BIBLE ENRICHED SPIRITUAL TRUTHS

Tuesday, 29 March 2022

The Rise of the ‘Umms’

Unlike "Nones" and "Dones," many church-adjacent Christians want to return to a local body—but they feel stuck.

For the first time in my nearly 40 years, I do not belong to a church body.

Each Sunday I awake with a longing to gather around song, Scripture, and sacrament. Most of those mornings my wife and I walk to the nursing home to celebrate the Eucharist with a faithful but forgotten few.

This year my wife and I want to plant a church in Chicagoland, but many weeks I am left wondering, Where do we fit in?

Recently, I was lamenting this season with a friend. He echoed my sentiment, “I’m also floating without a church—it isn’t ideal, just the way it is.” Our exchange wasn’t significant, just two friends consoling each other through ecclesial purgatory. Later that week, I heard similar thoughts repeated by my neighbors who are new parents.

Again, this sentiment was echoed by a friend who works at a large Christian nonprofit. Over text messages and phone calls, my old roommate and my denominational executive repeated a similar status. But what really caught my attention is when I heard my students and colleagues at Northern Seminary describe themselves and their congregants in much the same way.

All expressed a strong commitment to Jesus and a desire to be part of the church, but they are not active in a local congregation. This growing segment of believers is what I am labeling the “umms.”

Dones, nones, and umms

COVID-19 has been described as a global x-ray, revealing what was hidden in our systems and relationships all along. To be more precise, COVID-19 seems to be an accelerated x-ray, revealing and amplifying these hidden truths at an expedited pace.

Acquaintances became strangers as relational ties grew strained. Economic inequalities became glaringly obvious. ...

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‘Turning Red’ Teaches Kids to Feed, Not Tame, the Beast Within

The film departs from biblical wisdom on how we should deal with our inner mess.

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

So begins Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” in which Samsa is reviled for his transformation into a mammoth cockroach. His family hides him away until he dies. Then they go on with their lives, thankful to not deal with that problem anymore.

What do we do with this absurdist 20th-century story? It’s a tale that compels readers to question our own metamorphoses or changes. Over the course of our lives, we all change and grow, so how do these developments (or, in the case of Samsa, mutations) affect those around us? After all, we do not belong to ourselves. We cannot become beasts or angels without it hurting or helping our families, friends, and neighbors.

If you’re Meilin Lee in Turning Red, however, such wisdom of age-old philosophy is seemingly disregarded.

Philosophy is about the love of wisdom, and our culture is training us to either desire or disdain wisdom. Every world religion has a different conceptualization of wisdom, but for Christians, Wisdom is Jesus Christ.

When watching Disney films, I don’t expect the animation to move my family toward that highest end (although I was surprised by Encanto), but I do hope their movies don’t persuade my children against the grain of conventional wisdom. Unfortunately, Turning Red is a film that departs from that wisdom and embraces a messy philosophy.

I had high hopes for the movie, and I watched it with my children on the day it was released. I could not wait to see a contemporary Asian hero and the foregrounding of the mother-daughter relationship. (I enjoyed Brave, and I consider ...

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Died: LaShun Pace, Unstoppable Gospel Singer

She praised God through personal tragedy.

LaShun Pace sang of God’s power. With a voice that could hold an angelic note or drop down to a sinner’s growl, she declared the Lord’s victory on a revival circuit in the 1970s, on the Billboard charts in the 1990s, and on TikTok in the 2020s. She sang of a God revealed in times of trouble—belting it out, even as she went through her own unbearable suffering.

Pace, a founding member of the Anointed Pace Sisters and a solo gospel singer with eight studio albums, died on March 21 at age 60.

She was remembered as the voice of the Black church experience, one of “the greatest singers to ever touch this planet,” and a gospel music legend.

“My mother was a genuine, authentic woman of God,” daughter Aarion Rhodes told an Atlanta TV news station. “She sang the Word of God. She preached the Word of God. But more importantly she lived it.”

Tarrian LaShun Pace was born on September 6, 1961, in Poole Creek, Atlanta, a Black community that would disappear almost without a trace with the expansion of the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Her father, Murphy, worked as a carpenter. Her mother, Bettie Ann, cleaned classrooms at a school. Both parents were active ministers in the Church of God in Christ (COGIC).

Pace was the fifth of 10 children. She had one brother, Murphy III, called M.J., and eight sisters: Duranice, Phyllis, June, Melonda, Dejuaii, Leslie, Latrice, and Lydia.

When the large and growing household started to get out of control and some of the older children started to get in trouble, Bettie Ann prayed for help. She felt God tell her to gather the children to sing.

“And so she did,” Pace later wrote in her memoir. “God moved through her ...

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Visiting Prisoners in Jesus’ Day

Helping detained people was a shocking calling in the first century.

Whenever I take my shoes off at the security entrance of the Muskegon Correctional Facility, I feel like I am stepping onto holy ground. In the Michigan prison and its classroom, a true gift exchange happens that seems filled with the presence of God.

