Black Christians Play a Crucial Role in Athlete Activism

Though sports ministries long espoused a “colorblind” approach to race, believers in pro sports are leading the calls for racial justice.

Black Christian athletes, seeing their careers as a platform for the gospel, are speaking out for racial justice following the death of George Floyd and the shooting of Jacob Blake.

It’s a pattern that has been building since 2016. Months before Colin Kaepernick’s peaceful protests against police brutality and systematic racism swept through the NFL (and swept Kaepernick out of the league), Christian WNBA star Maya Moore and her Minnesota Lynx teammates wore “Black Lives Matter” shirts during warm-ups. Moore would later step away from professional basketball to focus on racial justice work, announcing her decision with an essay that proclaimed her life’s purpose “is to know Jesus and make Him known.”

By 2017 numerous NFL players, including Anquan Boldin, Eric Reid, and Malcolm Jenkins, were also invoking their Christian faith as a motivating factor for their involvement in protests and reform initiatives. Those numbers have only grown.

While some black Christian athletes have abstained from the recent wave of activism in stadiums and arenas—Orlando Magic forward Jonathan Isaac, for example, cited his understanding of the gospel when declining to fully participate in a pre-game racial justice ceremony—far more have played a leading role.

To name just a few: In the NFL, New Orleans Saint Demario Davis—known for his “Man of God” headband—has championed Black Lives Matter and encouraged athletes to hold the league accountable as it works to address systemic racism. Former player and football analyst Emmanuel Acho launched the viral video series “Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man,” informing Sports Spectrum that he recites Matthew ...

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The Apostle Paul: Partnership in Evangelism and Mission Part Two

Overcoming the inhibitors of ministry through the Apostle Paul's teachings.

Movements in Partnerships:

I have not yet met a church or ministry organization that does not have an innate desire to move people along some form of the continuum toward maturity in Christ. The hard truth is, though, that most churches and ministry organisations do not have an existing plan on how to move people forward in their faith and in their ministry involvement to become multipliers in ministry and not only maintenance-driven. Many have written about one possible cause – a discipleship deficit – which continues to rob evangelicals in particular of missional people serving the purposes of God in a timely fashion. My diagram below, entitled the “Partnership Matrix,” illustrates the movement of people toward ministry involvement and multiplication. In this article, I will explore the various stages in the process toward multiplication and unpack several ministry inhibitors that remain as obstacles for believers in moving to the next stage of their growth in their conceptualisation, articulation, involvement in the missio Dei.

Most people that have grown up in evangelical churches around the world would appreciate the centrality of the Word and the quintessence of the atonement of Christ to the Christian faith and a need for repentance and conversion. These are important themes in the evangelical discourse. Many, however, have had a tainted understanding of mission and evangelism, believing that these tasks were either for the professional, gifted, or were to be in the realm of the pastorate. In other words, most evanglicals held no responsibility for these central aspects of the Christian faith. This has led to the current inertia evangelicals have experienced in church life in recent decades ...

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Women Read the Bible More Than Men. Why?

Best-selling study authors and Bible teachers unpack the factors that drive women to prioritize time in Scripture.

When Anne Graham Lotz was a girl, she went on a 14-mile hike in the Blue Ridge Mountains with a friend. Eventually, they found themselves lost in a laurel thicket, unsure of the way home. “Laurel thickets can cover the side of a mountain, and you’re dense in thicket,” Lotz told CT. “You can’t see up, out, either side.” Fortunately, her friend had packed a compass, and with that compass, they were able to set their course for north and find their way out of the laurel thicket. “We got back to the trail that we had lost, and got to where we needed to be,” Lotz said, “and we were fine.”

Lotz compares that experience to how she approaches Bible reading each and every day. “When I get up in the morning and spend time with the Lord, it’s like setting my compass, so that regardless of which way I’m turned during the day, the needle turns north,” Lotz said. “My thoughts, my attention, they’re centered on the Lord.

Women Lead in Scripture Engagement

Lotz’s commitment to daily time in the Word reflects the Bible engagement habits of many American women. The Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study reports that among evangelical Protestants, 66 percent of women read Scripture at least once a week, compared to 58 percent of men. While these Bible-reading habits may involve engaging with Scripture during a church service or midweek Bible study, women also outpace men when it comes to engaging with Scripture outside of church. According to the 2017 Baylor Religion Survey, 36 percent of Christian women spend weekly or daily time alone reading the Bible, compared to 29 percent of Christian men.

The 2020 State of the Bible survey, ...

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My Savior Had Arrived—but He Wasn’t Elijah Muhammad

Why I left the Nation of Islam to follow Christ.

The year I was born, my father joined the Nation of Islam. He was in prison at the time. Some of our earliest family pictures show him holding me inside the facility.

Before being sent to prison, my father had been introduced to Nation of Islam teachings. During his incarceration, he officially became a member, joining a growing number of African American men for whom the nation signified community, identity, reform, and dignity.

After converting, my father placed our family under the authority of the nation’s leader, Elijah Muhammad. We belonged to Temple 7B in Corona, Queens, a mosque annexed by the famed Temple 7 in Harlem, where Malcolm X had once served as minister. (Louis Farrakhan was in charge of Temple 7 at the time.) Malcolm had been assassinated only seven years earlier, and no one dared mention his name, almost as if there were an unspoken rule forbidding it.

