by | Apr 3, 2024 | Uncategorized
Christians should encourage doubters’ questions. They should also discern what those questions might be seeking.
Wrestling with Christian faith—questioning, doubting, reforming, and even falling away from it—has been part of the Christian tradition as long as there’s been a Christian tradition. Christianity asserts some big claims about the world, and a healthy faith can mean wrestling with these claims at some point along our faith journey. The result can be a more robust faith, even if it is a somewhat reformed faith.
But this is certainly not how it goes for everyone. Sometimes one can’t get past an objection that calls the truth of Christianity into question. Other times, living by ethical claims that run counter to current cultural norms proves too heavy a burden. Sometimes the sheer audacity of the claims of Christianity leads people to dismiss them as unbelievable and unserious. And then there’s the presence of scandal and abuse within the ranks of church leaders. With church-related trauma all too common these days, some people simply want out.
These experiences, often lived out on social media and other online channels, travel under the banner of faith deconstruction. Deconstruction is one of those terms that feels familiar, even if most people know little about its roots. While it began as a term of art with 20th-century postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida, I suspect most faith deconstructions aren’t being informed by a study in Derridean semantic theory! Today, deconstruction may refer to a wide variety of experiences.
To help with the confusion, Alisa Childers and Timothy Barnett offer their new book, The Deconstruction of Christianity: What It Is, Why It’s Destructive, and How to Respond. As their subtitle makes clear, Childers and Barnett take a critical stance toward the deconstruction …
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by | Apr 3, 2024 | Uncategorized
Our research, based on large-scale student surveys, finds a surprising and complex interplay of religion and mental health at US universities.
In 2021, the Religious Exception Accountability Project (REAP) brought a lawsuit calling for “an end to the U.S. Department of Education’s complicity in the abuses and unsafe conditions thousands of LGBTQ+ students endure at hundreds of taxpayer-funded, religious colleges and universities.”
The underlying premise of REAP’s suit is that the federal government “is duty-bound by Title IX and the U.S. Constitution to protect sexual and gender minority students at taxpayer-funded colleges and universities”—and this means ending religious exemptions for schools, including many Christian colleges, which order student life according to traditional theologies of sex and gender.
The REAP case, which is ongoing two years later, is not the only reason the experiences of LGBTQ+ students on Christian campuses are closely scrutinized, of course. And neither is REAP the only voice claiming Christian colleges are subjecting thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of LGBTQ+ students to abuse and its effects, like poor mental health.
Until recently, there have been no studies testing that claim by comparing the mental health of LGBTQ+ students at religious and non-religious universities. While the individual stories of students are necessary, it is equally necessary to have rigorous, empirical studies evaluating the proposition that religious universities are causing harm. Our article, published in the Journal of Affective Disorders (one of the top journals in the field), is the first analysis of this kind.
Using data collected by the Healthy Minds Study, we examined over 135,000 university students from around the nation, around 30,000 of whom self-identified as LGBTQ+. …
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by | Apr 2, 2024 | Uncategorized
Designed to monitor foreign funding, more recently FCRA has crippled numerous organizations. Is it intentional?
Christian ministries operating in India are continuing to lose the government’s authorization to legally collect foreign donations, in what is amounting to a devastating financial blow to many organizations.
This March, Vision India, an organization that provides leadership training for Christian young people, was unable to renew its Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA) license.
“A week prior, the government conducted an enquiry, and a week later, refused the renewal,” said Vijay Mohod, director of Vision India.
The then–prime minister of India, Indira Gandhi, introduced FCRA during the Emergency period in 1976, claiming there was foreign interference in domestic politics. The first FCRA required organizations intending to receive foreign contributions to register with the Ministry of Home Affairs. The subsequent iterations in 2010 and 2011 made this policy stringent, requiring organizations to renew their FCRA licenses every five years, among other new clauses, and its most recent iteration, passed in 2020 and amended in 2022, is even more restrictive. One clause, for example, requires all FCRA organizations to have their accounts at a specific branch of a bank and prohibits interorganizational grants.
Theoretically, these five-year licenses are renewed based on an organization’s annual submission of reports, detailing the foreign funds received and demonstrating they were properly utilized for their stated, approved purposes. However, as Christian ministries have failed to see their licenses renewed, some leaders have questioned if the government has an ulterior motive.
“So many organizations depend on foreign funding,” said archbishop Anil Joseph Thomas Couto, general secretary …
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by | Apr 2, 2024 | Uncategorized
Leaders extend prayers and lament road safety after 45 were killed on the way to Zion Christian Church in South Africa.
Botswana will hold a national memorial service on Thursday for 45 people who died traveling to an Easter event in South Africa. An eight-year-old girl, Lauryn Siako, was the only survivor after a bus bound for Zion Christian Church crashed through barriers and fell 164 feet down a ledge last week.
In the days following the deadly accident, pastors in Botswana have appeared on national television to pray and to comfort the grieving.
“This tragedy calls us to come out of our sleeping moment and be ever praying and declaring the protection of God in any given situation,” said David Seithamo, the head of the Evangelical Fellowship of Botswana. “The nation should gather around to really support those that are grieving at this moment. When they mourn, we should mourn, but they should know that Christ remains our comfort.”
The pilgrims from Botswana were among millions who travel each Easter to Moria, a town in northeast South Africa and the headquarters for Zion Christian Church (ZCC, pronounced zed-c-c), one of the largest African-initiated churches in the region. ZCC has churches across Southern Africa, including Botswana, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique, and Malawi.
The church has two branches, ZCC and St. Engenas ZCC. This year marks the 100th anniversary for the latter, and South African president Cyril Ramaphosa attended the celebration event. Though pilgrims also showed up at St. Engenas in 2023, this is the church’s first official pilgrimage event since the pandemic.
Given the number of tourists usually packing the roads over Holy Week, the South African government had previously checked the capacity of drivers and the safety of cars.
Siako told officials the bus was following two cars carrying …
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by | Apr 2, 2024 | Uncategorized
Evangelical congregations from Texas to Maine plan outreach events in the path of totality.
The plan in Vallonia, Indiana, involves moon pies.
The sun will start to disappear at 1:49 p.m. The wide blue sky that stretches over the cornfields and soybeans along State Route 135 will grow darker and darker, until, after about an hour and 15 minutes, the small farming community of 379 souls will be cast into night.
The moon—invisible to the human eye except as an empty space—will overshadow everything. For a minute, and then two, and then three, stars will be visible in the sky. The colors of the world will seem all wrong. And Vallonia will pass through eclipse totality.
At Driftwood Christian Church, people will look up at the sky and say, “Wow!” and “Ooo!” and “Look at that!” And they will munch on moon pies decorated with the words of Jesus in John 8:12: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness.”
Pastor Daniel Ison said it was the church’s evangelism committee that came up with the plan. They bought the cookie-and-marshmallow snacks and wrote out the Scripture verse, over and over, hundreds of times.
The Independent Christian Church of about 170 doesn’t know how many visitors they’ll get. But they expect a lot of people will drive out to see the eclipse on Monday, April 8. The celestial phenomenon is a rare thing and there won’t be another one in the contiguous US for another 20 years. So the congregation decided to open up the church, its bathrooms, and the field around their building to welcome out-of-town visitors to a celebration of creation.
“That God created something like this for us to enjoy—God’s just like, Enjoy my creation, on an epic scale!—I think you just have to …
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