by | Jul 19, 2024 | Uncategorized
After 60 years of division, leaders hope that coming together will strengthen the church’s witness.
On March 25 of this year, a group of Pakistani Presbyterian church leaders gathered in one of their homes. There, the 20 or so people decided to bring their factions together after years of contentious division. Later, they gathered for tea and seviyan, a sweet vermicelli dessert cooked in sugar and milk or oil, at Gujranwala Theological Seminary.
There were no contracts or legal documents to mark this momentous decision. “We just talked and trusted each other,” said Reuben Qamar, the leader, or moderator, of one faction.
The Presbyterian Church of Pakistan (PCP) has a long history in the country, where Christians comprise less than 2 percent of the population. The Presbyterian mission was founded in the 1860s, and its missionaries led mass conversion movements and set up schools and hospitals in the region. In 1961, it was declared an autonomous body and local leadership began stewarding it.
This was when the divisions started: first between the ’60s and ’70s, then in the ’90s, and more recently in 2018 and 2021, says Qamar, noting that the splits mainly occurred not because of doctrinal differences but because of power and corruption.
One major conflict arose when there was a dispute on whether a moderator could extend their term from three to five years. Some supported this change, while others did not.
By the end of 2023, the church was split into three factions: One led by Qamar, and two others by moderators Arif Siraj and Javed Gill, respectively. Each claimed to be the Presbyterian Church of Pakistan.
The root of the problem was discipline, says Majeed Abel, the executive secretary in Siraj’s former faction. Whenever conflicts arose, people took “refuge” in splitting and creating …
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by | Jul 19, 2024 | Uncategorized
And that’s a good thing—because how we think about victory is not only delusional but damaging.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
With Election Day 2024 in sight, I can make one bold prediction: Your party is not going to win.
You might challenge me on this, saying, “But, RDM, you don’t know what party I, the reader, support.” That’s true—but I stand by my forecast. That’s because no matter what party wins the presidency, the Congress, or the state houses this November, no one is going to win.
I do not mean, of course, that one party or other won’t see its candidate in the Oval Office come January, or that we won’t see people being sworn in as members of Congress, senators, governors, and all the rest. That kind of winning will happen, as it always does. What I mean is that no one is going to win the way too many of us define winning in this strange era.
In his new book American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again, Yuval Levin points out a dangerous illusion of the present: the notion that after one decisive victory, whoever is “on the other side” will go away and will not need to be accommodated.
In truth, Levin argues, American life is pulled in two directions: toward what could be called “conservatism” in one direction and “progressivism” in the other. Those visions look different in different times—and, often, the two sides swap out on specific policy positions—but the basic tension is always there.
This is because, Levin writes, any group of human beings is going to have disagreements. A constitutional order doesn’t eradicate those disagreements but instead structures a careful balance between majority rule and minority rights.
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by | Jul 18, 2024 | Uncategorized
Poll: Black Protestants are among the only groups who remain confident in the president’s mental capacities.
With mounting scrutiny over President Joe Biden’s fitness for the 2024 election, most evangelical Protestants believe that Biden should drop out of the race, though a sizable number of Black Protestants continue to back him.
A new poll from AP-NORC found that evangelicals agree with the rest of the country: 67 percent of evangelicals and 70 percent of Americans overall want Biden to withdraw.
Among both groups, fewer than one in five (18%) see him as capable of winning the election. Less than 2 percent of Republicans say Biden can win.
Concerns around Biden’s abilities accelerated after his performance in a debate with former president Donald Trump in June, and a growing list of Democratic politicians and supporters have come forward asking him to step aside.
In one interview, he said he’d only drop out if “the Lord Almighty” asked him to.
Black Protestants are more likely than the average American to want Biden to stay in; 45 percent say the president should continue running, but just 32 percent of evangelicals and 28 percent of Americans say the same.
Earlier this month, Biden, who is Catholic, talked about his faith while visiting a Black church in Philadelphia, where supporters came to his defense.
Just under half of Black Protestants say Biden can win in 2024.
Both evangelicals (74%) and Americans (70%) overall say they aren’t confident that the 81-year-old president has the mental capacity for office, far more than those who say the same about his opponent. Fewer than a third of Black Protestants say they doubt Biden’s mental capacity.
“The fact that our elderly leaders—one struggling to put sentences together, the other ranting with insanities and …
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by | Jul 18, 2024 | Uncategorized
Jesus used his final moments with his disciples before the crucifixion to heal his opponent’s ear—and model the way of love.
In the Gospel narratives, a gaggle of soldiers came to arrest Jesus before his crucifixion. Trying to stop them, the apostle Peter brandished a sword to defend Jesus from danger but missed his target, striking one of the soldiers—ironically enough—on the ear. Jesus responded by using one of his final moments in person with his followers to teach them about the dangers of political and religious violence.
Jesus rebuked Peter with a much-quoted line: “Put your sword back in its place … for all who draw the sword will die by the sword” (Matt. 26:52). Violence, Jesus taught, only begets more violence, creating a spiral that can consume individuals, movements, and sometimes even republics.
But Jesus did more than issue a policy statement. He healed the soldier who had come to do him harm (Luke 22:51).
This same soldier and his fellow combatants would continue with the arrest, and Jesus would become a victim of state-sponsored torture and death. The healing, then, was not a commentary on the soldier’s politics. Jesus did not heal because he believed the actions against him were just. The healing was a recognition of his enemy’s humanity, for there are moments to set aside politics and to see our opponents as fellow bearers of the image of God.
In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump, we find ourselves in one of those moments. Regardless of our party affiliation, it is appropriate to lament the attack, to grieve the passing of the father in the crowd who died defending his family, and to pray for all those impacted by this unjustifiable act of violence.
But for Christians, prayers are the easy part. Being honest about the state …
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by | Jul 18, 2024 | Uncategorized
VP candidate J.D. Vance’s best-selling memoir told a compelling story about my home region in Appalachia. But it was not the whole story.
On Monday, Donald Trump announced his pick for vice presidential candidate: J. D. Vance, the junior US senator from Ohio.
Some would say Vance has had a meteoric rise, from venture capitalist to best-selling author, from junior senator to VP candidate, all in less than a decade. Like most people in America, I was introduced to Vance through his book.
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is Vance’s account of his tumultuous childhood growing up as the descendent of disadvantaged Appalachian hillbillies in Middletown, Ohio. It was critically acclaimed by pundits and politicians on both the left and the right and was later made into an Oscar-nominated film. Both book sales and movie streams surged this week with the news of Vance’s nomination.
When I originally read the book, I was immediately intrigued by Vance’s story. He and I are the same age, and, like Vance, I too am a product of the Appalachian diaspora. His grandparents left the mountains the same decade as mine, his to the Rust Belt of Ohio and mine to the sunshine state of Florida.
Our stories diverge because my family eventually found their way back to Appalachia. I’ve spent most of my life in rural East Tennessee and North Carolina. My immediate family also enjoyed many more economic and educational privileges than Vance. Additionally, I was blessed with more spiritual resources than Vance, who indicates his grandmother read the Bible and prayed but wasn’t involved in a local church like my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were.
But in the pages of Hillbilly Elegy, I met many characters I recognized, folks whose struggles echoed those of my neighbors, classmates, and extended family.
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