Features

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.

God took the raw material of David’s brilliant and sinful humanity—our humanity—and fused it in Mary’s womb with his own divine Son to create a new humanity.

Since the creation of the world we have depended on plants to sustain and nourish our bodies.

Presenting the winners of our first-ever essay contest for college students.

Elders should think of visits with congregants less as a “spiritual check-up” and more as an opportunity to attest to Christ’s presence.

How does our Christian faith enable us to carry on when hope seems lost?

The day you first tell someone about your struggle with porn is the day you first move toward healing. Yes, it’s difficult, but vulnerability is also powerful.

Those of us who have been raised in the tradition of Western Christianity can learn from our fellow Christians in the Eastern Orthodox tradition how to savor the mystery of our faith.

How can we be intentional in teaching our children to serve rather than to be served, to look outward instead of inward, to give rather than to consume?