To start out our conversation on multiethnic church, I did some work around clarifying terms of “multicultural’ vs. ‘multiethnic’. Because these terms are often used interchangeably, I wanted to posit our discussion around ethnicity or ethnos as the central theme…
Starbucks and Christmas
By Alan Rudnick Starbucks red cups are out to bring us holiday cheer, but the response on social media has not been very cheerful. Joshua Feuerstein, a former Arizona pastor shared a video on Facebook that went viral with over…
Confronting the silence of structural racism
By Scott Stearman There is recognition at the United Nations that people of African descent have been subject to a fairly specific kind of insipid global racism. This racism is somewhat unique in that it isn’t simply based on standard…
Brain trends, part 1: Enhancement
By John Chandler If you’ve ever heard a motivational speaker — or, heck, had a coach — you’ve been told that we only employ a tiny fraction of our vast mental capacity, and that we can tap into so much…
Things forgotten: The unexpected experience of ‘coming home’
Written by Deborah Foulkes, Ph.D. During the summer of 2015, I had the opportunity to travel to Africa for the first time as part of Biblical Seminary’s Global Trauma Recovery Institute program. As the plane touched the Tarmac, I was…
Never give up … Royals style
During a walk with my family yesterday afternoon, my eyes glanced over toward a wooded spot along the trail. It’s a place where my gaze frequently lingered the past few months. Early in the summer, my three-year-old son found a…
7 reasons not to participate in Operation Christmas Child this year
Each and every year around this time, thousands of churches around the country participate in an organization called Operation Christmas Child. If you are unfamiliar with Operation Christmas Child, the gist is this: churches distribute pre-printed shoebox-sized cardboard boxes, which…
Givenness
By Scott Dickison Marilynne Robinson, the gifted writer, novelist and Christian apologist, argues in her new collection of essays that for all our modern questioning and search for meaning we often fail to appreciate the “givenness of things.” I’m taken…
5 suggestions for Christian voters
By Jeff Harris The 2016 presidential election is still a year away and I am already tired of it. Maybe I’m too cynical, but the 24-hour news cycle has a way of bringing out the worst in us. Our dumbed-down,…
How a Baptist preacher learned about mass incarceration
These days, everybody seems to agree that mass incarceration–the policy of fighting crime by locking up as many people as possible for as long as possible–was a really bad idea. Charles and David Koch, Ted Cruz, and a steadily lengthening…
When it comes to congregational vision, may you be with the source
In greed we trust
You likely heard recently that former hedge fund manager-turned-entreperneur Martin Shkreli’s company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, bought the patent to a drug treating toxoplasmosis, a potentially deadly parasite disease, increasing the per pill cost from $13.50 to $750. (Before being sold several…