BIBLE ENRICHED SPIRITUAL TRUTHS

Wednesday, 4 May 2022

UK Christians Welcome Refugees amid Frustrations with Immigration Process

The churches are willing. But the bureaucracy is weak.

When Wai Lin Wong arrived in Bristol from Hong Kong in April 2021, one of the first things she did was look for a new church.

“I logged onto Facebook; I searched Google,” she said, “and found churches with webpages translated into Chinese, groups of other Hong Kongers, and sanctuaries full of people like me.”

That happened a lot, said Mark Nam, an Anglican priest in Bristol. As the Chinese government clamped down on the democratic freedoms of the former British colony in 2020, thousands of Hong Kongers fled to the UK thanks to a visa program that allows them to live and work in Britain with a pathway to full citizenship.

Hundreds of churches announced they would welcome the Hong Kongers with open arms. They did. And cities like Bristol have since seen their churches swell with newcomers, Nam said. Anglican parishes, Chinese Protestant churches, and evangelical congregations all grew dramatically in the last year.

“It’s been wonderful to see the welcome,” Nam said last year.

In recent months, UK Christians responded to another influx of refugees, this time from Ukraine.

The Sanctuary Foundation, which supports potential sponsors and assists the government in rolling out its Homes for Ukraine program, said over 2,000 churches, businesses, and schools plugged into their programming or volunteered to help in some way since March.

But in both cases, along with the surge of compassion, support programs, and congregational growth, there have come a host of challenges—from bureaucratic inertia to worrying signs of prejudiced double standards.

Sanctuary Foundation’s founder Krish Kandiah, who has been working with refugees since the 1990s, said his organization has been seeing churches ...

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Stained Glass Needs Saving

The oldest church windows in the Midwest and West are about to start falling apart.

When Justin Dunn preaches about Jesus feeding the 5,000, he points to the stained glass window on the southwest side of University Baptist Church in Shawnee, Oklahoma.

There, the gospel story is illuminated alongside the stories in the other windows in the 67-year-old sanctuary, which show Christ’s birth, miracles, crucifixion, and resurrection.

“As a pastor, you’re always looking for a good illustration,” Dunn said. “The windows are perfect for that because they’re right there and get people to look up, and then they’re going to come back next week and see the same window again.”

Stained glass windows became common in American evangelical churches in the West and Midwest in the 1870s. With the prosperity and growth following the Civil War, church architects increasingly turned to Romanesque and Gothic Revival styles, according to David Bains, professor of biblical and religious studies at Samford University, and that included gorgeous windows. The stained glass created an aesthetically rich interior and blocked out the bustling city streets outside.

Early evangelical stained glass often featured simple symbols, like a Bible or a cross, but technological advancements in the manufacture of opalescent glass in the 1880s and ’90s allowed for more elaborate biblical scenes.

“You get big, very legible teaching images of Jesus that you can look at and think about during church services and that ministers can appeal to in their sermons,” Bains said. Evangelicals “copied popular illustrations by German artists that were then being reproduced in Bibles and Sunday school literature” and enthusiastically funded the work of artists including Louis Comfort Tiffany ...

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Tuesday, 3 May 2022

Billionaire Who Invested ‘According to the Word of God’ Charged with Multibillion-Dollar Fraud

Christian Bill Hwang is at the center of what white-collar crime experts see as Wall Street’s biggest indictment since Bernie Madoff.

When the founder of Archegos Capital Management, Bill Hwang, was charged in a multibillion-dollar criminal case last week, the federal district attorney said the Christian investor’s “massive fraud … nearly jeopardized our financial system.”

The allegations come a decade after Hwang settled a civil case for insider trading. In the years since, the Korean-born fund owner has worked with evangelical institutions as a donor, board member, and voice in the faith-and-work conversation. If convicted, Hwang would join a list of spectacular securities fraud cases like Bernie Madoff’s and face multiple life sentences in prison.

The US government alleges that Archegos under Hwang’s direction engaged in market manipulation—buying up large portions of stocks in companies to inflate the price—and then lied about its market exposure to banks to get more and more funding.

In a few days in 2021, the government says, that scheme resulted in losses of $10 billion directly to banks financing Archegos and the destruction of more than $100 billion of value in a dozen or so companies that Archegos was trading.

Though he had a huge position in the stock market, Hwang was not a famous investor, and his New York lifestyle was not flashy for a billionaire. The son of a pastor, he spoke at small Christian conferences, hosted Bible readings at his firm’s Wall Street office, and gave visitors Christian books.

He was known for his Christian philanthropy through the Grace and Mercy Foundation that he founded. Archegos is named for ἀρχηγός, the Greek word used to describe Christ as the “author” of our salvation (Heb. 2:10) and the “prince” of life (Acts 3:15). ...

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The Roe Leak Spotlights America’s Crisis of Credibility

Abortion and the lost trust in institutions are two parts of the same problem.

As I write this, pro-life Americans don’t know whether to celebrate, and pro-choice Americans don’t know how to protest. That’s because all of us are looking at the news—a leaked-but-not-yet delivered majority opinion from the United States Supreme Court overturning the Roe v. Wade decision from almost 50 years ago.

