by | Jul 7, 2023 | Uncategorized
Nigerian American Christian Yemi Mobolade went from pastor and community organizer to city leadership.
Yemi Mobolade moved to Colorado Springs to start a church. Thirteen years later, he became the city’s mayor.
Even though his position isn’t a pastoral one, his faith is central to his platform, as well as his experience in local ministries, nonprofits, businesses, and economic development. Mobolade ran a campaign on hope and optimism, taking his core values from Micah 6:8: “Do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God.”
“I want to disrupt and confuse this whole experience we call politics,” Mobolade said. “I want to call God’s people back to doing it well.”
A Nigerian American, Mobolade was sworn in last month as Colorado Springs’ first Black and first immigrant mayor, telling residents, “As your mayor, I pledge to live courageously, lead with empathy, and remain humble. As your mayor, I pledge to lead by example and create a city government that is transparent, accessible, and proactive. As your mayor, I will work tirelessly to ensure our city government represents the aspiration and needs of its residents.”
His new position builds on years of community involvement and unity-building in Colorado’s second-biggest city.
He also quoted Chris Tomlin’s “God of this City,” saying, “Greater things are yet to come, greater things are still to be done in this city.”
Before he landed in the evangelical hub that’s home to Focus on the Family, the Navigators, Young Life, and Biblica, Mobolade grew up in a family of faith in Nigeria. Both his parents were pastors, and he came to know the Lord at a young age.
“I am really proud of the work that they did with …
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by | Jul 6, 2023 | Uncategorized
My worries for my child’s physical health shouldn’t surpass my concern for his spiritual well-being.
The past few years have seen groundbreaking advances in biotechnology—particularly in the areas of human cell therapy and gene editing.
In March, experts gathered for the third global conference to discuss the ethical dilemmas involved in their work—less than five years after a Chinese geneticist announced he had performed “gene surgery” to prevent a set of twins from inheriting their father’s HIV disease. Currently, related research on screening embryos for polygenic disease, including type 1 diabetes, is hotly debated.
Some are concerned this capacity could someday lead to a kind of “techno-eugenics” and “designer babies,” where prospective parents could pick and choose their future child’s genetic traits—or simply edit out their child’s genetic disorders to set up for the best life possible.
As a mother with type 1 diabetes (T1D), I understand the underlying impulse to protect my child, even as I know he was created in God’s image. I live in a constant state of awareness and worry that my son might develop my own chronic illness.
Type 1 diabetes is a life-altering autoimmune disease with no cure. The most current research on its cause points to a strong genetic factor—complex and polygenic—which increases the risk of diabetes in children whose parents have T1D. In my own family, I was diagnosed 14 years after my sister, cementing the genetic link behind what felt like an otherwise random diagnosis. Today, if my son developed T1D, that link would be obvious: He inherited it from me.
Knowing my child’s inherited risk of T1D, I pray against it daily, asking the Lord to keep my toddler healthy. I’m eager to do anything that might …
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by | Jul 6, 2023 | Uncategorized
Decades ago, converts thought the country would be a refuge from the caste system. Today, they risk criminal charges and remain largely relegated to sanitation jobs.
Two Christian Pakistani teenagers, one 18 and another 14, were arrested in their homes in Lahore in May 2023 on charges of blasphemy after a policeman claimed he heard them being disrespectful of the Prophet Muhammad.
Among Muslim-majority countries, Pakistan has the strictest blasphemy laws. People jailed under these laws risk a sentence of life in prison and worse still, even death. Christians and other religious minorities make up a mere 4 percent of Pakistan’s population, but they account for about half of blasphemy charges.
As if navigating blasphemy laws weren’t hardship enough, Christians who live in major cities like Lahore are often relegated to poorly paid and hazardous jobs like sanitation work. The nation of Pakistan was created 76 years ago but during this time the lives of its Christian citizens have grown ever more difficult.
As a scholar of world religions, I have studied how the evolution of a hardline version of Islam in Pakistan has come to shape this country’s national identity and contributed to the persecution of its Christian minority.
Hindu converts to Christianity
Many Christians in Pakistan trace their religious affiliation to the activities of missionary societies during the 19th and early 20th centuries in the Punjab region of what was then British-ruled India.
Early evangelization efforts by both the British and Americans in Hindu-majority India focused on upper-caste Hindus. The evangelizers assumed that these elites would use their influence to convert members of the lower castes. However, this approach led to few converts.
The caste system is a tiered socioeconomic system that consigns people to a particular group, or caste. In Hinduism, this system is part of its religious worldview. …
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by | Jul 5, 2023 | Uncategorized
UPDATE: One church has left voluntarily and another voted out over human sexuality.
UPDATE (July 5): The Evangelical Covenant Church (ECC) has removed Awaken Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, over “policies and practices that are inconsistent with the denomination’s human sexuality guidelines.”
Delegates to the ECC annual gathering voted the church out on June 30. Awaken—which allows for same-sex marriage and the full participation of LGBT members in church life—is the second church in the ECC’s history to be removed involuntarily.
Weeks before the meeting, Quest Church, in Seattle, decided to voluntarily remove itself from the ECC over LGBT inclusion rather than face a vote at the meeting. In its letter announcing its withdrawal, Quest’s pastor Gail Song Bantum said ECC “has become a space that prioritizes doctrinal uniformity on a singular issue over relational unity in areas that are non-essentials of faith.”
“We are always grieved when fellowship is broken,” said Tim Rodgers, chair of the Covenant Executive Board, after the vote on Awaken Church’s removal. “We pray for God’s blessing on Awaken and the Covenant Church as we each continue to join God in mission.”
“Having a position, as we know in all other aspects of life, does not does not prevent us from loving people well and growing in love for others,” said ECC President Tammy Swanson-Dranheim to the annual gathering.
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The Evangelical Covenant Church (ECC) does not ask its pastors to subscribe to extensive statements of faith. The denomination wants church leaders to unify around six essential doctrines concerning salvation, the Bible, the significance and mission of the church, the role of the Holy Spirit, and freedom in Christ.
And since 2015, …
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by | Jul 5, 2023 | Uncategorized
Hanna Wilt testified to God’s presence in a terminal diagnosis while pursuing a case against the pharmaceutical giant over its baby powder.
When Hanna Wilt was 22, she was diagnosed with abdominal mesothelioma, a rare cancer usually linked to asbestos exposure. Doctors gave her six months to live.
Her young life became consumed with horrific symptoms and brutal cancer treatments. This cancer fills the abdomen, starving the patient. But she lived several years beyond her prognosis.
In that extra time, Wilt wrote pages and pages of poetry that was recently published as a book. Her peers selected her to share her testimony of living with a terminal diagnosis at a chapel service at Covenant College, where she was a senior at the time.
“You read through Scripture, and all of a sudden you’re confronted with all this pain and suffering and questioning. The answer we’re met with is a God that saves us by dying for us,” she told the student body in 2019. “I don’t think we can begin to comprehend God’s love and grace until we allow ourselves to confront the difficult questions like pain and suffering. If we constantly keep pulling our bedsheets over our head, we cut ourselves off from the opportunity to experience God showing up in the ways he promises to.”
With that extra time, she also filed a lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson.
Wilt was one of thousands of people who have alleged that the talc-based baby powder, which scientists discovered was sometimes laced with asbestos, caused aggressive cancer. Asbestos is often found in the same mining locations as talc.
Johnson & Johnson is now working on getting a court to approve an $8.9 billion settlement for the lawsuits, in a saga that also has the company appealing to the US Supreme Court. But the outcome of the thousands of cases, including Wilt’s, is still uncertain. …
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