News
Christianity Today Magazine News and analysis from the world's leading Christian magazine.
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Digital Lectors for a Postliterate Age
by Brad East on May 8, 2024 at 4:00 pm
Postliterate people still need God’s Word, and online Bible ventures have found eager listeners.
Suppose you agree that ours is an increasingly postliterate age. The average person, including the average Christian, is reading less, and Christians of all ages, especially the young, lack the basics of biblical literacy. Is that all there is to say? Is hunger for Scripture simply dying out?
By no means. Of all tech pessimists I may be chief, yet few things excite me more than what’s happening online with the Bible. What we see is not declining interest in Scripture but an explosion of it. The question is not, therefore, whether people still need and actively seek nourishment from God’s Word but how best to get it to them.
Let me share a snapshot of some promising attempts to give an answer—to meet the world’s deep hunger with the pleasures, depths, and inexhaustible beauties of the Word of God. Call them “digital lectors.” In the preliterate era, most believers never read the Bible for themselves but heard it read aloud in the gathered assembly of worship. Those who read the Word were called lectors, which is Latin for “readers” and a term still used in liturgical traditions.
Online, new lectors are meeting the moment, presenting the Bible in fresh and creative ways. Sometimes, in a lovely closing of the ancient circle, they aren’t explaining or expounding the text, just reading it aloud. Either way, people are listening.
Let me begin with three overarching themes before turning to specific examples. The first and happiest thing to say about these online Bible ventures is that they are ecumenical. Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox are all rising to the occasion, using a mix of audio, video, and animation. So far as I can tell, there is little ...Continue reading...
-
Marilynne Robinson Reads Genesis Without Anxiety
by Matthew Mullins on May 8, 2024 at 3:00 pm
Unperturbed by debates over the book’s relationship to modern thought, she helps us appreciate its marriage of literary structure and theological claims.
In her latest book, Reading Genesis, Marilynne Robinson insists that modern readers have largely misunderstood the literary and theological significance of the Bible.
Among the most salient causes of this misunderstanding, she argues, is our tendency to read ancient texts through modern categories—history, myth, fiction, nonfiction—that do not map neatly onto ancient literature. The result is a never-ending and mostly unnecessary debate between those who approach Genesis as a catalog of events and those who read it as mythic pastiche, pieced together from various ancient sources.
We get a feel for Robinson’s impatience with this debate in her characterization of the factions warring over Noah’s flood: “One side in the controversy is rebuilding the ark to demonstrate its seaworthiness, or tramping up Ararat looking for its wreckage. The other sees the story as cribbed and fraudulent.” Both sides, Robinson concludes, are led astray by the same impulse to judge the veracity of Genesis on the basis of how closely it conforms to historical events.
In fact, as she argues at the outset, “the Bible is a work of theology, not simply a primary text upon which theology is based.” The implication for modern readers of Genesis is that when we focus primarily on the historicity of the Flood account, for example, we tend to ignore the arrangement of Genesis as a work of literature designed to grapple with theological questions.
Arranged with artistry
This is not to say that Robinson doubts whether all the events represented in Genesis took place or that she fails to consider its compositional history. The goal of Genesis, in her estimation, is not to offer a play-by-play of primeval events but ...Continue reading...
-
Died: Ferdie Cabiling, Philippines’ ‘Running Pastor’
by Caleb Maglaya Galaraga on May 8, 2024 at 2:00 pm
One of the founding leaders of Victory megachurch, he never stopped running to share the gospel.
Ferdinand “Ferdie” Cabiling, a bishop at one of the Philippines’ largest megachurches who ran across the Philippines to raise money for disadvantaged students, died April 1, the day after Easter. He was 58 years old.
Dubbed “the Running Pastor,” the moniker describes not only Cabiling’s epic race but how he lived his life and served as an evangelist. For 38 years, he was a vocational minister of Victory Christian Fellowship of the Philippines, which has nearly 150 locations in the country. The branch he led, Victory Metro Manila, averaged more than 75,000 people each Sunday.