For years, many of us working in the pro-life space have anticipated the day that the Supreme Court would announce the repeal of Roe v. Wade. Years ago, when my team and I were working at the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), we planned a pro-life event called Roe50 to mark the anniversary of the decision. I was the one arguing that the branding team should prepare for the distinct possibility that Roe wouldn’t even make it to 50 years.

Those working in the opposite space, on the abortion rights side, were likewise prepared for such an announcement. None of us were prepared for an announcement quite like this, for an “announcement” that is no announcement at all.

This has never happened before—where a leak from inside the Supreme Court delivers internal memos revealing what the court is planning to do. The resulting confusion means that most people are about 98 percent certain of what the court now plans to do. But we cannot really act on it, because there is always a possibility that the majority could change their mind between now and the release of the opinion.

Behind the confusion, though, there’s a simmering outrage. Last night my phone started vibrating with message after message from lawyers and politicians—most of them pro-life—outraged by the way this alleged ruling was leaked. Some speculated that ...

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This Is and Isn’t the Moment Pro-Life Evangelicals Have Waited For

Roe v. Wade opponents celebrate the Supreme Court’s move to overturn federal abortion rights while raising concerns about the leaked decision.

It’s the moment pro-life evangelicals had been working toward for decades. It came in a way none were expecting.

A leaked decision to overturn Roe v. Wade signals a win for the sanctity of life and a potential blow to the sanctity of the Supreme Court.

On Monday night, Politico reported that the majority of justices are poised to strike down federal abortion rights in their upcoming ruling on a Mississippi abortion case. The source? A first draft of a majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito.

This early version of his 98-page decision, published on the outlet’s website, doesn’t just uphold the state’s restrictions on abortion—as some had predicted the conservative-leaning court would do—but rejects the landmark Roe case as “egregiously wrong from the start,” and returns the issue of abortion restrictions to state legislatures.

The court was expected to release its ruling on Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization before its term ends in June. Having a draft of the majority opinion made public is unprecedented. The process is notoriously secretive. Even the timing of decisions, or how many decisions will be issued in a given day, aren’t revealed in advance.

If the court’s final ruling in this case is similar to Alito’s leaked draft, it will represent the most significant move on abortion in a generation. Bolstered by Alito’s arguments, the pro-life faithful are looking to the post-Roe horizon, when they hope fewer and fewer young lives will end due to abortion. Yet, their reactions are tempered with questions over whether the draft reflects where the high court will finally land, when the ...

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Monday, 2 May 2022

We Need a Positive Vision for Sex

Christine Emba wants to move beyond a legalistic sexual ethic.

Dating as an evangelical Christian in large cities like New York City and Boston was an exhausting experience for me and many others like me. Men at church didn’t always want to ask explicitly for dates. But sifting through men on the apps made husband-hunting seem economic at best and compromising at worst. Was my self-proclaiming “Christian” date going to make a move I was uncomfortable with or prove to be as devout as our online conversation had led me to believe?

Washington Post columnist Christine Emba recently authored Rethinking Sex: A Provocation, a manifesto spun out of the unspoken misery within our culture’s approach to sex and dating. Emba, an unmarried evangelical-turned-Catholic, asks readers to consider that respect and dignity do indeed matter in a world where consent seems to be the only rule. I asked Emba about why she believes in the value of a Golden Rule sexual ethic.

Can you talk about a little bit how you identify spiritually?

My parents are both Nigerian immigrants and very devout Christians. The church I went to is very evangelical, complete with Wednesday night youth group. My senior year of college, I converted to Catholicism. I was attracted by the rich theological traditions and the beauty of the church. I still identify as Catholic.

In your “Sex Is Spiritual” chapter, you talk about growing up with evangelical purity culture. What would you change about the messages you grew up with?

There are a couple of things. First of all, purity culture gets a bad rap, which in many ways it probably deserves. But there are good things and real truths there: the idea that sex is meaningful, it’s a thing unlike any other that you share with another person that can have ...

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Supreme Court: Boston Should Have Let the Christian Flag Fly

In a unanimous ruling, justices agree the city violated the First Amendment by keeping religious views out of a space being used as a public forum.

By hoisting 50 other flags up the city hall flagpole but turning down one Christian flag, the city of Boston violated the Constitution and denied a Christian group its free speech rights, the US Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The unanimous decision declared that because Boston’s flagpole hadn’t been used for government speech but as a public forum for hundreds of groups to use, the city discriminated against the group—Camp Constitution—that applied for the ecumenical flag to fly for a day.

“When the government does not speak for itself, it may not exclude private speech based on ‘religious viewpoint,’” wrote outgoing Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer in the opinion; “doing so ‘constitutes impermissible viewpoint discrimination.’”

Christian religious liberty advocates are celebrating the ruling as a win, coming just over a month after the high court sided with the religious rights of a Texas death row inmate requesting prayer at his execution.

“In one of the last opinions Justice Breyer will ever write (he retires at the end of the term), he says, ‘…Boston’s refusal to allow petitioners to raise their flag because of its religious viewpoint violated the Free Speech Clause,’” tweeted John Litzler, an attorney in Texas who represents Christian nonprofits.

“This is the 2nd of 4 different religious liberty cases being decided by SCOTUS this term. The decisions thus far have been 8-1 and 9-0 in favor of those asserting religious liberty claims. Freedom of religion & religious speech are not controversial or partisan issues.”

Brent Leatherwood, acting president of the Southern Baptist ...

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