The complexity of the situation even presents a challenge to Jewish Christian unity. Among Christians in America, Israel can be viewed as a fulfillment of prophecy, a democratic ally in a region of chaos, or an occupier oppressing stateless Palestinians. How to choose? Given that 2 out of 3 US evangelicals have a positive perception …
Does good press lead to greater gains in the Muslim world? Or merely cover a multitude of sins? Imad Shehadeh’s phone would not stop ringing. His American guest, part of a delegation invited by the king of Jordan, had called his royal host a bigot. In November 2017, the president of Jordan Evangelical Theological Seminary …
Can this season be one where I grow with God and with my neighbor? Summer, wrote A. W. Tozer, is “the period of full power when life multiplies, and it is hard to believe that it can ever end.” But summer’s lease truly hath all too short a date. So here at the beginning of …
Telling the uncomfortable story of “desolate” Tamar positions us to show a kind of compassion King David didn’t. For the past year, I’ve been teaching the Book of Samuel to a group of women at my church. We go through it chapter by chapter, verse by verse, and I challenge them to think critically about …
Thirty years after the deadly massacre, two dissidents reflect on hope for China. Though Tiananmen translates as “The Gate of Heavenly Peace,” the Beijing city square is known for something utterly destructive: the June 4, 1989, massacre where Chinese troops fired on nonviolent student demonstrators, killing thousands—deaths that the government still has not publicly acknowledged. …
Meet the survivors and advocates whose voices spurred “holy rumblings” in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. For many years, even as revelations of sexual abuse by clergy had been coming to light for decades in the Catholic church, the evangelical church had not had “eyes to see” or “ears to hear” the extent of its …
Falsified resurrection stories should not cause us to discount credible miracle accounts. Around 1960, in the Republic of Congo, a two-year-old girl named Thérèse was bitten by a snake. She cried out for help, but by the time her mother, Antoinette, reached her, Thérèse was unresponsive and seemed to have stopped breathing. No medical help …
My journey from the criminal underworld to the foot of the cross. Six years ago—lost, broken, alone, and suicidal—I was the empty shell of a once-promising rugby player, shuffling around an exercise yard in a London prison. I was a man of extreme violence who had done seven stretches behind bars. One morning around that …
It seems like foolishness to us, but it was one of Jesus’ greatest strengths. Of all the Beatitudes, I’d guess that “blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth” is the most misunderstood, mistrusted, and neglected. I think the reason why is because we don’t understand the virtue of meekness and tend to …
What the church can do when the world’s had too much of a good thing. By August 27, 1859, New England railroad conductor Edwin L. Drake had been spending borrowed money for months, and it was running out. His steam-powered drill had bored 69 feet into the rock near Titusville, Pennsylvania, at the rate of …