by | Jun 5, 2024 | Uncategorized
It’s tough to plunge into a new congregation. Here’s how to get your head above water.
Once, a man decided to attend religious services while visiting a new town. He went to the meeting location and made a bunch of new friends, just like that.
The man in question was the apostle Paul, and we learn this story of his visit to Philippi, including that friendly Sabbath, from Acts 16. Unfortunately, most of us aren’t like Paul in multiple key respects, so perhaps the story should be accompanied by a warning: results not typical. For most of us, making friends in a new church is hard.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past year because, last July, my family moved from Georgia to Ohio for my husband’s job. It was a difficult move; we have way too many books, it turns out, and they’re heavy. But far worse than shifting the books was leaving behind so many people we’ve known and loved for years—friends at church chief among them.
Leaving is only part of the trouble, however, and finding a new church isn’t the end of it either. Once you’ve settled on a local congregation, just how do you make friends?
It’s important to mention at this point that my husband and I, both socially awkward academics, are not as bold as Paul and have zero skill in small talk. I’m plenty familiar with the lives and writings of people who’ve been dead for two millennia or longer but often find living people rather harder to understand. And yet, being in community with them is a requirement of our faith (Heb. 10:25). God created us for community with himself and other believers, and church community is both a scene and source of spiritual growth. It’s also—eventually—lots of fun, even for the awkward like us.
The question, then, …
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by | Jun 4, 2024 | Uncategorized
Lack of funding and liability concerns have stalled abuse reform efforts.
A volunteer Southern Baptist task force charged with implementing abuse reforms in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination will end its work next week without a single name published on a database of abusers.
The task force’s report marks the second time a proposed database for abusive pastors has been derailed by denominational apathy, legal worries, and a desire to protect donations to the Southern Baptist Convention’s mission programs.
Leaders of the SBC’s Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force (ARITF) say a lack of funding, concerns about insurance, and other unnamed difficulties hindered the group’s work.
“The process has been more difficult than we could have imagined,” the task force said in a report published Tuesday. “And in truth, we made less progress than we desired due to the myriad obstacles and challenges we encountered in the course of our work.”
To date, no names appear on the Ministry Check website designed to track abusive pastors, despite a mandate from Southern Baptists to create the database. The committee has also found no permanent home or funding for abuse reforms, meaning that two of the task force’s chief tasks remain unfinished.
Because of liability concerns about the database, the task force set up a separate nonprofit to oversee the Ministry Check website. That new nonprofit, known as the Abuse Response Committee (ARC), has been unable to publish any names because of objections raised by SBC leaders.
“At present, ARC has secured multiple affordable insurance bids and successfully completed the vetting and legal review of nearly 100 names for inclusion on Ministry Check at our own expense with additional names to be vetted pending …
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by | Jun 4, 2024 | Uncategorized
A German soldier found by Christ in a prisoner of war camp, he became a renowned Christian scholar who taught that “God weeps with us so that we may someday laugh with him.”
Jürgen Moltmann, a theologian who taught that Christian faith is founded in the hope of the resurrection of the crucified Christ and that the coming kingdom of God acts upon human history out of the eschatological future, died on June 3 in Tübingen, Germany. He was 98.
Moltmann is widely regarded as one of the most important theologians since World War II. According to theologian Miroslav Volf, his work was “existential and academic, pastoral and political, innovative and traditional, readable and demanding, contextual and universal,” as he showed how the central themes of Christian faith spoke to the “fundamental human experiences” of suffering.
The World Council of Churches reports that Moltmann is “the most widely read Christian theologian” of the last 80 years. Religion scholar Martin Marty said his writings “inspire an uncertain Church” and “free people from the dead hands of dead pasts.”
Moltmann was not an evangelical, but many evangelicals engaged deeply with his work. The popular Christian author Philip Yancey called Moltmann one of his heroes and said in 2005 that he had “plowed through” nearly a dozen of his books.
Editors at Christianity Today were critical of Moltmann’s theology when they first grappled with it in the 1960s but still found themselves commending his work.
“We are brought up short,” G. C. Berkouwer wrote, “and reminded to think and to preach about the future in a biblical perspective. If this happens, all the theological talks have borne good fruit.”
Today, evangelicals who are ultimately critical of Moltmann’s views—disagreeing strongly with one aspect or another—have still …
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by | Jun 4, 2024 | Uncategorized
Effective altruism and longtermism are all the rage these days. How should Christians engage?
Former cryptocurrency trade executive Ryan Salame was sentenced last week for federal financial crimes he committed while working for FTX. The company’s billionaire founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was sentenced months ago for engaging in “one of the largest financial frauds in history.” This case is making headlines and sparking long-term conversations in the burgeoning field of tech ethics.
Bankman-Fried’s name and story are inextricably connected to the new ethical thinking of Silicon Valley, which is increasingly influenced by “longtermism”—the idea that positively influencing the future is the key moral priority of our time—and “effective altruism,” which dictates that if you want to do good, you should do it as effectively as possible.
The prominent thought leaders of these principles are William MacAskill (What We Owe the Future, 2022) and Roman Krznaric (The Good Ancestor, 2020). MacAskill taught Bankman-Fried during his time at Oxford, advising him that his acquired talents would be most effectively maximized in business and philanthropy. And so, citing longtermism and effective altruism as reasons for founding FTX, Bankman-Fried’s company earned him trust and billions of dollars—some of which went to charitable causes while much eventually ended up in his own pocket.
Not only did Bankman-Fried’s focus on long-term moral goals eventually eclipse the ethics of his immediate personal actions, but it appears thought leaders like MacAskill reportedly ignored repeated warnings about Bankman-Fried. Why? As Charlotte Alter wrote for Time magazine, “For a group of philosophers who had spent their lives contemplating moral …
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by | Jun 4, 2024 | Uncategorized
Instructions for publishers.
Dear publishers and authors,
Each year, Christianity Today honors a set of outstanding books encompassing a variety of subjects and genres. The CT Book Awards will be announced in December at christianitytoday.com. They also will be featured prominently in the January/February 2025 issue of CT and promoted in several CT newsletters. (In addition, publishers will have the opportunity to participate in a marketing promotion organized by CT’s marketing team, complete with site banners and paid Facebook promotion.)
Here are this year’s awards categories:
1. Apologetics/Evangelism
2a. Biblical Studies
2b. Bible and Devotional
3a. Children
3b. Young Adults
4. Christian Living/Spiritual Formation
5. The Church/Pastoral Leadership
6. Culture, Poetry, and the Arts
7. Fiction
8. History/Biography
9. Marriage, Family, and Singleness
10. Missions/The Global Church
11. Politics and Public Life
12a. Theology (popular)
12b. Theology (academic)
*In addition, CT will be naming a Book of the Year, chosen from the entire pool of nominees by a panel of CT editors.
Nominations:
To be eligible for nomination, a book must be published between November 1, 2023 and October 31, 2024. We are looking for scholarly and popular-level works, and everything in between. A diverse panel of scholars, pastors, and other informed readers will evaluate the books.
Authors and publishers can nominate as many books as they wish, and each nominee can be submitted in multiple categories. For larger publishers (those with 50 or more employees), there is a $40 entry fee for each nomination (defined as each title submitted in each category). For smaller publishers (those with fewer than 50 employees), the entry fee is $20 per nomination. And for self-published authors, the …
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