by | Aug 19, 2024 | Uncategorized
I joined Christianity Today not as a trite multicultural experiment but to contribute to the wonderful weirdness of building the kingdom.
The word weird is weirdly being thrown around by politicians as if it’s an official political critique. Once that label is hurled at someone, they return to middle school ethics and recite the gospel of rubber and glue. Most people don’t want to be weird.
However, I can’t help but think of the strange predicaments that Yahweh has put his people in: Noah building an uncanny boat, Ezekiel’s dramatized prophecy, John the Baptist as a pre-modern hipster wandering the desert, and many more. It’s very peculiar for enslaved people to sing of God’s goodness and provision on plantations that attempted to designate them as worse than weird—inhuman.
Maybe to be set apart is to be weird and peculiar. However, many people have auctioned off their weirdness to cultural lobbyists for relevance and power.
Then I think of myself and the reasons I’m joining Christianity Today as the editorial director of the Big Tent Initiative. They sometimes feel peculiar. I feel weird that I still carry hope. I feel docile when I speak of reconciliation. I feel lonely still having a tremendous amount of love for the bride of Christ. But then I feel content that I’m bringing my peculiar self and many other descriptives to CT.
I bring complexity. I am a Canadian-born man with a Swahili name, who was raised by a Black Panther in the suburbs of Southern California. I’ve known privilege and poverty. I have bobo tendencies with a militant’s temperament, but I’m a pacifist on paper. I’d rather discuss the implications of rap beefs than political beefs because at least there is poetry involved. I’m a theological nomad who tries his best to allow Jesus to take precedence over all my …
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by | Aug 19, 2024 | Uncategorized
How sending agencies are trying to bring overseas workers off the perfect Christian “pedestal” and into a counseling chair.
The long-standing stigma around mental health care has faded from many American churches, but has the shift made its way to the ends of the earth?
When you’re an overseas missionary, a season of deep depression, panic attacks, or chronic anxiety can seem to put your ministry in jeopardy, keeping you from the work you are being called and paid to do.
Yet missions workers are extra susceptible to such conditions. They experience culture shock. They witness trauma and fear persecution. And they often live in places where access to mental health professions is difficult to impossible.
For years, supporters have been trying to open up more conversations about mental health and to get workers on the field the help they need, but missionaries still fear the repercussions of coming forward with their struggles or their family members’.
Just over half of missionaries say they have an issue they worry could jeopardize their work in the field, according to a survey conducted this year by Global Trellis, an organization that supports cross-cultural workers. Emotional and mental health struggles were among their top concerns.
The ministry asked nearly 400 missionaries, many of whom had spent 20-plus years in the field, “How do we keep senders from putting missionaries on the pedestal, and keep missionaries from feeling like they have to stay on the pedestal?”
“We help people have language to talk about things. So, normalizing rest, normalizing growth, and just normalizing change,” said Amy Young, the founder of Global Trellis and a former missionary to China.
Other research has shown that missionaries’ stress levels are double to triple those of the average American, reaching levels that can lead to …
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by | Aug 16, 2024 | Uncategorized
While Hindus publicly confront mob violence against their community, Christians are apprehensive about speaking out.
Bangladesh’s religious minorities have reported looting, arson, and vandalization following Sheikh Hasina’s abrupt resignation as prime minister last month.
Thousands of young people first took to the streets in June to protest a court ruling that reinstated a civil service quota system many found discriminatory and exclusive. But after Hasina insulted protesters, demonstrations escalated into violence.
Since then, rioters have attacked the parliamentary building, the residences of the prime minister and other political leaders, and numerous other establishments, including ones belonging to certain religious minorities. The Catholic charity Caritas Bangladesh stated:
According to different local, national, and international news media, as well as reports from local communities, more than one hundred houses, religious institutions, and commercial centers belonging to Awami League leaders and religious minorities have been attacked. The Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council [BHBCUC] reported that hundreds of families have been attacked, faced sabotage activities, and received death threats from miscreants.
Caritas also stated its own regional office in southwestern Bangladesh was attacked by more than 100 rioters on August 4, noting that one of the mob’s leaders told the group after about 15 minutes that this was not the intended target.
On social media, many unverified reports went viral of mobs destroying a church in the Nilphamari district in northern Bangladesh and some Christian homes in Khulna, the country’s third-largest city.
BHBCUC president Neem Chandra Bhowmik said that his organization had received reports over the phone of “vandalism, intimidation and …
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by | Aug 16, 2024 | Uncategorized
Survivors, advocates, and pastors call for “true repentance” among religious groups that ran schools and homes between 1950 and 1999.
Not long after Frances Tagaloa accepted Christ at 16, she started experiencing flashbacks.
Over the next few years, Tagaloa began piecing together long-buried memories and came to recognize that she had been sexually abused between the ages of five and seven by a Catholic Marist Brother who taught at a school in the Auckland suburb of Ponsonby.
Tagaloa only told her parents about the abuse years later, after getting married and having children, because talking about the issue was taboo in her father’s Samoan culture, and she didn’t want her parents to blame themselves.
Her mother approached the Catholic Church in New Zealand around 1999, but Tagaloa, 56, decided not to speak with them —until three years later, when she heard the Marist Brothers were going to name a classroom after the perpetrator, Bede Fitton.
When Tagaloa met with a Catholic counselor, she wanted an apology and for Fitton’s honors to be removed. Instead, the Catholic church offered her financial compensation. Tagaloa suggested that they donate the money to the evangelical ministry where she worked.
“I was really disappointed in the process,” she said. “I remember thinking that was just a big waste of time.”
Two decades later, another opportunity arose for Tagaloa to hold the Catholic Church accountable.
The ministry leader became the first witness in the Catholic hearing with New Zealand’s Royal Commission of Inquiry, an independent body established in 2018 to investigate abuse and neglect that children and adults faced while in the care of state and faith-based institutions between 1950 and 1999.
On July 24, the Royal Commission released its final report, which found that an estimated 256,000 out of 655,000—or …
Continue reading…
by | Aug 16, 2024 | Uncategorized
Survivors, advocates, and pastors call for “true repentance” among religious groups that ran schools and homes between 1950 and 1999.
Not long after Frances Tagaloa accepted Christ at 16, she started experiencing flashbacks.
Over the next few years, Tagaloa began piecing together long-buried memories and came to recognize that she had been sexually abused between the ages of five and seven by a Catholic Marist Brother who taught at a school in the Auckland suburb of Ponsonby.
Tagaloa only told her parents about the abuse years later, after getting married and having children, because talking about the issue was taboo in her father’s Samoan culture, and she didn’t want her parents to blame themselves.
Her mother approached the Catholic Church in New Zealand around 1999, but Tagaloa, 56, decided not to speak with them —until three years later, when she heard the Marist Brothers were going to name a classroom after the perpetrator, Bede Fitton.
When Tagaloa met with a Catholic counselor, she wanted an apology and for Fitton’s honors to be removed. Instead, the Catholic church offered her financial compensation. Tagaloa suggested that they donate the money to the evangelical ministry where she worked.
“I was really disappointed in the process,” she said. “I remember thinking that was just a big waste of time.”
Two decades later, another opportunity arose for Tagaloa to hold the Catholic Church accountable.
The ministry leader became the first witness in the Catholic hearing with New Zealand’s Royal Commission of Inquiry, an independent body established in 2018 to investigate abuse and neglect that children and adults faced while in the care of state and faith-based institutions between 1950 and 1999.
On July 24, the Royal Commission released its final report, which found that an estimated 256,000 out of 655,000—or …
Continue reading…
