by | Apr 18, 2024 | Uncategorized
Christian artists work at the intersection of music and climate change.
Christians love to sing about creation. Hymns like “How Great Thou Art” describe the beauty of creation that moves the church to sing, “I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder / Thy power throughout the universe displayed.”
Nature can also be a source of confusion or anxiety for believers as they observe eclipses and earthquakes and try to discern God’s role or intent in their unfolding. And as climate change more visibly impacts humans, the natural world can seem increasingly hostile, even as it remains a source of inspiration and joy for the Christian.
Where is God’s hand at work? And how should we respond to mysteries and chaos in our prayers and worship?
British scholar Mark Porter believes the Christian imagination can hold a complex view of creation—as can music. His research looks at the intersection of music, faith, and climate change, showing ways to engage nature beyond using it as a signpost of God’s glory, contending also with its beauty, chaos, fragility, and brutality.
“There’s not just one thing that nature imagery does,” said Porter. “It can do something besides inspire an individual to look to God in worship.”
Porter’s forthcoming book For the Warming of the Earth: Music, Faith, and Ecological Crisis describes how faith communities and organizations are responding to climate change and environmental crises with music, such as Resound Worship’s Doxecology album, the activism of groups like Christian Climate Action (CCA), and Catholic song festivals centered on Pope Francis’ landmark encyclical, Laudato Si’.
It’s not a how-to book for worship leaders looking to more explicitly address creation care or …
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by | Apr 18, 2024 | Uncategorized
We must always be people of the Word, but we’ll have to reimagine deep engagement with Scripture.
Christians are readers. We are “people of the book.” We own personal Bibles, translated into our mother tongues, and read them daily. Picture “quiet time” and you’ll see a table, a cup of coffee, and a Bible spread open to dog-eared, highlighted, annotated pages. For Christians, daily Bible reading is the minimum standard for the life of faith. What kind of Christian, some of us may think, doesn’t meet this low bar?
This vision of our faith resonates for many. It certainly describes the way I was raised. As a snapshot of a slice of the church at a certain time in history—20th-century American evangelicals—it checks out. But as a timeless vision of what it means to follow Christ, it falls short, and it does so in a way that will seriously impinge on our ability to make disciples in an increasingly postliterate culture, a culture in which most people still understand the bare mechanics of reading but overwhelmingly consume audio and visual media instead.
We can see how this literacy-focused idea of Christianity will fail in the future by looking to the past. For most of Christian history, most believers were illiterate. Reading the Bible daily wasn’t an option because reading wasn’t an option.
This doesn’t mean Scripture was irrelevant to ordinary Christians’ lives. But the sacred page wasn’t primarily a private matter for personal devotion; it was a public matter heard in the gathering of God’s people for worship. The Bible was the church’s book—a liturgical book, a book whose natural habitat was the voice of Christ’s body lifted in praise. To hear the Word of God, you joined the people of God. Lectors …
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by | Apr 18, 2024 | Uncategorized
Church leaders can offer clear moral and ethical guidance for a practice that violates biblical mandates.
On April 8, the Vatican issued Dignitas Infinita, a 20-page document rejecting a variety of practices that violate human dignity. Unsurprisingly, these included human trafficking, violence against women, abortion, euthanasia, sex change, and child abuse. It also included surrogacy.
This isn’t the first time the pontificate has come out against this “deplorable” practice, which “fails to respect the dignity of [the] child” and “violates the dignity of the woman.” Pope Francis made waves in January when he condemned surrogacy, noting that “a child is always a gift and never the basis of a commercial contract.”
Evangelical Christians and pastors value the life of the unborn. That’s why we march across the capital on freezing January mornings and pray outside of abortion clinics. Our motivation for child protection must also lead us to confront the ways children are impacted by the baby-making industry as well.
But when did you last hear your pastor address the issue of surrogacy from the pulpit? Odds are, never. Protestants have a dearth of official guidance on reproductive technologies. While some are clear on abortion, very few denominations have clear teachings on IVF, let alone the much rarer practice of surrogacy.
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary ethics professor Andrew T. Walker told The New York Times that when he suggested introducing a resolution about artificial reproductive technology at the denomination’s annual convention, his colleagues hesitated.
Some Christians are directly involved in surrogacy and see their role as a calling to help families have children, as CT reported in 2018. But many Christian bioethicists cite …
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by | Apr 18, 2024 | Uncategorized
Study: 24 percent of clergy in North Carolina are still opposed to same-sex marriage.
After the departure of thousands of traditionalist United Methodist churches from the denomination over the past five years, it might stand to reason that those congregations remaining in the fold are more progressive and open to ordination and marriage of people in same-sex relationships.
But the picture is far more mixed.
A new report from the Religion and Social Change Lab at Duke University that looked at disaffiliating clergy from North Carolina’s two United Methodist conferences or regions found that even after the departures, 24 percent of North Carolina clergy remaining in the denomination disagree with allowing LGBTQ people to get married or ordained within the denomination.
“At least some amount of ambivalence over LGBTQ+ issues among UMC clergy is likely to persist for years to come,” the report concluded.
After a four-year COVID-19 delay and the departure of about 7,600 churches—a loss of 25 percent of all its US congregations—the denomination is likely to reconsider the issue of human sexuality when it convenes its top legislative body April 23–May 3 in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Given that the denomination is a worldwide body, with hundreds of delegates from Africa and the Philippines, areas far more conservative in their views of human sexuality, it’s unclear whether the measures stand a chance of passing, even as the US delegation is far more open to such changes.
Overall, the Duke report finds that disaffiliating North Carolina clergy were much more politically and theologically conservative than those who chose to remain. Some 85 percent of clergy who left the denomination disagreed with the notion that “all religious leadership positions should be open to people …
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by | Apr 17, 2024 | Uncategorized
Leader explains why the movement is seeing its biggest membership bump in 30 years and its mission for the years ahead.
As CEO of the United Kingdom’s Evangelical Alliance (EA), Gavin Calver sometimes compares the organization to the polarizing British breakfast spread Marmite: You either love it or you hate it.
The EA hears plenty from its critics, taking hits for stances on issues like transgender identity, and is calling on Christians who love them from a distance to actually join.
“We’re asking, ‘Will you please stand with us as someone who loves Marmite, not dislikes it?’” Calver said. “In our culture, it makes it a little lighthearted, but it needs very little explaining. People get it quickly.”
More churches, organizations, and individuals are responding to the call, and after record growth in the past year, the tally of dues-paying individual members recently topped 23,000. The total is a signal of the group’s influence to government officials and societal leaders, allowing the EA to represent evangelicals more effectively in the wider culture.
Many of the new individual members signed up when EA representatives spoke at member churches, so much of the recent growth “reflects the constituency we already have,” according to Calver. Still, the EA’s membership is becoming more ethnically diverse and trending younger, he said, with most of its growth happening “beyond the southeast of England where we were strongest to start with.”
Calver recently spoke to CT about his vision for the EA, why so many new members are signing up now, and how evangelicals in the UK are staying united despite their differences.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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