by | Jul 20, 2023 | Uncategorized
After a string of victories at the Supreme Court, focus turns to one major precedent that could be overturned.
It is an auspicious time for advocates of religious liberty in the United States. Consider what they have accomplished at the Supreme Court over the past year: They defended the right of Americans to express their faith while on the clock for a public school district (Kennedy v. Bremerton School District), affirmed the right of religious schools to use government vouchers (Carson v. Makin), heightened the standards protecting workplace accommodations for religious beliefs (Groff v. DeJoy), and expanded free speech protections for business owners who don’t want to make statements that go against their religious beliefs (303 Creative LLC v. Elenis).
What’s left to win? If you ask experts closely following the developments on the legal battlefield, they invariably give the same answer: Employment Division v. Smith.
“I predict that religious liberty advocates will ramp up their attack on Smith,” said Carl Esbeck, a professor of law at the University of Missouri. “They understand that 303 Creative was a wonderful victory, but it was a halfway victory. It only protects speech … so if they want full protection under the First Amendment free exercise clause, they need Smith reversed.”
In fact, it’s already begun. First Liberty and Alliance Defending Freedom, two religious liberty law groups, have already petitioned the Supreme Court to hear cases that call for Smith to be overruled.
To understand why Smith matters, one has to go back more than three decades. In the late 1980s, two counselors from a rehabilitation center in Oregon were fired after they ingested peyote as part of a Native American religious ceremony. The counselors applied for unemployment but were denied by the state because …
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by | Jul 20, 2023 | Uncategorized
The antidote to cultural Christianity on the Left and Right is true Anglicanism and Pentecostalism.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
In my new book (releasing Tuesday!), I mention a conversation I had years ago with an older man in ministry whom I respected. We had seen a string of what’s euphemistically called “moral failures” with pastors in our church tradition. I made some comment about their having “lost their ministries.”
But the older man corrected me. “Oh, they’ll be back,” he said. “After a scandal, blue-collar pastors become Pentecostals and white-collar pastors become Episcopalian.”
This was tongue-in-cheek, of course. This man and I could both name countless pastors in our tradition who, mid-career, had joined a Pentecostal church or sought ordination in the Episcopal church. These folks just changed their minds about liturgy or spiritual gifts or a thousand other factors.
This man also wasn’t talking about the mainstream of the Anglican Communion or of global Pentecostalism (such as the Assemblies of God). He meant, specifically, the most progressive environs of the Episcopal church in the USA and the most populist and extreme areas of prosperity-gospel Pentecostalism. Those places, he argued, were more tolerant of clerical misbehavior—though for very different reasons.
I’ve lived long enough to see that my denomination is hardly different when it comes to morally compromised people making a hasty comeback. Still, what sticks out to me is not the literal reality of this man’s statement so much as the metaphor of it all—a metaphor that explains a good bit of what’s going on in our current American social crisis.
We are not headed toward the religious …
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by | Jul 19, 2023 | Uncategorized
The crowdfunded show received approval writers’ and actors’ unions to wrap on Season 4.
The wildly popular series based on the life of Jesus Christ has crossed what its creator dubbed a “Red Sea Moment” after a labor strike threatened to halt the filming for Season 4 of The Chosen.
On Friday (July 14), director and co-writer Dallas Jenkins sent an email telling viewers The Chosen hadn’t yet received an exemption to continue filming during the strike by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. “This is very expensive, unfortunately, and especially frustrating because we’ve only got two weeks of filming left. Let’s pray we can get back on schedule quickly.”
Jenkins also tagged SAG-AFTRA in an Instagram post, urging the labor union to approve an exemption waiver. “We’re the good guys; we’ve treated your actors well. Please take the few minutes to approve our application so your actors can get back to work getting paid for the last two weeks of a season they want to finish.”
After one day of filming without the cast, on Sunday afternoon, the show’s official Twitter account announced it had been approved for a waiver and would resume filming on Monday. The account also noted Season 4 is “entirely independent and 100% funded by donations.”
“We’ve worked hard to accommodate all of SAG’s requests and their interim agreement. We appreciate their recognition of us as an independent as well as their hard work in this process,” Jenkins said in a statement provided to Religion News Service.
The Chosen was able to secure an exemption to continue filming because it is not affiliated with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the group representing studios such as Netflix, …
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by | Jul 19, 2023 | Uncategorized
As Christians, our righteous anger at sin must never surpass our compassion for sinners.
In the Square of Saint Petersburg, a young Fyodor Dostoevsky stood shivering in the snow alongside fellow convicts, arrested for belonging to a literary circle considered treasonous.
A priest carrying a cross led the convicts in a procession, arranging them in lines while their sentence was read—death by firing squad. But at the last second, a horseman arrived with a prearranged message from the tsar: Instead of execution, Nicholas “mercifully” commuted their sentences to hard labor.
While boarding the convict train to the work camp in Siberia, Dostoevsky was given a copy of the only book he was permitted to read in prison: the New Testament. Over the next four years of his incarceration, he’d consider the injustices of 19th-century Russia in light of Christ’s mercy.
Dostoevsky sought to understand how mercy restores human hearts—indeed, all of creation—into the righteous image of God. He wrote, “There are souls that in their narrowness blame the whole world. But overwhelm such a soul with mercy, give it love, and it will curse what it has done, for there are so many germs of good in it. The soul will expand and behold how merciful God is, and how beautiful and just people are.”
The need for mercy is just as relevant today—but it can be difficult to offer in a world worthy of judgment.
When our eyes are opened to God’s kingdom, we recognize injustices in the world that didn’t occur to us before. Hungering for the right ordering of life, we feel irritated by the fallen condition of humanity. We get unsettled, maybe indignant, or perhaps infuriated by the forms of wickedness and oppression we see around us.
As a result, anger can often be the besetting sin of …
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by | Jul 19, 2023 | Uncategorized
Sunday school teacher Margaret Ridgway’s wartime ministry had a significant impact on the next generation of missionaries and pastors.
On a warm spring day in 1942, Margaret Ridgway believed she heard God telling her to leave her home in Vancouver, Canada, and move to a Japanese internment camp.
Ridgway was on her knees in the kitchen, praying before an open Bible, when the prophet Haggai’s words leaped off the page: “Go up to the mountain … build the house; and I will take pleasure in it, and I will be glorified. … I am with you. … Fear ye not” (1:8; 2:4–5, KJV).
“God had spoken,” she declared.
“I had no doubt now that He was calling me to leave my ‘ceiled house’—the security of my home, my church, and my familiar surroundings—and follow my Japanese friends who were deprived of their homes and their livelihoods and were being sent to makeshift quarters in the narrow valleys of the Kootenay and Slocan Rivers,” she wrote.
Ridgway’s heart and passion for the Japanese Canadians in Vancouver prior to the war had prepared her well to face this tumultuous period in Canadian history. Her life story would come to reflect a deep commitment toward sharing the love of Christ with the Japanese people.
“If it weren’t for Margaret, we wouldn’t be here,” said retired Toronto pastor Stan Yokota. “She was the only person who went to be among the Japanese to start an evangelical church.”
Venturing into the unknown
Margaret Ridgway was born on May 31, 1915, in Regina, Saskatchewan. After her father’s untimely death when she was three years old, her family eventually relocated to Vancouver. She felt led to reach out to Japanese people well before the Second World War began, according to Ed Yoshida, former pastor of Wesley Chapel Japanese Church …
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