by | Jul 26, 2023 | Uncategorized
Communal suffering has to be reckoned with. And so does God’s healing word.
A few weeks ago, I arrived at the airport a little early to pick up a friend and decided to pull over in the emergency lane to wait. I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do, but there were 20 cars already there, so I figured my decision wasn’t too bad.
Moments later, however, I heard a siren and saw police car lights in my rearview mirror.
Without warning, my hands began to tremble, my breathing quickened, and my legs started to shake. I called my husband and told him what was happening. My body was going into full-fledged panic mode.
As the officer approached, I could barely catch my breath. Images of Black men and women shot for minor offenses raced through my mind. Would I be labeled as a criminal who broke the law, or as a mother, wife, and minister who served the Lord? Would I be lumped into the countless names of Black people who have died for misdemeanors, or would I be among the privileged few who escaped alive?
By the time the officer came near to my car, I could barely see. He stood at a short distance, asked me to breathe, and helped me to calm down. With my husband still on speaker phone, I finally found the words to say, “I’m sorry.”
What followed in my mind was, “Please don’t hurt me.” In that moment of panic, I could not distinguish the kind officer in front of me from everything I had seen on the news.
My traffic citation gave the other offending cars an opportunity to drive off and, when he finally left, I began to cry. I cried for all of the Black men and women who begged for their lives and still died. I cried for Manuel Ellis, Philando Castile, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Alton Sterling, and so many more.
The list grows by the day. During …
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by | Jul 25, 2023 | Uncategorized
At a moment of career disillusionment, a new book gave me a biblical perspective on the blessings and dangers of big tech.
In the last decade, our lives have become increasingly saturated with digital technology. Apps and platforms play outsized roles socially, professionally, casually, and corporately; in work, school, and church. It can be hard to remember how we used to carry on without the technological conveniences of modern life. Even many young adults feel a chasm between the tech norms they grew up with and the world they inhabit today.
This shift seems even starker when we try to map our day-to-day digital experiences—instant news, AI chatbots, and the Metaverse—onto those we read about in the Bible. In his latest book, God, Technology, and the Christian Life, Tony Reinke outlines an incisive “theology of technology,” grounded in Scripture, which draws a clear connection between our lived experiences and those of our Old Testament heroes. In so doing, he sets a helpful foundation for a biblically-aligned worldview on modern technology.
I read this book at a timely moment, while dealing with a bout of disillusionment over my career. I’m a data scientist, a career technologist who spends his days writing algorithms that generate numbers and recommendations that populate the screens of millions of smartphones all over the world. My work involves the same techniques that large tech companies have exploited for more pernicious purposes, making them a focal point of cultural controversy.
I certainly appreciate the blessings that modern technology affords, and my tech-development day job brings real satisfaction. Yet I can’t help maintaining a healthy dose of skepticism toward ubiquitous tech use. It’s difficult to overstate the degree to which our daily habits have grown dependent on the platforms of …
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by | Jul 25, 2023 | Uncategorized
Church life was booming in the 1950s. But where was the Spirit?
It started with an innocent-enough question: “Have you ever heard of the expression speaking in tongues?”
For the magazine editor who asked it, it was just a story idea. But it turned into a journalistic investigation that changed a reporter’s spiritual life, brought many Christians into a personal relationship with the Holy Spirit, and blew through evangelicalism with a strong charismatic wind. They Speak with Other Tongues, the compelling 1964 account of John Sherrill’s journey from skeptical reporter to ecstatic, tongues-speaking spiritual autobiographer, has had a profound impact.
As I have researched and written my new book, Age of the Spirit, I’ve thought a lot about the kinds of people who brought charismatic renewal to Anglo-world Christianity. There were preachers, teachers, and evangelists; businessmen, hippies, and housewives; professors, faith healers, frauds, and lots of everyday people who just wanted more of whatever God had to give them. The vehicle for many of these people to experience the Spirit was through the “personal witness story,” and the authors of so many of these stories in the 1960s and 1970s were John and his wife, Elizabeth “Tib” Sherrill.
It’s been almost 60 years since they wrote They Speak with Other Tongues, and both authors have now passed—Elizabeth died earlier this year. But for those of us who live in a world where people sometimes pray in a language they do not understand, where God still speaks to individuals, and where the faithful expect to see the Spirit at work in their daily lives, it’s the world the Sherrills built.
The Sherrills’ books provided a “charismatic catechesis,” preparing readers …
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by | Jul 24, 2023 | Uncategorized
Lifeway still plans to end online music resource but apologizes for short notice.
Update (July 24): Lifeway has decided to postpone the discontinuation of lifewayworship.com, the online Baptist church music resource that was once conceived as a digital hymnal without a back cover. The Southern Baptist Convention publisher announced it was shutting the site down last week, but backtracked after an outcry from a lot of surprised worship leaders.
“We are delaying the implementation of this decision until we have time to listen, allow for dialogue, and find out how we can best support churches’ digital worship music needs,” Ben Mandrell, Lifeway CEO, said in a statement. “We are actively considering alternatives to ensure minimal disruption and keep this essential catalog alive.”
Mandrell apologized the publisher “didn’t put the turn signal on soon enough.”
When Lifeway made its initial announcement, it was unclear whether the arrangements and materials available on lifewayworship.com would be fully preserved somewhere. Lifeway Worship director Brian Brown emphasized that music ministers needed to download what they wanted before September 30, raising questions about the fate of the vast catalog of musical resources maintained on the site. Brown told CT he had hoped to migrate all the content to Lifeway’s main website so it would continue to be available, but as he prepared to make the announcement, his team realized that wouldn’t be possible in the next few months.
“Each product has to be recreated individually, and it’s tens of thousands of products,” Brown said. “It’s not something that we are going to be able to accomplish by September 30.”
Lifeway still plans to shutter the online resource, but it will remain online …
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by | Jul 24, 2023 | Uncategorized
What nearly 20,000 people in 26 countries believe about God, Satan, and the supernatural.
Countries with more baby boomers who say they believe in God as described in “holy scriptures” (including the Bible, the Quran, and the Torah) are less likely to have members of Gen Z who do.
But countries with fewer boomers who hold this belief are more likely to have members of Gen Z who do.
In a recent Ipsos Global Advisor survey of nearly 20,000 adults from across 26 countries, the researchers found that in nine countries where less than one-third of adults believe in God as described in holy scriptures, Generation Z was more likely to hold these convictions than boomers.
In Northern and Western Europe, Gen Z was more likely than the boomer generation to say they believe in heaven, supernatural spirits, hell, and the Devil. In places like South Africa and India, however, boomers were more likely than Gen Z members to believe in these aspects of the spiritual realm.
Boomers were also more likely than younger people to identify as Christian in half of the countries.
This study was conducted via face-to-face and online interviews. However, only Australia, Argentina, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and the US numbers can be considered representative of their general adult population.
“Samples in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand, and Turkey are more urban, more educated, and/or more affluent than the general population,” explains Ipsos. “The survey results for these countries should be viewed as reflecting the views of the more ‘connected’ segment of their population. India’s sample represents a large subset of its urban population—social economic …
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