by | Sep 11, 2023 | Uncategorized
The abrupt departure of Alliance University and The King’s College leaves a hole in an influential city.
Don’t you love New York in the fall?” says Joe Fox in the classic romantic movie You’ve Got Mail. “It makes me want to buy school supplies.”
But students seeking a New York City fall at an evangelical college are now out of luck. There are no more schools affiliated with the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU) operating in the city after the closure of Alliance University (formerly Nyack College) and The King’s College.
The King’s board says the school is not officially closing, but it is not offering classes and has laid off its faculty after losing its accreditation. King’s accreditor, Middle States Commission on Higher Education, considers King’s closed because it has ceased education operations, even if it remains an organization legally. Both schools had deep financial problems and struggled for years to find a way to keep running. They join at least 18 evangelical colleges and universities that have closed since the start of COVID-19.
In the wake of the bad news, many graduates have been trying to imagine how their lives would have been different without their urban alma maters. Most King’s students came from outside the city, but many of them stayed there and built lives. They served in local churches, started careers, and had children. They ended up all over the city, living out their faith and putting their education to work.
Caleb Trouwborst, who graduated from King’s in 2017, is a music curator and DJ in the city. Megan Ristine Bellingham, in the same class, works at a hedge fund. Celina Durgin, a 2015 graduate, is a researcher at the Columbia Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. Alli O’Donnell, a singer and songwriter, said …
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by | Sep 11, 2023 | Uncategorized
Arab believers want American visitors to see the “living stones” in Israel.
Jack Sara sees buses of American Christians pass by his house as they tour around his homeland. He sees them stop, get out for a few minutes to take photos, and then get back on their buses and leave.
He wonders why they never come talk to him.
“The land of Christ is not just a museum,” said Sara, an evangelical pastor and the president of Bethlehem Bible College in Israel. “There is still a church they could meet and pray and fellowship with and get encouraged from.”
As many as 400,000 Americans visit religious sites in Israel each year. They go to walk where Jesus walked and see the land of the Bible: from the river Jordan to the Sea of Galilee to the traditional site of the Nativity, with stops at Mount Carmel, King David’s tomb, and the Mount of Olives, where Christ is said to have ascended. Yet few of these religious pilgrims connect with modern-day Christians in the Holy Land.
About 180,000 Christians live in Israel—just under 2 percent of the population. Three out of four of them are Arab. They include Byzantine, Roman, and Maronite Catholics; Eastern Orthodox; Coptic Orthodox; Armenian Christians; and a small number of Protestants like Sara.
Sara is a Palestinian who grew up in a nominal Christian home in Jerusalem’s Old City. He made a personal profession of faith and committed his life to Christ at Jerusalem Alliance Church in the early 1990s. Now—as president of the school he attended to grow deeper in his Christian faith—he hopes to connect more Christians from around the globe with the vibrant evangelical churches in Israel.
The Bible college is offering online classes to allow people to “Discover Jerusalem,” “Discover Bethlehem,” and “Discover …
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by | Sep 11, 2023 | Uncategorized
The theologian set aside his nearly finished magnum opus while in prison, investing instead in creative writing.
“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
“A Christian’s secular vocation receives new recognition from the gospel only to the extent that it is carried on while following Jesus.”
You may have heard these calls to a radical Christian life before, as well as other quotations from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer is one of the most-quoted Christian theologians of the last 100 years, inspiring generations of believers. What you may not have heard is that Bonhoeffer spent his final months in Tegel Prison creating art.
Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Gestapo at his parents’ home in Charlottenburg, Germany, in April 1943. He had broken many German laws by helping Jewish neighbors and by using his position as a government intelligence officer to evade service in the Nazi army. Bonhoeffer was jailed until October 1944 at Tegel Prison north of Berlin in relative comfort, allowing him the time and space to read and write prolifically for most of his imprisonment.
After his participation in the now-famous Hitler assassination plot was exposed, Bonhoeffer was convicted of new crimes and was moved from Tegel to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, then to Buchenwald concentration camp, and finally to Flossenbürg, where he was hanged with six others on April 9, 1945, just one month before Germany’s surrender to the Allied forces. Bonhoeffer’s short life came to a premature end.
A question haunts us: Did Bonhoeffer waste the last months of his life in prison by spending time on creative writing instead of finishing his best book, the much-anticipated Ethics? The Bible invites us to “number our days” (Ps. 90:12) and warns, “You are a mist that appears for a little while and then …
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by | Sep 11, 2023 | Uncategorized
Despite their crucial role in congregational life, 83 percent of women’s ministry leaders remain unpaid.
I want to tell you about a church leader I know. He heads up a ministry at his local church that provides spiritual formation for more than half its adult population—imagine him leading a Korean American ministry in a majority Korean American church, or a Deaf ministry in a majority Deaf church.
He plans and executes a full calendar of events and tailored discipleship opportunities, leading teams of volunteers to keep the ministry running. Those he serves love and value him as a leader. They feel seen and understood by him, and he has their trust.
While full-time staff at the church oversee smaller, specialized ministries with ample budgets, this leader has remained in a volunteer role for years with a shoestring budget.
His church covers seminary tuition for the staff ministry leaders, but he serves with no formal training, practical or theological.
The group he serves and belongs to notices the minimal support from the church, and so does he.
Except he’s not a he—but a she.
What I have described is the typical relationship of the women’s ministry leader to her local church. Even as women continue to outnumber men in evangelical congregations, the leaders who serve this majority demographic do so with high influence in the pews and low investment from the pastor.
A survey of women’s ministry leaders released in October from Lifeway Research revealed that 83 percent of them were unpaid, and 86 percent lacked formal theological training of any kind. For churches with more than 500 in attendance, only 29 percent of women’s ministry leaders were in paid, full-time positions and another 24 percent were paid part-time. Almost half (46%) received no pay.
The findings track with …
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by | Sep 11, 2023 | Uncategorized
Theologian Michelle Lee-Barnewall reflects on her ethnic identity and her identity in Christ.
We live in a world where race relations receive near-constant attention. Conversations about race permeate our politics, schools, universities, sporting events, concerts, health services—and our churches as well. And yet in public discourse, complex and wide-reaching issues of race are often reduced to the simple binary of Black versus white.
But where does this leave other ethnicities that don’t fit into this reigning dichotomy? Asians, to take one example, make up around 7 percent of the American population and around 10 percent of the British population. Yet the public discourse about race often overlooks them.
As a British Singaporean, I am therefore grateful for Michelle Lee-Barnewall’s new book A Longing to Belong: Reflections on Faith, Identity, and Race. A New Testament professor at Biola University, Lee-Barnewall weaves her personal story as a South Korean growing up and living in the United States with a practical exploration of the Bible’s themes of identity, community, and diversity.
Part 1, “Created to Belong,” begins with Lee-Barnewall’s childhood, emphasizing her struggles to fit in at school as a South Korean growing up in Minnesota. I’m sure many children can relate to her experience of desiring to been seen as “normal,” fearing classroom mockery, and enduring the pain of rejection by peers.
Lee-Barnewall then dovetails her autobiographical anecdotes with the Bible’s teaching that we are created as intrinsically relational beings who are wired to yearn for community. Furthermore, as she points out, Christians are called to something greater than personal repentance and discipleship; we are called to be interdependent …
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