In the past two years, his focus was on teaching evangelism to Victory leaders. Every time he received a teaching invitation, his answer was always yes, said his assistant, Faye Bonifacio.
“He was a maximizer,” Bonifacio said, noting that Cabiling developed a habit of taking short naps while parked at a gas station between long drives. “Because he liked to drive, he did a lot in a day.”
Hours before his death, Cabiling had visited a church member at a hospital an hour away from his hometown of Cuyapo before parking his car at a gas station, likely for a break before heading to his next destination. It was there that an attendant found his lifeless body and rushed him to the hospital he had just visited. Cabiling had died of a heart attack.
“He was a serious man of passion, action, and conviction,” wrote Steve Murrell, the founding pastor of Victory, the flagship church for the charismatic-leaning Every Nation Churches and Ministries, which has churches and campus ministries in 82 countries, in an Instagram post. “For 40 years, he was a part of every major decision made by Victory ...Continue reading...
-
Online Witch Doctors Lure South African Christians
by Nyasha Bhobo on May 8, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Churches are combating syncretism among millennials and Gen Z amid a rise of social media healers who call on ancestral spirits.
Millions of Black South Africans seek guidance from sangomas, traditional healers or so-called witch doctors who use their spiritual gifts to connect with ancestors, prescribe herbs to heal illnesses, and throw dry bones to predict the future.
It’s a centuries-old tradition that has continued in the majority-Christian country and has adapted for the internet age: A new breed of influencer sangomas are positioning themselves on social media as digital-entrepreneurial-spiritual seers.
Church leaders across several major denominations in South Africa have long decried the practice as involving “evil, devilish, and unclean spirits.” But as the online sagomas draw in a mass audience of millennial Christians—a generation eager to “decolonize” their lives and reconnect to indigenous African roots—church leaders have new concerns around syncretism as well as internet scams.
Condemnation of sangomas and African ancestral worship is the strongest cog uniting European-legacy churches like Anglicans, Baptists, and Catholics as well as African-initiated churches like the Zion Christian Church (ZCC), said Tendai Muchatuta, a cleric with the Apostolic of All Nations Church in Johannesburg.
Both kinds of churches say the practice, despite its popularity, is not compatible with Christianity.
The ZCC is the largest African-initiated church in Southern Africa, with about 12 million churchgoers, including some 9 million in South Africa. Bauleni Moloi, a ZCC pastor in Johannesburg, called sangomas “dubious agents of darkness out to sway Christians from the true focus on the gospel of the cross.”
But younger Christians are more likely to disagree. Many millennial and Gen Z South Africans embrace ...Continue reading...
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SBC Membership Falls to 47-Year Low, But Church Involvement Is Up
by Kate Shellnutt on May 7, 2024 at 7:00 pm
Amid the continued declines, Southern Baptists are celebrating back-to-back years of growth in worship attendance and baptism.
Despite years of record-setting declines shrinking the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) to its lowest membership in nearly half a century, Southern Baptists have begun to see some signs of life within their 46,906 churches.
Worship attendance, small group attendance, and baptisms were up last year in the SBC’s annual statistical report, released Tuesday, while membership fell below 13 million.
2023 marks 17 straight years of decline for the country’s biggest Protestant denomination. It’s down 3.3 million from its peak, with the steepest drops coming during the pandemic. The SBC lost 1.3 million members between 2020 and 2022 alone.
Beyond COVID-19 disruptions, Southern Baptists have recently confronted some contentious issues within their convention, responding to sexual abuse and clamping down on female preachers, which have led some congregations to leave the SBC (including prominent megachurch Saddleback Church).
But statistics indicate that church departures aren’t a significant driver of membership decline; the SBC was down 292 churches last year, just 0.63 percent of its total.
In 2023, membership fell by 241,000, its smallest decrease since 2018. Yet attendance at SBC churches increased 6.5 percent, reaching above 4 million a week for the first time since the pandemic.
Attendance at small groups and Bible studies ticked up 4 percent to 2.4 million.
With fewer Americans than ever attending church and religious disaffiliation on the rise, leaders see even small increases in engagement and discipleship as worth celebrating.
