by | Mar 14, 2024 | Uncategorized
The Bible museum on Independence Mall in Philadelphia was open less than three years and had attracted fewer visitors than projected.
American Bible Society announced it will shutter its Faith and Liberty Discovery Center (FLDC), a Bible museum it invested more than $60 million into, after less than three years in operation.
ABS had projected that the museum, centrally located on Independence Mall in Philadelphia, would draw 250,000 visitors a year. The revenue from ticket sales for the museum show a much lower number, maybe as low as 5,400 visitors in fiscal year 2022 (the museum’s program revenue was $54,000 and full-priced tickets cost $10).
ABS’s new CEO Jennifer Holloran, arriving last month to an organization with a variety of financial and missional troubles, said in an email to staff on Wednesday that she and the board had agreed at their February meeting that “now is the time to proceed with this difficult but necessary action.” She quoted Ecclesiastes 3, writing that “everything that happens in this world happens at the time of God’s choosing.”
“The FLDC as conceived was a wonderfully innovative idea,” she wrote to staff. “That idea came with big possibilities and requirements to allow it to be functional in the long run. Unfortunately, despite the valiant efforts of our FLDC leadership and team, we have not been able to achieve the long-term sustainability that an experience like that needs to be successful.”
The museum opened in May 2021 when venues were still experiencing pandemic ripple effects, but it never rebounded like other places. CT visited the museum last month and only three visitors trickled in over a two-hour span.
ABS described FLDC as a $60 million museum when it launched in 2021, and it had $11 million in expenses in fiscal year 2022. ABS’s 2023 stewardship report …
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by | Mar 14, 2024 | Uncategorized
I understand frustration with media negativity. But bad news may be God’s invitation to work alongside him.
On a church mission trip in 2004, 65-year-old Ramon Billhimer looked out a bus window in Uganda and saw a little girl taking dirty, stagnant water from a muddy ditch. The water was for a garden, Ramon assumed, or maybe livestock. She snapped a picture and offhandedly commented to her translator that the children sure went a long way to get water for their animals.
“Oh, that’s not for animals, Ramon,” the translator replied. “That’s her family’s drinking water.”
Ramon had already noticed, while visiting rural churches, how sick many Ugandan children were. She’d assumed they all had malaria, but soon learned at least half were chronically ill with dysentery and other consequences of drinking dirty water. The sight out the bus window became a turning point in Ramon’s life—the little girl with her jug, a burning bush.
For the rest of her time in Uganda, Ramon cried herself to sleep. A few days after the bus conversation, while visiting a Ugandan hospital, she met a little girl hooked up to IVs and lying quietly in bed. Ramon tried to engage the child and told her she’d come back to visit. A few days later, she made good on her promise, but the girl was gone. She was dead from dysentery.
As Ramon has told the story over the years, she went out into the hallway of the hospital and screamed, “God! Why don’t you do something!”
And she heard a response: Why don’t you?
So she did. She started by explaining to her husband, Bob, why she felt compelled—in the stage of life American society says should be devoted to rest and relaxation—to provide clean water to people nearly 9,000 miles away from their home in Midland, …
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by | Mar 13, 2024 | Uncategorized
The caricature of Rahab and other female characters in Scripture often sidelines their contribution.
Several years ago, I was invited to write the notes for a new women’s study Bible. The project was unexpected and felt unusual to me, because I’d never read a women’s study Bible myself and I was skeptical about the need for one. Why can’t we all just read the same Bible? But after praying about the offer, I felt led to accept—hoping I might be able to offer something of value to women who picked up the Bible. But I had no idea how transformative the project would end up being for me!
In my four decades working in Christian schools, churches, and other ministries—and with three degrees in Bible to my name—no one had ever asked me to read the Bible as a woman and for women. I had never approached the Bible while asking, What are women going to wonder about when they read this? What’s going to bother them? What will capture their attention?
Because my pastors and theology professors were all men, and most of the books I read about the Bible were written by men, I learned to read Scripture generically—ignoring myself as much as possible so I could see the world through their eyes. Some of my professors considered the plight of women or the roles of women, but none of them had embodied experiences which helped them enter the biblical stories of women. This was not their fault, and it did not make their teaching irrelevant, but it did make my understanding of Scripture incomplete.
As I reread the Old and New Testaments, focusing both on the women in the text and the women who would read it, so many biblical stories came to life for me in a whole new way. I was forced to wrestle with difficult passages that seemed hard on women. But as I wrestled with these …
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by | Mar 13, 2024 | Uncategorized
The latest influencer movement wants to “bring back” a narrow vision of biblical womanhood with pretty pictures, long dresses, and homemade bread.
Let’s bring back beauty,” begins the caption of a viral reel on Instagram.
The clip features Christian influencer Katie Calabrese in an airy long dress followed by a montage of images: flowers on an open Bible, a clothesline full of linen neutrals, a clean stairwell with wooden floors and shiplap walls, a faceless woman standing in front of a bowl of dough while holding a baby.
The caption lists other things she wants to bring back: “ladies who know how to whip up a delicious meal for unexpected guests,” going to church, having big families, and “loving your husband and singing his praises in front of others.”
Calabrese belongs to a cohort of online “tradwife” influencers, whose personas are built on the revival of various “traditional” expressions of femininity, marriage, homemaking, and family life. The thrust of their callback message rings familiar to those who grew up in fundamentalist Christian circles, though it’s uniquely packaged for Instagram and TikTok, where tradwife posts have grown substantially since 2020.
Tradwife content is unabashedly ahistorical, drawing on ideas and imagery from across time periods. Some tradwives build their brand with a 1950s June Cleaver persona, wearing lipstick and an A-line dress to do housework. Others evoke imagined versions of Little House on the Prairie: long dresses, rustic homemade bread, and rural homesteads. Some posts borrow painted images of Victorian households or Regency-era social gatherings.
Unlike other influencers who create content about homeschooling or homesteading, a tradwife influencer makes faithfulness to some aspect of “traditional” womanhood a central tenet of their online brand and …
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by | Mar 13, 2024 | Uncategorized
The phrase is increasingly useless—unfairly applied to ordinary Christians yet too weak to sufficiently condemn “another gospel” in our midst.
Some years ago, the Reformed philosopher Alvin Plantinga gave a useful definition of fundamentalist. He noted that, in academic settings, it served as little more than a smear word; he offered an expletive I can’t print here, so let’s just substitute son of a gun.
Where it retained any content beyond the smear, Plantinga argued that fundamentalist meant “considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.” Thus did academics, journalists, and many Christians come to deploy fundie to mean a “stupid [son of a gun] whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of” their own. And because there’s always someone to one’s right, the F-word is essentially relative: It has no stable reference, but it certainly can never refer to me.
These days we might say the same about Christian nationalism. The phrase has lost all substantive content. In nearly every conversation, it has little reference beyond those “stupid [sons of guns] whose political opinions are considerably to the right of mine.” Allegations of Christian nationalism can mean almost anything: Maybe the accused is a literal Nazi. Or maybe he’s just a lifelong Republican whose big issues are abortion and tax rates.
Recently there have been thoughtful, good-faith efforts to define the phrase in a useful way. I suggest instead that we put it out to pasture. Though it may once have had limited reference to specific groups and ideas, it no longer does; the phrase is all heat and no light. In too many uses, it’s slanderous. In almost every case, it’s largely an exercise in boundary drawing.
To be sure, sometimes a boundary is exactly what …
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