by | Apr 29, 2024 | Uncategorized
A late historian explores how crusade hymns told both the classic story of gospel salvation and the evolving story of evangelical worship music.
Crowds of over 50,000. Famous special guests. Hundreds of cities in the US and around the world. Beloved, catchy songs. For many, these might sound like readouts from the Taylor Swift Eras Tour hype machine. But exchange the glittery girl power for the gospel in baritone, and you have one of the most successful musical touring acts in the postwar world: the Billy Graham Crusades.
The first association that “Billy Graham Crusade” may evoke is not musical at all, but rather a close-up shot of the evangelist, with his penetrating, wide-eyed gaze and raised forearms, thundering, “The Bible says …” Admittedly, music was not the main focus.
Yet as the late historian Edith Blumhofer shows in her final book, Songs I Love to Sing: The Billy Graham Crusades and the Shaping of Modern Worship, neither Graham’s ministry nor the late-century rise of contemporary Christian music can be understood without it. As crusade song leader Cliff Barrows pursued his main goal—“sing to save”—he and his teammates bridged stylistic, cultural, and generational divides, transforming evangelicals’ music into the harmonic blend of old and new that is familiar today.
Mining rich resources
Before unpacking this highly original book, a few words about the author. Blumhofer is an American religious historian renowned for her empathetic biographies of hymnist Fanny J. Crosby and evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, as well as broader studies of evangelicalism and Pentecostalism. She concluded her career with this new study, sadly succumbing to a battle with cancer in the process.
To finish the project, she tapped Jesus People expert Larry Eskridge, with whom she had for many years directed the Institute …
Continue reading…
by | Apr 26, 2024 | Uncategorized
Do activists often invest their work with religious significance? All the more reason for Christians to be discerning co-laborers.
I love nature documentaries, especially those narrated by David Attenborough. Whether watching with my children or on my own, I love seeing the majesty of the snowy Alps or kelp forests.
But I’ve noticed that in recent years, nearly every somber vignette of a species struggling on the edge of survival ends with a call to action. Viewers are beckoned to take responsibility for causing a poor animal’s plight and to consider how they can fix things before the species is gone forever.
I understand the impulse to believe that animals’ struggles should move humans to action. However, it is the ethics informing the narrator’s pleas that seem a bit muddled.
By many documentarians’ admission, the species we marvel at on screen have emerged out of eons of struggles to survive and adapt to their surroundings. Sometimes, the narrators even remind us that this process has resulted in countless prior species disappearing into extinction.
Whether you believe in a young or an old earth, in God’s hand or in meaningless physical forces guiding history, we can all agree that change, death, and selection favoring adaptability are features of life on earth. Witnessing it in real time makes for compelling television drama, but the moral indictment that you and I contribute to grave evil when one of these species goes extinct does not seem to square with the documentarians’ worldview.
What compels us to see polar bears possibly going extinct in terms of moral right and wrong? If we take human action out of the equation, isn’t history littered with the bones of countless species that have gone extinct? Are not humans and their actions part of nature?
A robust theology of creation care
If we listen closely, …
Continue reading…
by | Apr 26, 2024 | Uncategorized
The government plans to close its porous border with Myanmar to boost security, separating ethnic groups that straddle the boundary.
Ngamreichan Tuithung runs a Christian boarding school that sits right at the border of India’s Manipur state and Myanmar. Amazing Grace Mission School is based in Wanglee Market, a small Indian town, and serves around 150 students from Myanmar and 6 from India.
Since Myanmar’s 2021 coup, the school has become a safe haven for parents wanting to send their children away from the violence of the war raging on in Myanmar. To Tuithung, it’s an opportunity to share with students and parents “about God’s love and how God is taking care of us.”
For decades, some parents in Myanmar (also known as Burma) have been able to easily send their kids to school in India, thanks to a government policy that allows citizens of either country living within 10 miles of the border to freely enter the other country without a visa. Many tribal communities share ethnic ties, familial bonds, and a way of life transcending territorial boundaries. Tuithung, who is from the Naga ethnic group, grew up in India but has many relatives in Myanmar. Because of their close ties, he can speak Burmese and visits them often.
However, all this will change as the Indian government proceeds with its decision to close the international border between India and Myanmar, which shares boundaries with four Indian states: Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, and Mizoram. India’s home minister Amit Shah says the action is needed to “ensure the internal security” and “to maintain the demographic structure” of northeastern India as the war in Myanmar continues. Plans include constructing a fence and implementing a surveillance system.
Tuithung believes that even with tightened borders, the government will provide …
Continue reading…
by | Apr 26, 2024 | Uncategorized
The rage of the mob is a poor substitute for real community.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
As Columbia University and other elite campuses erupt into protests against the United States’ diplomatic and military support of Israel’s war against Hamas, US Sen. John Fetterman denounced the antisemitic speech of some of these protesters, remarking on the social platform X, “Add some tiki torches and it’s Charlottesville for these Jewish students.”
Whatever one thinks of Fetterman’s analogy or of the Israel-Hamas war, we would do well to listen to the common ring of the Charlottesville chant, “You will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!” with the one recorded this week on the Columbia campus: “We have Zionists who have entered the camp!”
An observer might have asked in Charlottesville, “What Jews are trying to replace you?” The white nationalists there would no doubt have told such a person that a shadowy cabal was seeking to import immigrants, to commit “white genocide.” Just so, another observer might ask at Columbia, “What Zionists have entered your camp?” Israeli military forces? No. The “Zionists” in question are Jewish students—one wearing a Star of David—attempting to walk on campus.
At one level, the video of the students chanting seems almost farcical, like a parody out of an old episode of Portlandia. The leader yells out a sentence; the followers repeat it back—even to the point of repeating back, in unison, “Repeat after me.” Does that part really have to be repeated? Well, kind of; that’s part of what happens in a chant. The message is not reasoned discourse. The rote nature of the repetition …
Continue reading…
by | Apr 26, 2024 | Uncategorized
The plan would organize UMC churches in four global regions, with each given more leeway around same-sex marriage and other theological issues.
The top legislative body of the United Methodist Church passed a series of measures Thursday to restructure the worldwide denomination to give each region greater equity in tailoring church life to its own customs and traditions.
The primary measure, voted on as the UMC General Conference met at the Charlotte Convention Center in North Carolina, was an amendment to the church’s constitution to divide the denomination into four equal regions—Africa, Europe, the Philippines, and the United States.
According to the plan, each region would be able to customize part of the denomination’s rulebook, the Book of Discipline, to fit local needs. While church regions in Africa, the Philippines, and Europe have already enjoyed some leeway in customizing church life, the United States has not.
The vote on the constitutional amendment passed 586–164, or by 78 percent, which means it surpassed the two-thirds majority needed for constitutional amendments. It must now go before each smaller church region, called an annual conference, for ratification by the end of 2025.
If ratified by two-thirds of delegates to the annual conferences, the restructuring would allow the four regions to set their own qualifications for ordaining clergy and lay leaders; publish their own hymnal and rituals, including rites for marriage; and establish its own judicial courts. A new Book of Discipline would have one section that could be revised and tailored for each of the four regional conferences.
The two-week worldwide meeting is the first meeting of the General Conference in five years, due mostly to delays associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. It follows a painful schism that has split some 7,600 US-based churches from the denomination—a …
Continue reading…
