~r/christianitytoday/ctmag/~3/TQ-JWa7qrhU/behavioral-science-catches-up-to-bible.html

Sunday, 28 January 2018

Mark 9:35

“Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, “Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all.””

from
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?version=NIV&search=Mark%209:35