by | Mar 21, 2024 | Uncategorized
Christians should celebrate from Palm to Easter Sunday—and everything in between.
As a child, my twin and I would often stage elaborate bake-offs during the school holidays. One year, I made an Easter cake with three chocolate crosses and a crown of thorns. I drowned these elements in large pools of jammy blood.
Sure, it was gratuitously gruesome—and I’m not surprised my sister’s saccharine fluffy chick cupcakes were the favored choice. But from an early age, I have shirked the propensity to avoid the grittiness of Easter. To me, its bloodiness is the very reason the Cross brings so much hope.
Many Christians around the world will celebrate Palm Sunday this weekend to commemorate Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Some 2,000 years ago, crowds of Jews laid out palm branches on public streets to welcome their “Messiah”—the conquering king who they believed would overthrow the Roman government and liberate them from its hostile occupation.
While many oppressed people today still desperately need this kind of physical deliverance, Jesus’ journey did not end there. Instead, his road to Jerusalem culminated in the Cross, which brought an entirely different kind of liberation.
Palm Sunday marks the start of Holy Week, the days leading up to Jesus’ betrayal, death, and resurrection. It is a period from the ancient church calendar when Christians look forward to the victory of Easter Sunday with joyful anticipation.
But it is also a time of great sorrow—marked by suffering, betrayal, and brokenness. And because of this, it speaks powerfully to those whose countries, relationships, or mental health situations are increasingly unstable. In a world desperately in need of hope, we cannot just brush past the anguish of Holy Week and …
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by | Mar 21, 2024 | Uncategorized
We gained an audience but overexposed our souls.
Ten years ago, I published my first book. Like many of my peers, my work draws from personal experience and uses elements of memoir. After all, I became a writer in the heyday of confessional blogging when Glennon Doyle and Jen Hatmaker were writing from their kitchen tables about the struggles of domestic life and womanhood. The first blog I ever read described the pain of childbirth in all its gory detail.
But that openness is nothing compared to the kind of self-exposure that today’s platforms demand.
As blogs gave way to social media, content became both more staged and, ironically, more intimate. Instead of writing from the kitchen table, influencers go live from their kitchens, bathrooms, and bedrooms. Nothing is off-limits. Audiences are invited to ride the dramatic arc of personal relationship, sexual experience, and religious doubt. Together, we celebrate milestones in the lives of children we don’t even know.
In publishing, the pressure to expose one’s personal life is rooted in the author’s need to drive sales through online presence and platform—what has been deemed the “personal brand.” Writer Jen Pollock Michel, whose career mirrors mine, recently confessed that she’s considering stepping back, not from writing but from book publishing, because “there are fewer and fewer ways to publicize a book that don’t look self-promotional.”
All of this makes for a deeply immodest publishing culture—one in which self-exposure is deemed a virtue.
To name authorial self-promotion as a problem of modesty may strike you as misplaced. It’s gimmicky, to be sure, maybe even cringe as the kids say, but immodest? Part of the …
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by | Mar 20, 2024 | Uncategorized
Abstaining from eating confronts the cultural lies we believe about our bodies.
I stood frozen in the cereal aisle. On either side of me were thousands of boxes and bags of breakfast grains stretched out row after row, in scores of varieties: Vitamin fortified! Extra marshmallows! Cinnamon clusters with organic wheat germ for twice your daily fiber!
For the past four and a half years, I’d been living in another country, limited to the street of local food vendors near my house. I’d walk up and down the market past wriggling eels in gallon buckets, steaming dumplings from a little chrome cart, and gritty bundles of bok choy heaped on a card table. I’d buy only what I could fit in my bags and carry back home on foot. Now, just after moving back to America, I was paralyzed by the excess surrounding me at my local grocery store.
A land of plenty is a strange place to fast from food. And not just because many of us have not known of fasting by necessity, but also because of our underlying cultural assumptions.
On one hand, we embrace the indulgence of hedonism—what the body wants, it must have. We enthrone desire as the highest good, give in to every craving, and let it enslave us. And as a rule, our pleasures are designed for excess. Just as streaming companies encourage binging and smartphones aim for addiction, a lot of what we eat is scientifically engineered to addict us. It’s hard to rightly order our appetites when they have been manipulated by global food conglomerates that profit from excess.
On the other hand, we embrace a modern-day iteration of Gnosticism. Strongly influenced by Platonic and dualist philosophies, we split the physical from the spiritual in a false dichotomy. We elevate the supernatural realm as purer and truer than the corporeal—which …
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by | Mar 20, 2024 | Uncategorized
A seminary professor from Sierra Leone shares how African arrivals are changing the church in Belgium and the rest of the continent.
Joseph Bosco Bangura is out to reshape how we think about migrant churches.
For more than 25 years, he has been exploring how new Christian movements open up opportunities to engage with and transform societies. Bangura’s research on the growing Pentecostal movement in his home country of Sierra Leone revealed both its popular appeal and the creative ways charismatic and Pentecostal churches have accommodated indigenous African religious traditions.
Now he’s turning his focus to the impact of migrant churches in Europe. Bangura, who teaches missiology at the Evangelical Theological Faculty (ETF) in Belgium and Protestant Theological University (PThU) in the Netherlands and also pastors a migrant church, spoke with CT about the opportunities and challenges facing migrant congregations in secularized European societies.
What motivated you to study migrant churches in Europe?
There is always a connection between people’s mobility and the spread of their faith. Any time the Jews migrated—in fact, it is from them that we have the term diaspora—something happened to their faith. The same was true in the early church. They didn’t go immediately; persecution brought about their dispersal. Migration inevitably coincides with the spread of the gospel. It widens the possibility of bringing new aspects of the faith to places where they were not initially known.
In Western Europe today, there is a greater awareness among indigenous [i.e., white European] churches of the missionary implications of migrant communities. What can they do for the configuration of the church in a secular Europe? They might be the lifeline for the survival of the faith in a secularized world.
Mission organizations are taking the …
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by | Mar 20, 2024 | Uncategorized
Their pastors are mostly evangelical, sometimes bivocational, and eager for additional workers and funding to better serve their communities.
Pastors of Hispanic Protestant churches in the United States maintain immense gratitude for their role, but many face financial struggles. Their congregations reflect diverse worship styles, but they have a unified desire to reach and serve their communities.
Lifeway Research partnered with numerous denominations and church networks to survey Hispanic Protestant pastors in the United States for a study sponsored by Lifeway Recursos, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and Samaritan’s Purse. This study follows a Lifeway Research study of US Hispanic Protestant pastors last year focused on the congregations and their evangelistic outreach.
“The response from pastors and leaders about the first study we did last year was overwhelming,” said Giancarlo Montemayor, director of global publishing for Lifeway Recursos.
“The goal with this second study is to dig deeper into some of the nuances of the Hispanic church in the US, such as worship and outreach. We also wanted to pay close attention to the particular needs of the pastors serving in these communities who often struggle with cultural and political issues that are not present in an English-speaking church.”
Pastoral perspectives
The average Hispanic Protestant pastor shares many similarities with other Protestant pastors while also having some unique characteristics. Participating pastors are overwhelmingly evangelical, with 82 percent identifying as such compared to 17 percent who say they are mainline Protestant.
Seven in 10 have some type of higher education, including 44 percent who have a graduate degree. In terms of their theological education, almost half have completed Bible institute training (47%) or seminary courses (46%).
More than …
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