Features

Nothing I have read so far explicitly names the greatest obstacle Joanna Veenstra faced in her preparation for mission: the institutional opposition of the CRCNA.

We’ve come to wonder if the problem with being included and fitting in is less about our girls’ disabilities and more about the ableist culture in which we live.

Surely we are not left with just two stark options of hypermasculine men who behave badly or emasculated, effeminate men.

As Christians, we need to dig deeper to find out what motivates our political groupings. If our leaders disagree on the right policies to pursue, it is often because they are effectively worshiping different and conflicting gods.

She didn’t care. But she cared that she didn’t care. Why didn’t she care anymore?

We tell ourselves that we’re not playing for the money, and this might be true for a friendly game of no-stakes poker, but lotteries are always about the money, aren’t they?

How could you sleep at night knowing the other schools in your area are more open and welcoming to all the king’s children than your school is, even if those other schools don’t acknowledge each child’s royal status?

How does a church emerge decades after a mission field is closed? Is it possible that the seeds of good news were planted during the decade when the mission was active—only to lie dormant and sprout much later?  

Meet this year’s candidates for Minister of the Word. For the first time, some are anonymous.

To bear out our faith in public life and policy with neighbors who do not all share our religious convictions is to walk a minefield. Yet walk it we must, for to stay home is a political commitment too. Discernment is of the essence. 

Born in 1959 as Ha-Jin, Lee was the fourth son of a struggling atheistic family in South Korea, a country still recovering from the Korean War. With Ha-Jin’s birth, nine people lived in their small house.

The restorative justice movement began with Mennonite Christians in search of a better response to crimes. They started with a biblical understanding of justice and shalom, centered in the need for accountability, reconciliation, and peace. 

If biblical justice is a movement that restores broken relationships, then our pursuit of justice is as much about everyday acts of courage and conviction as it is about those dramatic—and intimidating—moments of history. 

I will likely have depression for the rest of my earthly life. But for all of eternity, I have been, am, and will be God’s beloved. And so I go forward, knowing that even in the darkest places, my God will hear me.

We know the gospel writers are only rubbing our noses in human limitations because they are setting us up to watch God blow those limitations out of the water. 

The story of the peace initiative in Uganda and its faithful witness to peace and reconciliation, beginning in the midst of one of the world’s most savage civil wars, shows how powerful the witness of religious communities can be when they join forces in pursuit of peace. 

A few years ago, Chicago Tribune columnist Ross Werland raised a provocative rhetorical question in the title of an editorial: “A pew or a canoe: Not a tough choice.”

In this Lenten season, when words slip and crack under the weight of our pain or under the weight of glory, I am thankful for the freedom to groan as in the pains of childbirth.

What the story of Uriah and Bathsheba tells me is that none of our stories is lost to God. There is a reckoning for Uriah and Bathsheba. God has not forgotten what happened to them, not in 3,000 years. And God does not forget your story either.

Recovering hypocrite. That’s what my student leaders had printed on T-shirts for orientation days when I was a campus pastor. The point was that all Christians are recovering hypocrites. None of us has always been consistent in following Jesus.

The hope of peace and security—of life—is ultimately rooted in the age-old biblical teaching that God created human beings in his own image.

When I started to think about retiring it wasn’t my work as a therapist that felt burdensome; rather, it was the mundane aspects of my work—the need for better computer skills and the need to allow for expanded administrative time—that propelled me toward making the decision to retire.