We don’t need churches steeped in ideology, left or right. We need local churches. We need churches on the ground, on the streets, and in the margins; churches who know their communities and whose communities know that they are loved and welcome in their spaces.
The Christmas story flips the camera…to places hardly anyone was looking for joy.
Properly understood, prayer is not just something that accompanies action but is embedded with it and is the most meaningful foundation for it.
On March 4, 2020 we published the first of many articles in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Today, we mark the occasion with this series of excerpts from articles published over the past year. They are a reminder of trials and tribulations experienced and challenges that remain. As with all that we publish, we hope these excerpts will inspire, encourage, and challenge our readers to bring a greater measure of justice, mercy, and faith into our communities and world.
Lent comes around every year in the Christian calendar as a time of reflection, self-denial, and confession. It has traditionally been a time of some kind of fasting or abstaining from certain things. If there’s ever a year to rediscover Isaiah’s words about ‘the fast God has chosen,’ it’s this year: “…to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?” (Isa. 58:6 NIV). In particular, maybe this Lenten season is the time to get serious about loosening our chains of racism.