It’s the first time in over a decade that SBC worship attendance has grown two years in a row, though it still lags behind pre-pandemic numbers. Back in ...Continue reading...
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The Key to Fighting Sex Trafficking? Showing up.
by Angela Lu Fulton in West Java on May 7, 2024 at 3:00 pm
Indonesia's Compassion First isn’t knocking down doors, but caring for victims and tutoring at-risk youth living in cemeteries.
Inside a cemetery in West Java, a woman rests on a mattress laid on top of a gravestone beneath the oak trees. The graveyard is home not only to the dead but to the living poor, who have nowhere else to go.
Residents of the Rose Cemetery community collect garbage, drive pedicabs, or clean graves by day. In the northern section of the cemetery, about 200 families live in brick and tin buildings lining a ditch filled with trash and milky sewage water. At night, many women resort to prostitution to provide for their families. Their daughters are often sold—or kidnapped—into the sex trade. (CT changed the names of the cemeteries and only used the first names of its residents for security reasons.)
Compassion First (CF) offered tutoring, parenting classes, and cooking classes for the community on a blue covered porch in the cemetery complex. Recently they moved to a new community center nearby. CF focuses on fighting sex trafficking in Indonesia, and here at the cemetery, that means community development among families vulnerable to exploitation.
Susi and Mala, two mothers who have lived in the community their whole lives, noted that neighbors rarely knew one another in the past. CF arrived during the COVID-19 pandemic—initially to provide food for the community and scholarships to the children. Since then, the neighborhood has become much more close-knit and better resourced. For young girls, this could make the difference between whether they are trafficked or not.
Susi learned from the cooking class how to make seblak (a spicy dish made of wet crackers and meat or seafood, smothered in sambal chili paste) and now sells it to supplement her income. Mala learned about the five love languages in the parenting class ...Continue reading...
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Duke Ellington Read His Bible in the Bath
by Larry Tye on May 7, 2024 at 3:00 pm
An excerpt from Larry Tye’s The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America.
“Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?” asked a 1921 Ladies Home Journal article. Whimsical wordplay aside, the question would become a serious one for mid-century America, as parsons and priests blamed jazz for soaring juvenile crime rates, drugs, and extramarital sex. A 1960 poll found that, among Black preachers, just 1 in 5 wanted to let jazz or blues into their services. Decades before, a religion editor at the Pittsburgh Courier had denounced Louis Armstrong’s “sacrilegious desecration of Spirituals.” Duke Ellington’s music was “considered worldly,” counseled the Rev. John D. Bussey, explaining why the local 1966 Baptist Ministers Conference had unanimously passed his resolution opposing a performance.
But whatever commandments they were breaking—and there were plenty, from slighting the Sabbath to serial adultery—Duke, Louis, and king of swing Count Basie all seemed to take the Christian faith they’d been raised in seriously. And that faith found its way into their music.
For Louis Armstrong, the connection was there from the very beginning, when he learned to sing in his mother’s Sanctified church. “The ‘whole ‘Congregation would be “Wailing—‘Singing like ‘mad and ‘sound so ‘beautiful,” he wrote with his characteristic expressive, idiosyncratic punctuation. “I’d have myself a ‘Ball in ‘Church, especially when those ‘Sisters ‘would get ‘So ‘Carried away while ‘Rev’ would be ‘right in the ‘Middle of his ‘Sermon. ‘Man those ‘Church ‘Sisters would ‘begin ‘Shouting ‘So—until ...Continue reading...
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Yes, Paul Really Taught Mutual Submission
by Murray Vasser on May 7, 2024 at 3:00 pm
Why Wayne Grudem’s interpretation of Ephesians 5:21 is untenable.
In Ephesians 5:21, Paul instructs Christians to “submit to one another.” These words have traditionally been understood to require mutual submission, even among family members. The reformer John Calvin, for example, acknowledged that the notion of a father submitting to his child or a husband submitting to his wife might seem “strange at first glance,” but he never questioned that such submission is indeed what Paul prescribes.