The Invisible God

Growing up within the Nation of Islam, I was exposed to certain beliefs that, in retrospect, seem quite bizarre. Sometimes we would look up at the night sky, spot the lights of planes flying at high altitudes, and wonder if we had caught a glimpse of the “Mother Plane.” According to the nation’s leaders, this was a spacecraft equipped by Allah to destroy the world and its white ruling structures in what they called “the Battle in the Sky,” a reference to Armageddon.

Other memories are more pleasant. Scented body oils and the fragrance of burning incense were common in every Nation of Islam household alongside pictures of the nation’s founder, “Master” Wallace Fard Muhammad, and Elijah Muhammad, his successor. I also have fond recollections of cheering for Muhammad Ali. To us, he was something ...

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The Unsung Inspiration for the Protestant Reformation: the Ethiopian Church

For the Reformers, renewing the church was a Pentecost moment tied to the global body of Christ.

There are some parts of the world that you never expect to see. A few years after the Iron Curtain fell, my parents took me out of school to visit Russia. My dad was taking pastoral study leave and was involved in the missionary outreach foundation of our denomination.

Our first days were spent in Moscow, an austere but extraordinary city that was home to soldiers, beggars, and the Bolshoi Ballet. Our overnight sleeper train from Moscow to St. Petersburg required bodyguards to protect our travel group from train robberies. Tourism was new, so we were some of the first Americans to set foot in the Kremlin and the Hermitage Museum. Statues memorializing past regimes had been toppled and moved. Tour guides were still sorting out the complexities of explaining their past in a fast-changing and sensitive present. We felt exhilarated (and overwhelmed) by the food, the language, and the customs, but most of all, we were drawn to the churches.

Stepping into St. Basil’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg’s Red Square was a lesson in Christian unity and diversity. We three American Presbyterians were surrounded by the familiar and the strange. For the first time, we saw an iconostasis—a screen of icons that divides the sanctuary from the nave—and encountered the stories of Christian faith, suffering, and beauty depicted there. Later in the trip, a visit with an embattled Protestant missionary added layers to my young adult perspective on faith. Through these and other experiences, the Eastern Orthodox branch of the church was making itself known to me in the heart of the “Third Rome,” a moniker used to signify Moscow as the heir of Byzantium (or Eastern Orthodox) Christianity. I began to realize that the ...

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Was Liberty’s Board Set up to Support Falwell or Liberty?

The challenge of holding Christian ministry leaders accountable.

Jerry Falwell Jr. resigned as president of Liberty University on Monday. The news came after Reuters reported that a friend and business partner of the couple had sex with Becki Falwell while Jerry Falwell Jr. watched. Falwell Jr. himself submitted his resignation only to reverse course twice.

Falwell Jr. was already on an indefinite leave of absence after he posted a picture on Instagram of him posing with his arm around a woman at a party with their zippers down and midsections exposed.

With one notable exception, Liberty’s board has stayed largely silent in the wake of Falwell’s increasingly controversial public statements and financial dealings.

For ministry boards that have run into moral or ethic issues with their CEOs, one common mistake is allowing the CEO to recommend too many board members, says Bob Andringa, the managing partner of the Andringa Group who specializes in governance and the relationship between boards and chief executives.

“Who's a CEO going to recommend? They’re going to recommend friends,” said Andringa, who has written several books on board governance, including The Nonprofit Board Answer Book and Good Governance for Nonprofits. “And so when it comes down to crunch time, those friends have more loyalty to the CEO than they do to the mission of the whole organization.”

Andringa joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss the blind spots of Christian boards, what encourages and discourages them in holding leaders accountable, and why more retired people should serve on boards.

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Better Together: A Model of Local Government and the Local Church Converging to Care for the Homeless

When faith communities and civic leadership work together for good, the community benefits.

We've grown used to stories of churches pitted against civic leaders in local communities and of religious liberty battles in the larger political arena. What is not so common today is the convergence of faith communities and local governments to tackle issues all sides see as vital.

But that's just what is happening in Riverside, California, through the efforts of Grove Community Church and Mayor Rusty Bailey.

The Burden of a Mayor and a Church's Response

Mayor Bailey wanted to do something to alleviate the plight of homeless people in his city. The Love Your Neighbor initiative partners the government with churches, synagogues, and nonprofits. The Grove, as Grove Community Church is known, eagerly volunteered to participate.

Mayor Bailey believed the way to get rid of homelessness was to provide a home. He asked churches to consider putting a home for the homeless on their property. The Grove was the first to jump on the opportunity.

They built four small 600-square foot "tiny homes" on the church property, naming it The Grove Village. Some in the neighborhood pushed back, but overall there was a great spirit of unity on the project.

The city helped by waiving significant fees for the effort. Current pastor Daniel Bishop credited his predecessor, Tom Lance, with initiating the work. President of Tilden Coil Construction, Brian Jaramillo, who attends The Grove, reached out to various contractors and suppliers to make this project go from a dream to a reality.

Building Homes for the Homeless

Many began donating resources, time, and money to the effort. Someone donated all the framing, and another the plumbing, Bishop said, adding:

Some were believers, some were not believers, but they believed in what was going ...

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