by | Sep 21, 2023 | Uncategorized
“This was not ours. And we don’t take credit.”
College marketers love photos: students in class, students out on the grass—maybe throwing a frisbee, reading a book, or laughing with friends. For a Christian school, any image of someone singing or praying is good. They are always looking for compelling pictures that say to prospective students, This could be you.
And the Asbury revival—the “outpouring” in February 2023, where students in Wilmore, Kentucky, felt moved by the Holy Spirit to stay in chapel and sing, pray, confess, testify, and sing some more for about two weeks—produced lots and lots of compelling photos.
But Jennifer McChord didn’t think she could use them.
When the revival started, the vice president of marketing and enrollment at Asbury University was a year and a half into an intensive digital ad campaign to raise the Wesleyan-movement school’s brand profile. She was trying every way she could to grab the attention of 15-, 16-, and 17-year-olds who loved Jesus and wanted to be challenged in their faith while studying Bible theology, biological psychology, English, health communication, equine science, or any of the other subjects offered at Asbury. Her team wanted to make sure that Christian high school students in the region knew about and seriously considered applying to the school.
But using the photos and videos from the revival for an ad campaign felt like it would be a violation of something special. The administration decided they weren’t going to do that.
“If it seems like we’re trying to benefit from the outpouring, that’s the check,” McChord told CT. “This was not ours. And we don’t take credit.”
From the outside, news that Asbury has record-breaking enrollment …
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by | Sep 21, 2023 | Uncategorized
Sermons preached the Sunday before they were sent off exhorted suffering Christians to find their hope in Jesus and to continue to gather together.
Many Japanese American Christians first heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, as they returned home from Sunday worship. Japanese students gathered with their faculty at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California, to pray long into the evening. During the nightly curfew enforced for Nikkei (the term for all ethnic Japanese in the US), ministers telephoned frightened church members who huddled together in their homes.
Ten weeks later, President Franklin Roosevelt authorized Executive Order 9066, forcing nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans from the Pacific Coast to relocate to internment camps. Throughout the spring of 1942, public notices started appearing on telephone poles in cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles announcing the dates when “all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and nonalien” would be evacuated and where they would be picked up.
Each family could only bring whatever luggage they could carry, leaving behind homes, businesses, farms, churches, communities, and even pets. Authorities then bused them to makeshift assembly camps where they would reside for several months before being transferred to one of 10 relocation centers in the country’s interior.
My grandparents and their two young children, my aunt and uncle, were detained at Manzanar Relocation Center near Death Valley, California. The older generation rarely talked about the camps, so in college I began to study the internment to learn about my family’s story. Now, as a pastor, I’ve expanded my research to how the Japanese American church practiced soul care during that difficult time in our nation’s history.
By the outset of World War II, Nikkei churches numbered about …
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by | Sep 21, 2023 | Uncategorized
Character and competency matter all the time, whether that’s in public office or the church.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
This week, all of Washington is abuzz about journalist McKay Coppins’s profile in The Atlantic of US Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), which revealed Romney’s forthcoming retirement from the world’s most important deliberative body.
The piece, excerpted from Coppins’s forthcoming book, Romney: A Reckoning, is striking because in it, the senator does not retreat into euphemisms or PR-speak in disclosing what he believes to be the problems in the country and in his own party. Instead, he lets his “yes” be “yes” and his “no” be “no,” no matter what people might think of that.
Setting aside for a moment whether one agrees or disagrees with Romney’s viewpoints, now might be the time for us to reevaluate what we once knew about the importance of character—not just in public office, but also in the church.
As I read the profile, many thoughts came to mind, but one memory kept flashing to the forefront. Several years ago, I was interviewed on a media format I rarely engage—a drive-time radio comedy/news/sports/politics show. One of the hosts challenged me on my saying that a lack of character makes someone unfit for office. He said he had found evidence that I once thought the exact opposite.
Now, there are lots of things that I have said in my life where I now think the exact opposite (I’ve discussed some of them here), but I was hard-pressed to think how this was one of them. The radio host pointed to a panel I had done back in 2012, when the controversy in the evangelical world was over whether Christians could vote for Mitt Romney, then the Republican nominee for president, …
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by | Sep 21, 2023 | Uncategorized
His engagement announcement reflects the complications of grief and celebration that Christians experience with second marriages.
Tony Evans stood before his Dallas congregation last week—with keyboards playing softly in the background and his four adult children standing behind him—to announce that nearly four years after losing his wife Lois, he was engaged to remarry.
“God, in his sovereignty, has brought someone into my life,” the 74-year-old told the crowd, which broke out in applause. He introduced Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship to his fiancée Carla Crummie, a widow who had lost her husband around the same time as Lois’s passing.
The announcement came with a sense of both somberness and celebration. “Pray for us,” he asked the church, calling it a “sensitive” and “tender” time.
Evans had been married to Lois for 49 years before she died of cancer at the end of 2019, and the famous preacher described how she had been his partner in life and ministry. He told his church, “This may evoke some grief in some people, which I can understand, because we’re reminded about the fingerprints”—the legacy of his late wife.
Christians who have lost their spouses know firsthand the mixed emotions that come with remarriage.
“I’m more aware than most people of the reality of joy and grief that need to coexist in the life of a godly person,” said Jonathan Pitts, who attended the service along with dozens of ministry colleagues to celebrate Evans’s birthday. Pitts lost his wife of 15 years, Wynter, in 2018. She was Evans’s niece.
“I was there to grieve with those who grieve but also rejoice with those who rejoice—to rejoice with Dr. Evans that he’s found love again and companionship, knowing that that tension is not a problem to …
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by | Sep 20, 2023 | Uncategorized
As humanitarian aid—and Azerbaijan’s attacks—return to the Caucasus enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, religious freedom advocates debate the merits of emphasizing religion.
It was almost a good news story.
After nine months of blockade, humanitarian aid finally reached the Armenian Christians of Nagorno-Karabakh on Monday. But almost immediately, ending three years of tense ceasefire after a 2020 war, Azerbaijan renewed on Tuesday its military assault on the mountainous Caucasus enclave.
And following today’s surrender and promised disarmament of local separatist forces, the region will almost certainly revert to the sovereignty of a neighboring nation that Armenians fear—and a former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court warns—is preparing a genocide.
Thousands massed at the airport in the capital of Stepanakert, preparing to leave.
Advocates for Armenia are at a loss. But of the three aforementioned adjectives—humanitarian, Armenian, or Christian—which ones were most effective in pressing for humanitarian aid? And now in a new phase of the conflict, which will be the most crucial in mobilizing further support?
CT spoke with six religious freedom experts about best practices in Christian advocacy.
What compelled this week’s minor breakthrough?
One week before the initial agreement, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Aliyev to express “concern over the deteriorating humanitarian situation.” According to the official State Department readout, however, neither the word Christian nor Armenian was spoken by the senior diplomat. Religion and ethnicity were completely ignored.
But one CT source stated that Blinken’s outreach to Azerbaijan “ticked up” following the June visit to Armenia by Sam Brownback, former US ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom. And at a congressional human rights hearing on …
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