Unearthing the Faithful Foundations of a Historic Black Church

In Colonial Williamsburg, a neglected Christian past is being restored.

They dug up broken bits of lamp, the foot of a porcelain doll, a piece of what was once a bowl, and brick fragments from the Baptist church where African Americans worshiped while they were still enslaved. They excavated down to the foundation. Carefully clearing away the earth, they exposed the cross-stacked bricks at the base, dusted them off, and called Connie Matthews Harshaw.

Harshaw stood at the edge of the dig. A member of the historic black First Baptist Church in Williamsburg, Virginia, she had pushed for this project before anyone knew if they would find anything worthwhile. She had come a long way by faith. Now the archaeologists had something to show her.

“I see it,” she said. “We were here and we were strong. Through it all, we kept the faith, and we were hopeful. That’s a story to tell.”

Colonial Williamsburg, the living history museum that recreates the life of the 18th-century town that was then the capital of the colony of Virginia, is excavating a black Baptist church. The first phase was finished in November, and the second started this January, with the ultimate aim of reconstructing the building and recovering its history.

First Baptist was founded by free and enslaved African Americans in 1776, not long after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It was illegal for black people to congregate and worship then, but they did anyway. At first they met secretly in a hidden brush structure. Then a Virginia woman decided to let the man she owned become a Baptist minister, and Gowan Pamphlet became the first ordained black man in America in 1772, a dozen years before the better-known Lemuel Haynes. Inspired by the Great Awakening, Pamphlet preached sin, salvation, and the ...

Continue reading...

from Christianity Today Magazine https://ift.tt/3j1sbNg

How American Evangelicals Lost Credibility with the Global Church

What the last four years have meant for the relationship between US Christians and their brothers and sisters in Christ around the world.

“Was the US never really a “Christian country,” or was US Christianity corrupted by politics?”

That’s the question that Kylie Beach, a writer for the Australian-based Eternity News asked several days after the capitol insurrection and several days before last week’s presidential inauguration. She continued:

Did the US only ever appear to be more Christian than other countries, or was its Christianity corrupted by politics? To put it frankly, are the people who declare themselves to be Christians in the US really just ‘cultural Christians’ – people who are ethnically descended from nations where Christianity was the primary religion? Or people who have taken on the outward form of their grandparent’s faith? Have they ever actually had a moment of conversion where they have decided to accept Christ as their Lord and Saviour? Do they read their Bibles to try to learn what God is like? Do they pray and listen for his direction?

Beach isn’t the only Christian from around the world asking what to make of US evangelicals after Trump. At the UK’s Evangelical Alliance CEO Gavin Calver wrote a column for The Times with the headline, “Let us redefine evangelism after the Trump presidency.” He wrote that the word evangelical has become politicized and toxic even in the UK because of Trump politics.

René Breuel is the pastor of Hopera, an evangelical church in Rome and has served as a student leader in International Fellowship of Evangelical Students movements in Brazil, Germany, Canada, and Italy. He is also the author of The Paradox of Happiness.

Breuel joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss how non-US evangelicals ...

Continue reading...

from Christianity Today Magazine https://ift.tt/2MvDyAU

5 Books on the Nature of Human Emotions

Chosen by Matthew LaPine, author of “The Logic of the Body: Retrieving Theological Psychology” (Lexham Press).

The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life

Joseph LeDoux

Whatever else emotion is, it involves neurons and chemicals. Any adequate understanding of human emotions must grasp the basics of how our nervous system works. Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux lays bare the biological underpinnings of our feelings, clarifying the role played by brain processes and memory.

Finding Quiet: My Story of Overcoming Anxiety and the Practices that Brought Peace

J. P. Moreland

Moreland draws from personal experience and professional expertise to share ideas and practices that help in the battle with anxiety. He is especially helpful in rebutting the idea that our emotions come from our soul and not from our holistically embodied self. This short book is rich with insight and practical wisdom for sufferers.

The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing

Bruce D. Perry and Maia Szalavitz

Too often, Christians fail to grasp the generational legacy of attentive parenting as it bears on a child’s emotional well-being. Working with journalist Maia Szalavitz, psychiatrist Bruce Perry draws on his clinical experience to tell heartbreaking but hopeful stories of the emotional toll of neglect on children. The problems caused by neglect are complicated, but helping often involves simple acts of loving attention.

Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

C. S. Lewis

In Till We Have Faces, Lewis retells the myth of Cupid and Psyche, but with a twist. The book shows how self-deception can lurk near the core of our most-cherished feelings. Psyche’s sister Orual wears a veil that symbolizes her projected self-image; when the veil is removed, so is the depth of her ugly self-obsession. Lewis ...

Continue reading...

from Christianity Today Magazine https://ift.tt/3pAwuBt

Change Your World with John C. Maxwell and Rob Hoskins

An adapted excerpt from Ed Stetzer's interview with authors John C. Maxwell and Rob Hoskins.

Ed Stetzer: Let me ask you tell us a little bit about why you wrote Change Your World, and why ultimately, this book matters.

John C. Maxwell:Change Your World was written because we think that in the times in which we live, it is better to turn on the light than to curse the darkness. Change Your World is all about how anyone, anywhere, at any time can really make a difference in their life. The book is a result of both Rob and my own experience in trying to do transformation around the world. I’ve been pursuing it with our Equip group and with a few select countries on the invitation of the presidents of those countries. And of course, Rob has been doing this too, with great success. And so we decided to come together and bring our experience of trying to bring transformation to people’s lives into the book.

