gathering in light

The President of Fuller (where I attend) had this to say about the need for for charity among Evangelicals in a recent article he wrote for Christianity Today.

In a speech I heard several years ago, the Japanese-American theologian Kosuke Koyama put it nicely: We all have to decide, he said, whether we have a generous God or a stingy God. And the truth is that we evangelicals often give the impression that we have decided to be a spiritually stingy people. A recent Barna Group survey, for example, offers evidence that many young people in the larger society think of evangelicals primarily as “judgmental” types, hostile toward folks in other religions and mean-spirited in our attitudes about homosexuality. Even many young evangelicals share some of these assessments of the older generation. A leader at an evangelical college said it this way: “A lot of our students worry about typical evangelical attitudes toward people who have different belief systems and lifestyles. It’s not that they don’t take the Bible’s teachings seriously. It’s just that they have gotten to know Muslims and gays, and they are embarrassed by the harsh spirit toward such folks that they see in the older generation. If we don’t do something about this negative image soon, we could easily lose them for the evangelical cause.”

(From An Open-Handed Gospel | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction)

Ben Pink Dandelion, Quaker professor at the University of Birmingham (UK) and one of my tutors has recently (as in this week) published, The Quakers: A Very Short Introduction with Oxford University Press. It’s a perfect book for someone who knows little about Quakers and doesn’t want to work through his much larger introduction (though I must say it is really good). This shorter intro is the kind of book that will cover all the really important bases: some belief and practices, a little history, key figures and what the Quakers are up to now. If you can’t wait to get your hand then I suggest downloading Dandelion’s lectures he recently did at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Center on the same subject.

To announce his new book Oxford University Press Blog did a (very short) interview with him, which can be read here. It’s a great interview, it is short but contains some worthy gems, like when he is asked whether the Iraq War has helped to increase Quaker membership: [Read more]

Over on God’s Politics Blog, Jarrod McKenna has written a great post on national ‘Sorry Day,’ a day when White Australians are trying to enact reconciliation for the pain they’ve caused through racism and colonialism. This could (hopefully) be a chance to change history.

She shared later, “things are different now.” Somehow wrapped up in this one little word, “sorry,” was a new future. This strong aboriginal woman, who I’m proud to call my friend, was saying that in this word a new day is possible for her people and our nation. In this word, grief can now find its energy in change rather than despair. The cries of mothers who have had their babies torn from their arms and stolen from their breast have finally reached the halls of government. And miraculously, government has started to repent from the legacy of racism and colonialism.

(From Jarrod McKenna at God’s Politics)

A really good article about re-monking the church from Christianity Today. I am surprised the favorableness the magazine gives to such a radical idea.