Christian Conservationists Sue to Protect Ghana Forest

Bauxite mining would threaten birds, plants, and clean water.

A Christian conservation group is fighting the Ghana government in court over plans to mine bauxite in the Atewa Range Forest Reserve. The protected highland forest north of the capital, Accra, is home to more than 700 species of butterflies, 239 different birds, and 1,134 plants and also provides water for millions of people.

The government reportedly granted a license to the Chinese state-owned Sinohydro Corp. to mine bauxite and build a refinery for the production of aluminum to pay back a $2 billion loan for infrastructure projects across the country. Experts say the mine would be catastrophic for plants and wildlife, not to mention the climate and clean water.

“We thought that if we didn’t take this step of faith, then we would not have acted well as Christians who are stewards of God’s creation,” said Seth Appiah-Kubi, the national director of A Rocha Ghana. “We’ve done all we’ve done because we are Christians.”

A Rocha Ghana is leading the legal challenge, joined by six other civil society groups and four private citizens. The case was filed three years ago and made its way to the Accra High Court in February. The conservation group has never filed suit before.

“Even though we’ve done advocacy and campaigns as part of our work, this is the first time we’ve taken legal action,” Appiah-Kubi said. “It’s a big learning curve.”

Appiah-Kubi was the first witness when the hearing began February 6. He was cross-examined by a state lawyer for two days.

The conservation group and the other plaintiffs argue that mining the forest for bauxite would violate Ghana’s constitution, which protects citizens’ rights to a clean and healthy ...

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‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ and the Beautiful Mystery of God's Silence

Who knew two non-verbal rocks had so much to say?

I don’t remember the last time I said, “I love you” to my parents. In fact, I don’t think they’ve said that to me much either in the 30-something years of my existence.

For a Chinese Singaporean family, this is hardly out of the ordinary. Our affection for each other is mostly communicated through sharing food at mealtimes or through questions about how work has been.

But there’s another way that my parents—and grandparents, aunties, and uncles, for that matter—express affection for me: through biting, negatively framed opinions that hit you like a punch in the gut.

You’ve got more white hair now. You put on weight. You look so tired. (There’s also the all-encompassing “Aiyoh!” which usually conveys a mix of disappointment, disapproval, worry, and concern all at the same time.)

That is why, when watching Everything Everywhere All at Once at home one Friday evening, I cringe-laughed when the protagonist Evelyn Wang blurts this line out to her daughter Joy early in the film: “You have to try and eat healthier. You are getting fat.”

Such judgmental comments become a tried-and-true method of communicating care and concern, bypassing anything gushy or sentimental. To be clear, this is not a condoning of verbal abuse, which exerts manipulative control over another. I speak of the pessimistic, unsympathetic sentiments that often color speech in a Chinese family.

Over the years, I’ve deflected remarks like these by laughing or shrugging them off rather than allowing them to take root. As I tell my husband when similar phrases roll off my tongue, these are simply words of “endearment.”

I used to view this inability to articulate “I ...

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Antioch Has Always Survived Its Tragic History. What Will the Latest Earthquake Change?

A city essential to the early church, Antakya has been all but reduced to rubble.

Up until early February, tourists to the Turkish city of Antakya could find various types of archaeological and cultural treasures. The site of numerous Christian legends about the famous apostle, the Grotto of St. Peter, a church built into a cave in the fourth or fifth century, sits near nearby Neccar Mountain.

In 2010, workers uncovered a city block’s worth of 30,000 artifacts, including a Roman bath, and the world’s largest single-piece floor mosaic, one displaying a noticeable ripple from an earthquake in the sixth century AD. A museum opened displaying these finds in 2020.

Despite 99 percent of Turkey’s population identifying as Muslim, the city also included a Greek Orthodox church, rebuilt after an earthquake in 1872, a Catholic church, and a modern synagogue, all on streets once paved by Herod the Great.

Christians know this city as Antioch, a place that the apostle Paul held close to his heart and whose name many churches and ministries have taken as their own. However, in contrast to a site like Ephesus, archaeologically minded Christian visitors would find little to see, as the modern city was built on top of the ancient one. The visible ruins were limited to sections of fortification walls above the city and foundations of an aqueduct. Only a visit to the harbor at nearby Seleucia provided any tangible connection to the biblical world, as here the apostles set sail for Cyprus.

Today, most of these wonders have been impacted after two earthquakes (7.8 and 7.7 respectively) struck southeastern Turkey and northern Syria on February 6. More than 50,000 have died, and just as rescue efforts had ceased and cleanup had begun, two more earthquakes, measuring 6.4 and 5.8, struck outside Antakya on February ...

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Jinger Duggar Vuolo ‘Disentangles’ Her Faith After Gothard Upbringing

She says her new book is “not just for me, but it’s also for the victims.”

One of Bill Gothard’s best-known followers recently became one of his most vocal critics.

Jinger Duggar Vuolo is the sixth kid in the Duggar family, made famous on TLC shows like 19 Kids and Counting. The Duggars are known for the distinctive practices they learned through Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP): dressing modestly, courting before marriage, modeling their Christian faith, and having as many children as possible.

Last month, Vuolo released a spiritual memoir following her personal reckoning with what she considers Gothard’s false teachings and unbiblical, fear-based system. In Becoming Free Indeed, 29-year-old Vuolo “disentangles” her beliefs and joins a growing wave of Christians who say they have shifted and deepened their faith by leaving legalism.