In more recent years, however, this reading of Ephesians 5:21 has been called into question—ironically, in the name of theological conservatism. Many evangelical scholars now assert that the submission in this verse is not mutual submission (everyone submits to everyone) but one-directional submission to those in authority (some submit to others). The most outspoken proponent of this view is Wayne Grudem, a prominent theologian who helped establish the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.
Grudem, who recently announced his retirement from teaching, has argued for more than three decades that Ephesians 5:21 could be paraphrased as follows: “Those who are under authority should be subject to others among you who have authority over them.” On Grudem’s reading, this verse requires a wife to submit to her husband, but it does not in any sense require a husband to submit to his wife.
In defense of this interpretation, Grudem appeals to the meaning of hypotassō, the Greek verb translated “to submit” or “to be subject.” Grudem claims that this verb “always means to be subject to someone else’s authority, in all Greek literature, Christian and non-Christian.”
“In every example we can ...Continue reading...
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Let the Neurodivergent Children Come to Me
by Sunita Theiss on May 6, 2024 at 7:00 pm
Gentle parenting is one tool to train up children who have disabilities with love and wisdom.
As a toddler, my son would often lash out at other kids for no apparent reason, causing incidents at daycare, at home, and in the church nursery. At times, he would even hurt himself in his distress. After more than a year of trying to encourage the “right” behavior, I felt like this was more than age-appropriate tantrums.
We sought an evaluation, and our son received multiple diagnoses that confirmed he’s neurodivergent, a term that commonly encompasses brain-based differences such as ADHD, autism, learning difficulties, and more.
One way to consider how my son experiences the world is to think of his brain like a highly sensitive smoke detector. A typical smoke detector on your kitchen ceiling will alert you to a potential emergency in the room. However, one that is highly sensitive might alert you to a neighbor smoking a cigarette as he walks by your window on his way to the store.
My son’s nervous system makes him similarly sensitive. He’s hyper-attuned to potential threats in the world around him, and sometimes the most typical everyday interactions can become extremely distressing for him, even resulting in acute anxiety attacks.
As first-time parents, we did our best to follow conventional advice about establishing routines and maintaining authority. We disciplined him with consequences, withheld privileges, and rewarded any display of self-control. Any physical discipline only succeeded in making us seem like a threat and triggering his fight-or-flight response.
Traditional forms of discipline were not working, and my husband and I knew we needed to change the way we parented. Yet I still wondered if this was compatible with my faith. I could not escape the maxim “Spare the rod, spoil ...Continue reading...
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If Panama Closes the Darién Gap, Would Evangelicals Care?
by Franco Iacomini on May 6, 2024 at 6:00 pm
(UPDATED) Migrant rights have been off-radar for many Panamanian Christians. But as pressures increase, some are speaking out ahead of this weekend’s general elections.
Update (May 6, 2024): José Raúl Mulino will be Panama’s new president after the Realizando Metas (Realizing Goals) party candidate won 34.2 percent of the vote.
Mulino began the campaign as the running mate of former president Ricardo Martinelli. (Martinelli previously served from 2009 to 2014.) When Martinelli was booted from the ticket after receiving a 10-year prison sentence for money laundering, Mulino assumed the top of the ticket. While other candidates fought to get him removed from the ballot for bypassing the party’s selection process, the country’s supreme court declared it legal two days prior to the election.
Last month, Mulino promised to close the Darién Gap, where tens of thousands of migrants have crossed from Colombia to Panama on their journey to the US border. On Monday, the president-elect reiterated his desire to do so, saying that he will work with the governments of Colombia and the United States to jointly create a long-term solution.
“Currently we have technology to survey the border, and I hope to start a repatriation process as early as possible,” he said in an interview Monday with Radio Blu.
Mulino is set to be inaugurated on July 1.
----
On May 5, Panamanians will vote for a new president. The outcome of this election may have consequences for far more than its 4.4 million residents; it could change the migration reality for the hundreds of thousands of people traveling from South America, Asia, and Africa who pass through the Central American country en route to the United States.
Leading in the polls is José Raúl Mulino, a candidate for Realizando Metas (Realizing Goals), a right-wing populist party founded by disgraced president Ricardo ...Continue reading...