What is fun is the fact that we did it together. We have just kind of fed each other. When you put two people together and they have the same heart, you begin to really compound and multiply some good work. What we’re finding with the book is that it was not only a labor of love, but of colleagues.

We believe that the world can be changed. Therefore, we have a how-to book guide on how to do it. And it’s not theory, because we’ve done this with millions and millions of people and we’ve seen terrific results. Now, we’re trying to put it in the hands of people who can be the ones to change their world. It’s not “change the world”, but “change your world.” Start with where you are.

Rob Hoskins: John’s been mentoring me for several years and we’ve worked together. We were talking about our favorite subject, transformation, and I said to John, ...

Continue reading...

from Christianity Today Magazine https://ift.tt/2YuotSW

In the GameStop Frenzy, What If We’re All the 1 Percent?

Jesus’ economic justice doesn’t mean beating the rich at their own game.

Everybody loves a David and Goliath story. In recent days, millions of aspiring Davids took on one of society’s least favorite Goliaths: Wall Street.

It all started with a Reddit page called WallStreetBets. Many of the 3 million amateur investors involved in the chat room decided to come together to coordinate the purchase of stocks in a handful of companies. By doing so, they generated a massive increase in the value of those companies’ stock. GameStop’s market value, for instance, went from $2 billion to $24 billion in just a few days. While this created an enormous profit margin for individual investors, it also nearly bankrupted a hedge fund that had bet against GameStop by short selling their shares.

By all accounts, many folks involved celebrated both outcomes. “You stand for everything that I hated during [the financial crisis],” one user wrote in an open letter to the hedge funds. “You are a firm who makes money off of exploiting a company and manipulating markets and media to your advantage.” One evangelical pastor even drew on Jesus’ parable about the rich fool (Luke 12:13–21) who used his profits to build a bigger barn to describe what was happening. “Since 2008, it feels like Wall Street has had an overabundant harvest, financed by public money, and rather than share the billions with the less fortunate, they’ve built bigger and bigger barns for themselves.”

I certainly see what he means, especially when we consider the likely economic realities behind the parable. When the rich man tears down his barns to build bigger ones, he probably isn’t creating an enormous rainy-day savings fund. He’s more likely opening the first-century ...

Continue reading...

from Christianity Today Magazine https://ift.tt/3coOtXJ

Meet the Republican Congressman Who Says His Faith Led Him to Vote for Impeachment

Adam Kinzinger wants to see a commitment to truth reorient his party and recover the witness of the American church.

From his office in the Capitol, US Rep. Adam Kinzinger could see a little bit of the crowd on the lawn on January 6. He heard the flash-bangs go off on the steps as rioters made their way inside. And he could feel the spiritual weight of what was unfolding.

“I’m not one of these people that senses evil all the time or anything. It’s probably only happened maybe twice in my life,” the Illinois congressman said. “But I just felt a real darkness over this place, like a real evil.”

Kinzinger, a nondenominational Protestant, doesn’t talk much about his faith in public and is wary of conflating the mission of the church with the work of politics. But he saw serious implications for both in the wake of the Capitol breach and felt convicted to speak out.

“Although I’m not great at citing verse and chapter, I know the Bible speaks quite a bit about conspiracies and about allowing that darkness into your heart, about the importance of truth, the importance of being a light in dark places, of being truth,” he said on a call with CT and other news outlets this week.

“I’m not a Christian leader. I’m not a pastor. But I am a person who shares the faith and who looks at what that’s done to the political system in this country, and I decided to speak out.”

In the days after the attack, Kinzinger called on Christian leaders “to lead the flock back into the truth.” He opposed President Donald Trump for continuing to tout claims that the election had been stolen and was one of ten House Republicans who voted in favor of impeachment.

The backlash was swift, coming from Kinzinger’s district in northern Illinois, where a majority of Republicans ...

Continue reading...

from Christianity Today Magazine https://ift.tt/3r88o1x

For Churchgoing Families, More Kids Aren't a Burden

Researchers find big families don't deter child outcomes, but our theology defines flourishing differently.

The more children you have, the less you can give each one, and the worse they do. Right? Parents in pandemic isolation without the usual supports from schools, churches, and extended family will certainly resonate with the idea that their time, energy, and attention are split into ever-smaller slices with each child.

It’s also the tradeoff anthropologists and economists have assumed when studying modern fertility patterns. But when John Shaver came across projections during his graduate studies that Hispanic Catholics and Muslims were on track to surpass white Christian subgroups and Jews, respectively, by the midcentury, he was perplexed.

“It struck me as a puzzle,” said Shaver, who now teaches anthropology and religion at the University of Otago in New Zealand. “These groups may be growing rapidly, but if there’s not something there to mitigate the negative effects of large family size, these could be populations where the children in these groups are not functioning as well.”

But when Shaver investigated himself, he found that when families had support from religious communities, like churches, this negative scenario didn’t always play out.

Shaver and his colleagues recently published a paper exploring the effects of religious support on fertility and child development. They used ten years of data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, which recruited over 14,000 pregnant women in England in the early 1990s to track ever since—on measures such as children’s lead exposure to number of illnesses to developmental ups and downs. From this data they tested how church attendance and social support affected family size and child development.

Unsurprisingly, ...

Continue reading...

from Christianity Today Magazine https://ift.tt/39rn1qq