by | Aug 9, 2023 | Uncategorized
What the recent J. D. Greear video clip says about all of us.
Last week, pastor J. D. Greear, the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, stirred up a social media storm when a 27-second clip from his Sunday sermon went viral on Twitter (now X).
In the clip, Greear reproaches his congregation at The Summit Church for arriving late, leaving early, and being generally unfriendly. “It’s one of the things, honestly, that irritates me,” he says, looking straight at the camera and taking a “real talk” tone. “You treat church like a religious show.” Then, pointing at his online viewers, he says, “When people say that the church … feels like a big production, you’re the problem.”
The video cuts to a wider camera angle featuring him standing on a large, well-appointed stage, in front of an audience sitting in movie-style seats and flanked by at least two massive hi-def screens, one of which features the pastor himself. The subtitled clip adds the supposed audience reaction—“uh-oh” and then, “whew”—a seeming attempt to soften the blow.
The clip appeared on Greear’s Twitter account before it was taken down, but not before another user reposted it with the comment, “Bruh. Look where you’re standing.”
The implication was obvious: The pastor’s surroundings didn’t match his story. The platform on which he stood preached a different sermon than his tough love talk. The medium seemed to contradict the message.
In essence, I agree with Greear’s spoken message that the church is not a show—I think most Christians would. But when the camera zooms out, a different message comes across: The church is a show.
Greear’s …
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by | Aug 9, 2023 | Uncategorized
Many evangelicals have stuck with the former president through his legal troubles, moral failings, and public indiscretions.
On the eve of former president Donald Trump’s indictment on charges that he attempted to overturn the presidential election of 2020, Franklin Graham, head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse, appeared on Greta Van Susteren’s show on Newsmax to share his take.
“It’s a sad day for America,” Graham said.
The indictment—the third Trump has faced in the span of four months—“is an attempt to … inflict enough political wounds on this man to where it will be impossible for him to run” for president in 2024, Graham said.
According to Graham, this is but the latest attempt by Democrats to discredit Trump. First, there was Robert Mueller’s investigation on whether Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election. Then, a probe into the Trump Organization’s tax returns, and finally, accusations of sexual harassment by women that “seem to come out of the woodwork.”
Next week Trump may face yet more charges in Georgia for attempting to interfere in the presidential election of 2020. The investigation has taken nearly two and a half years and could bring charges to nearly 20 people.
After all the scandals Trump faced in his presidency and beyond, is he still susceptible to “political wounds”?
Trump’s political career has been morally fraught from the start, and a plurality of evangelical supporters stuck with him through the Access Hollywood tape, the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, revelations of Trump paying hush money to Stormy Daniels, his impeachments, and the Capitol insurrection.
Some conservative evangelicals may be turned off by Trump’s legal fights and pivot to a …
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by | Aug 9, 2023 | Uncategorized
New rules integrate pastors into the military to help with physical and spiritual needs as fighting continues.
Of all the dangers of war, I didn’t think about speeding until I was in a car of evangelical chaplains departing the besieged city of Bakhmut, Ukraine. It makes sense. A slow car is an easier target. We were not a slow car.
But the speed is also a testament to the urgency these chaplains feel. There is so much to do. There aren’t enough hours in a day. And the need grows with the war.
There were no chaplains in the Ukrainian military before. Pastors and priests would sometimes embed in a unit as civilians, but nothing formal. That changed with the invasion. Facing an existential crisis as a nation has made many in Ukraine turn to religion. Fighting in the cities, suburbs, and countryside has turned soldiers’ thoughts to timeless things, prompting many to ask for chaplains. There are people who are hungry and hurting and alone. The chaplains are not going to drive slow.
The Ukrainian Chaplaincy Service was established in March. The first 30 who were trained were Ukrainian Orthodox, Eastern-rite Catholic, and evangelical. Only about 2 percent of the country is evangelical, but many Baptist, Pentecostal, and free church pastors across the country have volunteered to minister as chaplains.
By July, the Ukrainian military had 160 official chaplains. There are still a lot of volunteers too.
Vasily Povorozniuk, pastor of Compass Church in Zhytomyr, is a volunteer. He drives more than 500 miles to the front to care for soldiers and the people who live near the shifting battle lines. Povorozniuk is a former military man who points to Cornelius, the Roman centurion sent by an angel to the apostle Peter (Acts 10), as a model for his ministry. It was a soldier and his family and friends who were able to take the message …
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by | Aug 8, 2023 | Uncategorized
Whenever we enter a new season of life, we must care for our souls in the process.
The beginning of a new school year can bring relief or disappointment, or both. As a mom of three young children, I’m looking forward to the return of familiar school-year routines—and I’m also dreading the return of early morning tardy bells. My kids feel their own ambivalence: It’s exciting to get a new lunchbox, but scary to walk into a new classroom full of people.
Almost all transitions create a subtle (or not so subtle) cocktail of emotions. But transition times are often so busy that we don’t attend to our interior lives in the flurry of tasks and deadlines. The result is a kind of survival mode that runs on adrenaline and cultivates numbness. Last August, I Tweeted a summary of my family’s first three days of school: Day 1—“Everything is awesome!” Day 2—“Everything is terrible!” Day 3— “Where am I?”
In the modern West, we value productivity and efficiency. A “successful” start to the school year looks like securing all the items on every supply list and making it to all the meet-the-teacher events on time and intact. Some of us thrive on these kinds of tasks. Others of us feel defeated and frazzled by them.
But for all of us, the busyness of transitions can mask the slower, deeper work of spiritual formation that new seasons call forth in us and in our relationships. In other words, survival mode can only serve us up to a point. It might help us cope (and get those supply lists taken care of) but it cannot steward our hearts.
As Christians, we have access to a different, more layered mindset to help us navigate the back-to-school rush. Instead of merely focusing on external routines and benchmarks, we can prepare for …
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by | Aug 8, 2023 | Uncategorized
As a school of theology, it’s in decline. As a cultural and political force, it’s more influential than ever.
My father traveled from Texas to Minnesota for my seminary graduation. At some pre-ceremony gathering, he was chatting with my adviser about the latter’s work in biblical hermeneutics. “But,” he asked, befuddled, “don’t you just sort of read the Bible and understand it? Doesn’t it just mean what it says?”
Seven years later, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley kicked off her campaign with a speech prefaced by televangelist, author, and activist John Hagee. Opening with a prayer, he praised Haley, who’s seeking to be commander-in-chief of the United States, as a “defender of Israel.”
And around the same time, I was working on an article about American evangelicals’ skepticism of human-caused climate change. The inevitable question I had to address: Do evangelicals think it’s okay to abuse the earth because we’re all just waiting around for the Rapture? As Fox News host Sean Hannity said in 2022, “If [the world] really [is] gonna end in 12 years, to hell with it all! Let’s have one big party for the last 10 years, and then we’ll all go home and see Jesus.”
The link between these three vignettes is the subject of Daniel G. Hummel’s astute new history, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation. Dispensationalism is commonly characterized as an eschatology, but as Hummel demonstrates in his two-century survey of its ecclesial, scholarly, political, and cultural development, “the end times are just one dimension of the theology of dispensationalism and its wider legacy.”
The ”plain meaning” model of biblical interpretation my father …
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