Christianity Today Magazine News and analysis from the world's leading Christian magazine.
-
Digital Lectors for a Postliterate Age
by Brad East on May 8, 2024 at 4:00 pm
Postliterate people still need God’s Word, and online Bible ventures have found eager listeners. Suppose you agree that ours is an increasingly postliterate age. The average person, including the average Christian, is reading less, and Christians of all ages, especially the young, lack the basics of biblical literacy. Is that all there is to say? Is hunger for Scripture simply dying out? By no means. Of all tech pessimists I may be chief, yet few things excite me more than what’s happening online with the Bible. What we see is not declining interest in Scripture but an explosion of it. The question is not, therefore, whether people still need and actively seek nourishment from God’s Word but how best to get it to them. Let me share a snapshot of some promising attempts to give an answer—to meet the world’s deep hunger with the pleasures, depths, and inexhaustible beauties of the Word of God. Call them “digital lectors.” In the preliterate era, most believers never read the Bible for themselves but heard it read aloud in the gathered assembly of worship. Those who read the Word were called lectors, which is Latin for “readers” and a term still used in liturgical traditions. Online, new lectors are meeting the moment, presenting the Bible in fresh and creative ways. Sometimes, in a lovely closing of the ancient circle, they aren’t explaining or expounding the text, just reading it aloud. Either way, people are listening. Let me begin with three overarching themes before turning to specific examples. The first and happiest thing to say about these online Bible ventures is that they are ecumenical. Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox are all rising to the occasion, using a mix of audio, video, and animation. So far as I can tell, there is little ...Continue reading...
-
Marilynne Robinson Reads Genesis Without Anxiety
by Matthew Mullins on May 8, 2024 at 3:00 pm
Unperturbed by debates over the book’s relationship to modern thought, she helps us appreciate its marriage of literary structure and theological claims. In her latest book, Reading Genesis, Marilynne Robinson insists that modern readers have largely misunderstood the literary and theological significance of the Bible. Among the most salient causes of this misunderstanding, she argues, is our tendency to read ancient texts through modern categories—history, myth, fiction, nonfiction—that do not map neatly onto ancient literature. The result is a never-ending and mostly unnecessary debate between those who approach Genesis as a catalog of events and those who read it as mythic pastiche, pieced together from various ancient sources. We get a feel for Robinson’s impatience with this debate in her characterization of the factions warring over Noah’s flood: “One side in the controversy is rebuilding the ark to demonstrate its seaworthiness, or tramping up Ararat looking for its wreckage. The other sees the story as cribbed and fraudulent.” Both sides, Robinson concludes, are led astray by the same impulse to judge the veracity of Genesis on the basis of how closely it conforms to historical events. In fact, as she argues at the outset, “the Bible is a work of theology, not simply a primary text upon which theology is based.” The implication for modern readers of Genesis is that when we focus primarily on the historicity of the Flood account, for example, we tend to ignore the arrangement of Genesis as a work of literature designed to grapple with theological questions. Arranged with artistry This is not to say that Robinson doubts whether all the events represented in Genesis took place or that she fails to consider its compositional history. The goal of Genesis, in her estimation, is not to offer a play-by-play of primeval events but ...Continue reading...
