Best Practices

"The craftsmen of Solomon and Hiram and workers from Byblos cut and prepared the timber and stone for the building of the temple." 1 Kings 5:18

In the face of an imminent environmental crisis, a powerful climate justice movement is rising from the heart of faith communities across Canada.

Worship that has integrity refuses to divorce praise of the Creator from love of creation. Hands that are raised in praise of Creator God must seek to also reach out in actions that defend the welfare of creation. Anything less risks expressing empty words of adoration devoid of committed action.

If I had my way of doing racial reconciliation, I would have to follow this verse of the Bible:  "My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise." Psalm 51:17. 

To me this means that I must be painstakingly convinced of my misery and danger by sin, which I spare no cost to obtain the forgiveness of it. A broken spirit and a contrite heart are those in which sorrow and affliction have done their work, and the stubbornness of pride has been replaced by the humility of penitence. 

As Christians around the world prepare during this Advent Season to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, I pray we might realize how we are invited to contribute to peace in the world. 

I experienced amazing Middle Eastern hospitality in my late twenties and early thirties in Sierra Leone and the West Bank. Once I was welcomed home, I became a friend for life. Meals there consisted of delicious delicacies for twice as many people as were invited. Especially as a single woman, they took extra care to keep an eye on me. I knew if I had any questions or problems, one phone call could solve almost all my challenges. My problems became their problems. In the West Bank, I was there as a two-week consultant.

Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.”  Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” “How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!” (John 3:1-21, NIV)

In the days following Easter Jesus’ disciples gathered on a hill above the Sea of Galilee. Much of their ministry with Jesus had occurred in these hills, but this encounter was like no other. This time the resurrected Jesus appeared and commissioned them to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything Jesus had commanded them” (Matthew 28:16-20). And then he was gone.

Haitian immigrants and denationalized Dominicans of Haitian ancestry in the Dominican Republic are under constant threat of being deported.

“People are going to start dying soon.”

Vardan Tadevosyan’s face on my computer screen is filled with worry, as he speaks to me from his office in Nagorno Karabakh. For the past eight months, he and 120,000 other Armenian Christians have been trapped there, under a siege orchestrated by the dictatorship of Azerbaijan.