Theology

The primary strategy white Christians have taken over the past 45 years to reduce abortions has been to make abortion illegal. This goal can only be accomplished by getting conservative justices on the Supreme Court, which can only happen if conservative (usually Republican) presidents are elected. With Justice Kennedy stepping down this year, we have a moment like this once again.

In Hong Kong, two things are very valuable. One is space. There isn’t much of it. Hong Kong has one of the highest population densities on the planet. The Mong Kok neighborhood where we have been staying in Hong Kong has approximately 130,000 people per square kilometre. That is a lot of people.

We’ve been hearing lots of talk about family lately.

In the USA, the nomination of a new Supreme Court judge has prompted talk of family values. The detainment and separation of migrant families has done the same. In Canada, the announcement of compensation for those harmed by the Sixties and Seventies Scoop has raised questions about Canada’s treatment of Indigenous families. And then, of course, there is the more banal talk of family vacations and weddings that each summer brings.

Review of Journeys to Justice (Novalis, 2018) by Joe Gunn

How should churches deal with political issues? That question has long sparked incandescent discussions among Christians. Many hold that God calls Christians to promote public justice. Yet we differ strongly on what those policies and which political parties, if any, Christians should support. With many white evangelicals backing Donald Trump in 2016’s presidential campaign, the issue soared into public consciousness, triggering months of embarrassing negative media coverage.

Jesus would find modern Zionism peculiar. More than that, in his own day, he rejected the closest thing to it. But first let’s explain our terms.

S. F. Moore, E.T. Bethell, and J.S. Gale are not the names of trivia questions in the history of world Christianity game board. And yet their ordinary well-manicured graves, along with 145 other foreign missionaries, nestled at Yanghwajin Foreign Missionary Cemetery in Seoul, South Korea were the genesis of explosive evangelism in the late 19th and early 20th century. These men and women turned a once-hermited country into one of the leading producers of some of the largest churches in the world and a huge missionary movement.           

This year for Lent I was thinking about something a friend of mine, Karen Wilk, had been talking about in the lead up to Lent. She noted that often people give things up in order to focus more on God and try to drop something that may cause distraction to our lives. Karen suggested that a similar action could be done to draw closer to God by picking up a new discipline over Lent, to form something new in us. So with that in mind, I decided to give up eating fruit and I decided to add reading theology from a different cultural context than my own.

June 10 is Office of Social Justice Offering Sunday. In addition to Ministry Share support, it is the yearly offering from CRC churches like yours in the U.S. and Canada that make this important work possible. Will you mark OSJ Sunday with us? 

Oakland CRC became the answer to the prayers of Christians half a world away.

In this year’s bulletin insert, you'll read how Oakland CRC became the answer to the prayers of Christians half a world away by welcoming a refugee family from the Democratic Republic of Congo!

Were you there when a Starbucks manager called the police on Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson less than two minutes after they arrived for a routine meeting with a business partner?

Created in God’s image, human beings were made with a unique capacity for developing structure and accentuating the beauty of God’s world. God’s intention was that we would be like his signet ring (see Haggai 2:23), representing and ushering in his justice and righteousness as the caretakers of this world, and of each other. We are meant to make his glory known.