-
Died: Ferdie Cabiling, Philippines’ ‘Running Pastor’
by Caleb Maglaya Galaraga on May 8, 2024 at 2:00 pm
One of the founding leaders of Victory megachurch, he never stopped running to share the gospel. Ferdinand “Ferdie” Cabiling, a bishop at one of the Philippines’ largest megachurches who ran across the Philippines to raise money for disadvantaged students, died April 1, the day after Easter. He was 58 years old. Dubbed “the Running Pastor,” the moniker describes not only Cabiling’s epic race but how he lived his life and served as an evangelist. For 38 years, he was a vocational minister of Victory Christian Fellowship of the Philippines, which has nearly 150 locations in the country. The branch he led, Victory Metro Manila, averaged more than 75,000 people each Sunday. In the past two years, his focus was on teaching evangelism to Victory leaders. Every time he received a teaching invitation, his answer was always yes, said his assistant, Faye Bonifacio. “He was a maximizer,” Bonifacio said, noting that Cabiling developed a habit of taking short naps while parked at a gas station between long drives. “Because he liked to drive, he did a lot in a day.” Hours before his death, Cabiling had visited a church member at a hospital an hour away from his hometown of Cuyapo before parking his car at a gas station, likely for a break before heading to his next destination. It was there that an attendant found his lifeless body and rushed him to the hospital he had just visited. Cabiling had died of a heart attack. “He was a serious man of passion, action, and conviction,” wrote Steve Murrell, the founding pastor of Victory, the flagship church for the charismatic-leaning Every Nation Churches and Ministries, which has churches and campus ministries in 82 countries, in an Instagram post. “For 40 years, he was a part of every major decision made by Victory ...Continue reading...
-
Online Witch Doctors Lure South African Christians
by Nyasha Bhobo on May 8, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Churches are combating syncretism among millennials and Gen Z amid a rise of social media healers who call on ancestral spirits. Millions of Black South Africans seek guidance from sangomas, traditional healers or so-called witch doctors who use their spiritual gifts to connect with ancestors, prescribe herbs to heal illnesses, and throw dry bones to predict the future. It’s a centuries-old tradition that has continued in the majority-Christian country and has adapted for the internet age: A new breed of influencer sangomas are positioning themselves on social media as digital-entrepreneurial-spiritual seers. Church leaders across several major denominations in South Africa have long decried the practice as involving “evil, devilish, and unclean spirits.” But as the online sagomas draw in a mass audience of millennial Christians—a generation eager to “decolonize” their lives and reconnect to indigenous African roots—church leaders have new concerns around syncretism as well as internet scams. Condemnation of sangomas and African ancestral worship is the strongest cog uniting European-legacy churches like Anglicans, Baptists, and Catholics as well as African-initiated churches like the Zion Christian Church (ZCC), said Tendai Muchatuta, a cleric with the Apostolic of All Nations Church in Johannesburg. Both kinds of churches say the practice, despite its popularity, is not compatible with Christianity. The ZCC is the largest African-initiated church in Southern Africa, with about 12 million churchgoers, including some 9 million in South Africa. Bauleni Moloi, a ZCC pastor in Johannesburg, called sangomas “dubious agents of darkness out to sway Christians from the true focus on the gospel of the cross.” But younger Christians are more likely to disagree. Many millennial and Gen Z South Africans embrace ...Continue reading...
-
SBC Membership Falls to 47-Year Low, But Church Involvement Is Up
by Kate Shellnutt on May 7, 2024 at 7:00 pm
Amid the continued declines, Southern Baptists are celebrating back-to-back years of growth in worship attendance and baptism. Despite years of record-setting declines shrinking the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) to its lowest membership in nearly half a century, Southern Baptists have begun to see some signs of life within their 46,906 churches. Worship attendance, small group attendance, and baptisms were up last year in the SBC’s annual statistical report, released Tuesday, while membership fell below 13 million. 2023 marks 17 straight years of decline for the country’s biggest Protestant denomination. It’s down 3.3 million from its peak, with the steepest drops coming during the pandemic. The SBC lost 1.3 million members between 2020 and 2022 alone. Beyond COVID-19 disruptions, Southern Baptists have recently confronted some contentious issues within their convention, responding to sexual abuse and clamping down on female preachers, which have led some congregations to leave the SBC (including prominent megachurch Saddleback Church). But statistics indicate that church departures aren’t a significant driver of membership decline; the SBC was down 292 churches last year, just 0.63 percent of its total. In 2023, membership fell by 241,000, its smallest decrease since 2018. Yet attendance at SBC churches increased 6.5 percent, reaching above 4 million a week for the first time since the pandemic. Attendance at small groups and Bible studies ticked up 4 percent to 2.4 million. With fewer Americans than ever attending church and religious disaffiliation on the rise, leaders see even small increases in engagement and discipleship as worth celebrating. It’s the first time in over a decade that SBC worship attendance has grown two years in a row, though it still lags behind pre-pandemic numbers. Back in ...Continue reading...
