by | Aug 14, 2023 | Uncategorized
The apostle used his hellos and goodbyes to teach, bless, and worship.
You can learn a lot about a culture from the way people begin and end their letters.
Written correspondence in the email age, for example, is brief and functional. We start as quickly as we can (maybe with a “Dear” or a “Hi,” but often with nothing at all), and conclude with dismissive brevity (“Yours,” “Regards,” “Best”). By contrast, when people had more time and letter-reading was a moment of intimacy to be enjoyed by candlelight, correspondents would use ornate, florid sign-offs: “I need not say how much I am your ever-faithful friend,” “I have the honor to be your obedient servant,” and so forth.
In many parts of the world today, it is normal to begin by asking about the well-being of the recipient’s whole family; in the individualistic West, that is much less common. Our greetings communicate more than we realize.
One of the most striking examples of this in history, and certainly the most theologically significant, is in Paul’s epistles. In the first-century Greco-Roman world, letters opened in a standard format. You would give your name, then the name or names of whomever you were addressing, and then a one-word greeting: “Hilarion, to his sister Alis, many greetings.” Several letters in the New Testament follow this pattern exactly (Acts 15:23; 23:26; James 1:1).
But Paul (and subsequently Peter) developed a modified introduction. After identifying himself and the church he was addressing, he would offer “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Paul was obsessed with grace, so it might come as little surprise that he starts all his letters with it. The addition of peace, …
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by | Aug 14, 2023 | Uncategorized
The particularities of people groups can aid the work of understanding and proclaiming the gospel.
The worldwide growth of Christianity has brought about a flowering of theological perspectives. Yet many Western theologians have little familiarity with theologians working in non-Western contexts. Stephen T. Pardue, a professor at the Asia Graduate School of Theology, addresses this problem in a new book, Why Evangelical Theology Needs the Global Church. J. Nelson Jennings, editor of the journal Global Missiology, spoke with Pardue about the blessings of engaging with majority-world theologians.
You grew up in the United States, but you’ve spent many years living and teaching in the Philippines. How has that background shaped your thinking on theology and the global church?
Like most culturally hybrid people, I couldn’t possibly trace all the intricacies of how I’ve been shaped. One of my joys in writing the book was getting to reflect on these complex realities, which often get either ignored or oversimplified in theological books. In my own book, I try to move beyond these simplifications—for example, speaking of “Eastern” and “Western” theologies as if all theologians within these categories think the same way. I hope readers will feel invited to consider how the cultural plurality of God’s people helps us hear the Good News more fully.
Why, to invoke your book title, does evangelical theology need the global church?
We need the input of the whole church to thrive. This means not just celebrating the church’s growing diversity for vague reasons of politeness or political correctness, but developing a coherent framework for how culture can inform our theology without undermining its primary focus: the triune God revealed in Scripture.
One of my big themes is that …
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by | Aug 14, 2023 | Uncategorized
As the toll of overdoses continue to rise, congregations provide recovery, medical care, and redemption.
It was the prayer requests that caught the new minister’s attention. Not long after Lisa Bryant arrived at the Madam Russell United Methodist Church, a historic congregation named for one of the original pioneers in Saltville, Virginia, she began to notice the repetition. The same underlying problem kept rearing up in the needs she heard.
“I got phone calls from some members: ‘Please pray for my grandson, he’s on drugs again,’” she said. “Or someone’s niece would get arrested again.”
Drugs—methamphetamines, oxycontin, heroin, fentanyl—were hiding everywhere in the prayers of the people.
The town of just 2,000 people in southwestern Virginia had almost nothing to help those struggling with addiction. The nearest recovery group was an hour’s drive away. Residential rehab facilities were even farther—out of reach of anyone without a decent income and reliable transportation, which is a lot of people in that part of the country. So Bryant believed that the church, in the Wesleyan spirit of doing all the good you can for all the people you can, could start a recovery group.
It shouldn’t be too hard, she thought. Churches have been hosting 12-step meetings across the country for decades.
She brought the idea to the church council: They should launch a program to help people in Saltville deal with the opioids crisis ravaging the region.
“Everybody was quiet,” Bryant told CT, recalling the moment from five years ago. “Then one guy spoke up and said, ‘We don’t really have that problem here. That doesn’t pertain to us.’”
“Really?” she asked, stunned to tears. “It’s all around us. You …
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by | Aug 14, 2023 | Uncategorized
The newly accredited school promotes a theological education that’s not at odds with culture.
Much of Terry LeBlanc’s adult life has been driven by one question: Can you be fully Indigenous and fully a follower of Jesus?
His answer has been a resounding yes.
Over the past three decades, he and others have built a seminary to offer theological education to Indigenous people in the United States, Canada, and the world, so that they can answer yes too.
NAIITS, previously known as the North American Institute of Indigenous Theological Studies, was founded in 2000 with a vision of seeing “men and women journey down the road of a living heart relationship with Jesus in a transformative way which does not require the rejection of their Creator-given social and cultural identity.” In 2021, it became the first Indigenous school to receive full accreditation from the Association of Theological Schools. NAIITS can now offer accredited master of arts, master of theological studies, and master of divinity degrees, as well as doctorates in Indigenous Christian theology.
Last year, NAIITS received two grants worth $6 million from Lilly Endowment to do just that. The school will use $1 million to develop a master’s program in trauma-informed spiritual care. The other $5 million will go toward creating the Canadian Learning Community for Decolonization and Innovation, a collaborative project with four other universities.
LeBlanc, who is Mi’kmaq-Acadian and holds a PhD from Asbury Theological Seminary, said NAIITS teaches people how to reimagine the relationship between faith and culture. The academic term is decolonization, which LeBlanc said doesn’t mean diminishing the power of Jesus or the gospel, but making space for Indigenous perspectives and learning to see Indigenous identity and culture as …
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by | Aug 11, 2023 | Uncategorized
Resurrection South Austin is the latest to go, citing issues around race, women, sexual minorities, and abuse response.
In the past year, two Anglican congregations in the US have left their more theologically conservative denomination for the mainline Episcopal Church.
Formed in 2009, the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) is known for taking in breakaway Episcopal congregations and clergy, though these two departing churches—Resurrection South Austin in Texas and The Table in Indianapolis—didn’t have previous ties to the Episcopal Church.
Both were church plants belonging to the Church for the Sake of Others (C4SO), an Anglican church-planting movement that predates ACNA and, for the past decade, has functioned as a diocese in the denomination. Its parishes span across California, Texas, the Midwest, and the South. Very few of its clergy or churches were Episcopalian before, and many of its members come from evangelical backgrounds.
Some Anglicans see C4SO as less conservative than others in the denomination due to its focus on justice and since it’s among the dioceses that ordain female priests.
Clergy at the departing churches attributed their decision to a range of issues where they felt out of alignment with the ACNA as a whole and for which they faced backlash from fellow Anglicans online.
They cited their convictions around the inclusion of women in leadership, hospitality toward sexual minorities, opposition to white supremacy, treatment of people of color, and response to abuse victims in the church (including a contentious investigation in the Upper Midwest Diocese).
Though LGBT inclusion was not named as the primary impetus for either church’s withdrawal, it became the impasse for the more theologically conservative minority who decided not to stay during the transition to local Episcopal dioceses.
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