Christians involved in prison ministries, advocacy organizations, and prison educational programs—such as the Hope-Western Prison Education Program, which I am part of—trace their work back to Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 25.

Today, it’s not the least bit shocking that someone like me, a professor of ethics and theology, would visit prisoners. I won’t lose my friends or my job over it. I won’t be arrested or assaulted. Instead, it is one of the richest classroom experiences I have ever had.

But for Jesus’ listeners, the risks of visiting incarcerated people were enormous. Anyone who brought a prisoner much-needed food, clothing, medical care, comfort, or hope risked being seen as guilty by association, imprisoned, or even killed.

And yet, early Christians did not focus on their own danger but rather saw what they did as a fitting way to follow in the steps of Jesus, who cared for, suffered for, and liberated others.

The extensive way early Christians visited and cared for those in prison was countercultural. There were not any sort of prison ministries in the Jewish or Roman cultures of that time. “Visiting the prisoner” wasn’t mentioned in Old Testament lists of righteous actions.

And yet, visiting prisoners quickly became a practice the early church was known for. They came to see prison ministry as the fitting response to Jesus’ statement about the blessed ones who would inherit “the kingdom prepared for you ...

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Colorism, Microaggressions, and White Supremacy with Ekemini Uwan

Our identities are often influenced by our surroundings—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Everyone struggles with issues of identity. Maybe it’s the way we look or the amount of success we have achieved, but either way, the question “Who am I?” is fundamental. That’s why when we allow others or our culture to answer that question for us, it can lead to devastating consequences. In this episode of VOICES’ Where Ya From? podcast, Rasool speaks with theologian Ekemini Uwan and discovers how the ideology of white supremacy impacted not only the way she viewed herself but her relationship with Christ.

Ekemini Uwan is a public theologian and writer who has dedicated her life to combating racism and bringing awareness to the issues of colorism, microaggressions, and white supremacy. She is a host of Truth’s Table, a popular podcast for black women, and holds a Master of Divinity degree from Westminster Theological Seminary.

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Monday, 28 March 2022

What Lent Teaches Me About the Vices of Time

Fasting resists our society’s expectations about efficiency and instant gratification.

Several days after the dinner party, I was still thinking about the perfect disk of salami I’d wanted to eat—and didn’t. As I write this, several days later, it is still Lent, and I am still craving the meat I’ve sworn off these 40 days.

When Ash Wednesday arrived a couple of weeks ago, I was in the mood for renunciation. seemed a good and right thing. Time, however, threshed my willpower from spiritual endurance. Never has the book of Numbers—providentially scheduled in my Bible reading plan for the Lenten season—spoken with such force: “If only we had meat to eat!” (Num. 11:4).

Lenten fasting is hard, though not for all the reasons I’ve expected. It’s not just my immoderate appetite for food that has been checked these 40 days, even if I persist in pining for that slice of salami. Perhaps even more importantly, what’s been exposed is my disordered relationship with time. I want the quick fix of transformation. I do not want the slow burn of 40 days of prayer and persistence and reliance on grace.

In his book Fasting, Scot McKnight reminds us that fasting is not instrumental. It is not a season of giving up food in order to get blessing from God. There are many reasons Christians throughout the centuries have committed to the practice of fasting.

Augustine saw the benefit of denying ourselves “licit” pleasures in order to grow our capacity for denying “illicit” ones. In the Middle Ages, Gregory the Great believed fasting could check our patterns of eating “too daintily, too sumptuously, too hastily, too greedily, too much.” Even more-contemporary Christian thinkers, like the late Dallas Willard, have emphasized the connection ...

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Friday, 25 March 2022

The Missionary Kids Are Not Alright

Third culture kids are struggling with a crisis of care in the church, statistics and experts say.

“How are you doing?” my professor asks me as I enter the empty classroom.
“They’re bombing my city” is all I can say.
“Oh no,” they mutter.
They remember where I’m from.
— A portion of a poem by Abigail de Vuyst, age 18, American missionary kid from Ukraine

American missionary kid and college freshman Abigail de Vuyst already missed her lifelong home of Ukraine while figuring out college classes in Michigan. Now she spends her days worrying about her friends. Are they safe in their cellars? Will they be able to get out?

“It’s hard just sitting and watching everything happen,” she said.

Home is a complex concept for missionary kids (MKs)—whose citizenship is in one country and whose upbringing is in another. The MK’s world, even in the best of circumstances, is “shifting sand,” said MK advocate and author Michele Phoenix. And now?

“We’re wrecked,” said Annie Wiltse, a teacher at the international school in Ukraine that de Vuyst used to attend. She and her students had just 24 hours to pack for their evacuation. “This is … in some cases the only home that they have ever known.”

Records aren’t available for the number of kids living with their missionary parents in other countries, but World Christian Database’s 2020 figures show there were an estimated 6,000 Christian missionaries in Ukraine and 425,000 foreign missionaries around the world.

Some American missionary kids, feeling powerless, are stuck in the United States because of COVID-19 restrictions, others are waiting in Kansas for an unknown amount of time because of kidnappings in Haiti, and many kids who make the transition ...

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