-
The Key to Fighting Sex Trafficking? Showing up.
by Angela Lu Fulton in West Java on May 7, 2024 at 3:00 pm
Indonesia's Compassion First isn’t knocking down doors, but caring for victims and tutoring at-risk youth living in cemeteries. Inside a cemetery in West Java, a woman rests on a mattress laid on top of a gravestone beneath the oak trees. The graveyard is home not only to the dead but to the living poor, who have nowhere else to go. Residents of the Rose Cemetery community collect garbage, drive pedicabs, or clean graves by day. In the northern section of the cemetery, about 200 families live in brick and tin buildings lining a ditch filled with trash and milky sewage water. At night, many women resort to prostitution to provide for their families. Their daughters are often sold—or kidnapped—into the sex trade. (CT changed the names of the cemeteries and only used the first names of its residents for security reasons.) Compassion First (CF) offered tutoring, parenting classes, and cooking classes for the community on a blue covered porch in the cemetery complex. Recently they moved to a new community center nearby. CF focuses on fighting sex trafficking in Indonesia, and here at the cemetery, that means community development among families vulnerable to exploitation. Susi and Mala, two mothers who have lived in the community their whole lives, noted that neighbors rarely knew one another in the past. CF arrived during the COVID-19 pandemic—initially to provide food for the community and scholarships to the children. Since then, the neighborhood has become much more close-knit and better resourced. For young girls, this could make the difference between whether they are trafficked or not. Susi learned from the cooking class how to make seblak (a spicy dish made of wet crackers and meat or seafood, smothered in sambal chili paste) and now sells it to supplement her income. Mala learned about the five love languages in the parenting class ...Continue reading...
-
Duke Ellington Read His Bible in the Bath
by Larry Tye on May 7, 2024 at 3:00 pm
An excerpt from Larry Tye’s The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America. “Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?” asked a 1921 Ladies Home Journal article. Whimsical wordplay aside, the question would become a serious one for mid-century America, as parsons and priests blamed jazz for soaring juvenile crime rates, drugs, and extramarital sex. A 1960 poll found that, among Black preachers, just 1 in 5 wanted to let jazz or blues into their services. Decades before, a religion editor at the Pittsburgh Courier had denounced Louis Armstrong’s “sacrilegious desecration of Spirituals.” Duke Ellington’s music was “considered worldly,” counseled the Rev. John D. Bussey, explaining why the local 1966 Baptist Ministers Conference had unanimously passed his resolution opposing a performance. But whatever commandments they were breaking—and there were plenty, from slighting the Sabbath to serial adultery—Duke, Louis, and king of swing Count Basie all seemed to take the Christian faith they’d been raised in seriously. And that faith found its way into their music. For Louis Armstrong, the connection was there from the very beginning, when he learned to sing in his mother’s Sanctified church. “The ‘whole ‘Congregation would be “Wailing—‘Singing like ‘mad and ‘sound so ‘beautiful,” he wrote with his characteristic expressive, idiosyncratic punctuation. “I’d have myself a ‘Ball in ‘Church, especially when those ‘Sisters ‘would get ‘So ‘Carried away while ‘Rev’ would be ‘right in the ‘Middle of his ‘Sermon. ‘Man those ‘Church ‘Sisters would ‘begin ‘Shouting ‘So—until ...Continue reading...