In the book, she describes being constantly worried that God wanted to punish her disobedience—for not confessing some “secret sin,” playing broomball instead of praying, accidentally revealing her knees in a skirt, exposing herself to alcohol at the grocery store, even not eating enough fiber in her bread. In her 20s, she finally found a gracious God who made himself clear in his Word, without the need for Gothard’s rules and rhemas.

“A few years ago, it became abundantly clear to me that this man I had always looked up to as a model Christian was, in fact, no better than the false teachers Jesus and Paul described,” she wrote. “Gothard was not only teaching his own principles instead of Christ’s but reportedly harming those closest to him.”

With 1.4 million Instagram followers and enough readers to become a New York Times bestseller, Vuolo now represents the most prominent ...

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‘Christian America’ Isn’t Dying. It’s Dividing.

The greatest threat to the church today isn’t apostasy—it’s regionalism.

Recent demographic analyses suggest that Christians will constitute a minority of the American population in less than 50 years—which has understandably caused some alarm among believers. But most of the anxiety is misplaced.

This is not the first time that prognosticators have predicted the imminent end of Bible-believing Christianity. Such predictions have been circulating for the past hundred years. There are good reasons to believe that orthodox Christianity in the United States is not likely to retreat in the same way that it has in Britain or much of Western Europe.

Instead, it will transform—and the result is likely to be disconcerting to believers and secularists alike.

To understand what changes are likely to occur in the next half century, it’s important to remember what did—and did not—happen after each of the earlier predictions of the imminent collapse of American Christianity or evangelical Protestantism.

In the 1920s and 1930s, liberal Protestants predicted the demise of those who believed in the “fundamentals” of the faith—including the Virgin Birth, biblical inerrancy, and the literal, physical second coming of Jesus.

Such projections concluded that American Christianity would become overwhelmingly liberal in its theology and these “fundamentalists” would account for only a small minority.

“Fundamentalism is still with us but mostly in the backwaters,” liberal New York pastor Harry Emerson Fosdick declared in 1935. “The future of the churches, if we will have it so, is in the hands of modernism.”

In the mid-1960s, professors at America’s leading divinity schools began predicting not only that would belief in the “fundamentals” ...

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A Revival in America Answered My Prayers for Europe

Look at history! Revivals rarely stay put.

Two weeks ago, I flew nearly 5,000 miles from Rome to Kentucky to witness a revival, something I have prayed for, for years. As someone who left my homeland of Brazil to serve in Italy as a missionary for the past decade, I have continually asked God to make himself known again across the continent.

The videos I watched, the stories I heard, and the time I spent myself at Asbury University, led me to believe that what God had done in Asbury was not for Asbury alone. After all, David Thomas, a local UMC pastor, the person who had taught me most about revivals, was playing a critical role in shepherding this one.

Back at a student chapel at Asbury seminary in 2016, Thomas shared about a trip to an island off the coast of Scotland to interview 11 eyewitnesses who had experienced the Hebrides Revival:

They described something more essential: a kind of spiritual posture that was found among some who were the catalytic core—a spirit of urgency and audacity, an attitude of brokenness and desperation, a manner of prayer that could be daring and agonizing. These friends in the Hebrides referred to it as travailing prayer, “like the Holy Spirit groaning through us,” they said, like a woman … in labor, like Paul in Galatians 4:19 travailing as if in the pangs of childbirth that Christ might be “formed in you.”

Thomas went on:

And … ever since I looked into the eyes of those people who once saw what you and I so long to see, I’ve become convinced that the real beginnings, the true native soil of awakening is the plowed-up hearts of men and women willing to receive the gift of travail.

It was the first time I heard someone putting into words what I and other friends have been experiencing as ...

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After Pushing for UMC Unity, Former Bishop Joins New Denomination

The Global Methodist Church welcomes Scott Jones, who led Methodists in Texas and had advocated for the “extreme center” and “staying at the table.”

Bishop Scott Jones isn’t the first United Methodist bishop to join the Global Methodist Church since the theologically conservative denomination launched in May, but his exit from the UMC has arguably caused the greatest stir.

That’s partly because of the unique position his family holds in Methodism and the “extreme center” position he had staked out within the United Methodist Church.

For some, it also casts a different light on his retirement, just days before he joined the GMC, as head of the Texas Annual Conference where about half of its churches—more than any other conference in the United Methodist Church—likewise left the denomination.

“The Jones family is truly one of the first families of Methodism in our church,” said Will Willimon, a retired United Methodist bishop and a professor of the practice of Christian ministry at Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina.

Willimon added, “This family has been a family of leaders of our church, and it’s such a shock to have one of the members of the family leading churches out of our church.”

Jones’ late father, S. Jameson Jones, Jr., was president of the Iliff School of Theology in Denver and then dean of Duke Divinity School—two United Methodist schools.

His brother, L. Gregory Jones, now the president of Belmont University, previously served as dean of Duke Divinity School, arguably Methodism’s premier seminary.

And one of his three children, Arthur Jones, is senior pastor of a United Methodist Church: St. Andrew United Methodist Church in Plano, Texas, which is currently negotiating to leave the UMC.

Both Arthur Jones and Greg Jones declined to be interviewed for this article.

“So ...

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