-
Yes, Paul Really Taught Mutual Submission
by Murray Vasser on May 7, 2024 at 3:00 pm
Why Wayne Grudem’s interpretation of Ephesians 5:21 is untenable. In Ephesians 5:21, Paul instructs Christians to “submit to one another.” These words have traditionally been understood to require mutual submission, even among family members. The reformer John Calvin, for example, acknowledged that the notion of a father submitting to his child or a husband submitting to his wife might seem “strange at first glance,” but he never questioned that such submission is indeed what Paul prescribes. In more recent years, however, this reading of Ephesians 5:21 has been called into question—ironically, in the name of theological conservatism. Many evangelical scholars now assert that the submission in this verse is not mutual submission (everyone submits to everyone) but one-directional submission to those in authority (some submit to others). The most outspoken proponent of this view is Wayne Grudem, a prominent theologian who helped establish the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. Grudem, who recently announced his retirement from teaching, has argued for more than three decades that Ephesians 5:21 could be paraphrased as follows: “Those who are under authority should be subject to others among you who have authority over them.” On Grudem’s reading, this verse requires a wife to submit to her husband, but it does not in any sense require a husband to submit to his wife. In defense of this interpretation, Grudem appeals to the meaning of hypotassō, the Greek verb translated “to submit” or “to be subject.” Grudem claims that this verb “always means to be subject to someone else’s authority, in all Greek literature, Christian and non-Christian.” “In every example we can ...Continue reading...
-
Let the Neurodivergent Children Come to Me
by Sunita Theiss on May 6, 2024 at 7:00 pm
Gentle parenting is one tool to train up children who have disabilities with love and wisdom. As a toddler, my son would often lash out at other kids for no apparent reason, causing incidents at daycare, at home, and in the church nursery. At times, he would even hurt himself in his distress. After more than a year of trying to encourage the “right” behavior, I felt like this was more than age-appropriate tantrums. We sought an evaluation, and our son received multiple diagnoses that confirmed he’s neurodivergent, a term that commonly encompasses brain-based differences such as ADHD, autism, learning difficulties, and more. One way to consider how my son experiences the world is to think of his brain like a highly sensitive smoke detector. A typical smoke detector on your kitchen ceiling will alert you to a potential emergency in the room. However, one that is highly sensitive might alert you to a neighbor smoking a cigarette as he walks by your window on his way to the store. My son’s nervous system makes him similarly sensitive. He’s hyper-attuned to potential threats in the world around him, and sometimes the most typical everyday interactions can become extremely distressing for him, even resulting in acute anxiety attacks. As first-time parents, we did our best to follow conventional advice about establishing routines and maintaining authority. We disciplined him with consequences, withheld privileges, and rewarded any display of self-control. Any physical discipline only succeeded in making us seem like a threat and triggering his fight-or-flight response. Traditional forms of discipline were not working, and my husband and I knew we needed to change the way we parented. Yet I still wondered if this was compatible with my faith. I could not escape the maxim “Spare the rod, spoil ...Continue reading...
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If Panama Closes the Darién Gap, Would Evangelicals Care?
by Franco Iacomini on May 6, 2024 at 6:00 pm
(UPDATED) Migrant rights have been off-radar for many Panamanian Christians. But as pressures increase, some are speaking out ahead of this weekend’s general elections. Update (May 6, 2024): José Raúl Mulino will be Panama’s new president after the Realizando Metas (Realizing Goals) party candidate won 34.2 percent of the vote. Mulino began the campaign as the running mate of former president Ricardo Martinelli. (Martinelli previously served from 2009 to 2014.) When Martinelli was booted from the ticket after receiving a 10-year prison sentence for money laundering, Mulino assumed the top of the ticket. While other candidates fought to get him removed from the ballot for bypassing the party’s selection process, the country’s supreme court declared it legal two days prior to the election. Last month, Mulino promised to close the Darién Gap, where tens of thousands of migrants have crossed from Colombia to Panama on their journey to the US border. On Monday, the president-elect reiterated his desire to do so, saying that he will work with the governments of Colombia and the United States to jointly create a long-term solution. “Currently we have technology to survey the border, and I hope to start a repatriation process as early as possible,” he said in an interview Monday with Radio Blu. Mulino is set to be inaugurated on July 1. ---- On May 5, Panamanians will vote for a new president. The outcome of this election may have consequences for far more than its 4.4 million residents; it could change the migration reality for the hundreds of thousands of people traveling from South America, Asia, and Africa who pass through the Central American country en route to the United States. Leading in the polls is José Raúl Mulino, a candidate for Realizando Metas (Realizing Goals), a right-wing populist party founded by disgraced president Ricardo ...Continue reading...