At the outset of his Confessions we see his renowned prayer that “our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.” That affirms what you’ve been saying about seeing ourselves as unfinished: even at the beginning of his spiritual autobiography he tees that recognition up.

He does. Because if we see ourselves as finished, if there’s nothing more to long for, it’s as if we are blocking off a pathway toward the deep source of our being, which is God.

If we try to imagine ourselves standing on our own internal foundation, being in ourselves solid, grounded individuals, the truth is we are going to be very disappointed—because the truth is beneath and beyond. Our life opens up to the generous and creative gift of God.

Perhaps no period has riveted so much attention to confessional, personal narratives as ours has. Augustine seemed prescient in this. For him, identity was “storied,” as someone put it.

Our identity is something that always grows. What Augustine doesn’t like is the idea that somehow there’s a moment of static perfection and achievement, after which we can stop growing. Oddly enough, that’s why he’s so critical of the extreme ecclesiastical puritans of his day, the Donatists. What do they mean when they pray, “forgive us our trespasses”? Do they really not expect that they are going to be trespassing every day? So that’s part of the story: an interest in our own growth.

But Augustine looks at his life and experience and says, it’s not me who makes a story of this, ultimately. It is God who does that, because the witness of my life is God.

Read it all.

Rowan Williams lecture at Brecon Cathedral this evening on poet Henry Vaughan pic.twitter.com/u09sBNvsja

— Paul Shackerley (@PaulShackerley) May 6, 2022

According to Daniel French there is an increasingly “underground” aspect to conservative Christian life in the UK — believers have woken up to the fact that the culture is against them, and in many cases even traditional religious leaders too.

Another of his UK allies, Dr James Orr, believes that Rod Dreher is destined to have a significant impact on our conservatism. “His insights are proving more salient with every week that passes, not only for Christians but for all those who are beginning to feel the consequences of rejecting the West’s Christian inheritance.

“As hyper-progressivism continues to colonise the UK public square with neuralgic imports from the US culture wars, I predict that more and more people in the UK will start to take Dreher’s jeremiads seriously and pay attention to his constructive proposals.”

Whether or not James Orr is right, Dreher is interesting not just for who he is, but for what he represents. He stands at a newly emergent nexus of traditional European conservatism, English realism, and American romanticism and religiosity. With an increasingly sterile politics, caught between technocratic centrism and the hollow battles of the culture wars, there’s a desperate need for new ideas, and fresh approaches. This is a man worth listening to.

Read it all.

My first print piece for @TheCriticMag – I spoke to @roddreher and discovered a paradoxical and complex conservatism, deeply marked by the problem we all face in the modern age: the search for meaning, rootedness and community in a world that rejects them. https://t.co/7djuyI0rYP

— Sebastian Milbank 🥀🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 (@JSMilbank) April 27, 2022

For the past few years, Bible teacher and best-selling author Beth Moore has been one tweet away from disaster.

Moore, perhaps the best-known ex-Southern Baptist in the country, will recount her Twitter battles, her split with her former denomination and, more importantly, her lifelong journey with Jesus, in a new memoir titled “All My Knotted-Up Life,” due out from Tyndale in April 2023.

News of the memoir was first reported by Cathy Lynn Grossman of Publishers Weekly. Tyndale publisher Karen Watson told PW that the memoir will be a “southern literary reflection on an unlikely and winsomely remarkable life.”

Read it all.

Jesus saved @BethMooreLPM's life. Twitter blew it up. Now she's writing all about it https://t.co/QYP90bTzrb via @RNS

— Bob Smietana (@bobsmietana) April 26, 2022

The World Council of Churches is under pressure to oust the Russian Orthodox Church from its ranks, with detractors arguing the church’s leader, Patriarch Kirill, invalidated its membership by backing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and involving the church in the global political machinations of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The debate garnered a response on Monday (April 11) from the Rev. Ioan Sauca, acting general secretary of the WCC, which claims 352 member churches representing roughly 580 million Christians around the world.

Sauca, a priest in the Romanian Orthodox Church who has visited Ukrainian refugees and publicly criticized Kirill’s response to the invasion, pushed back on the suggestion of expelling the ROC, arguing doing so would deviate from the WCC’s historic mission to enhance ecumenical dialogue.

Read it all.

NEW from me: The World Council of Church is facing pressure to expel the Russian Orthodox Church from membership over Patriarch Kirill’s support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The WCC head pushed back on the notion today, but it’s a *whole thing.* https://t.co/G56Jvu6fCc

— Jack Jenkins (@jackmjenkins) April 11, 2022

The scheduled April 29 execution of South Carolina death row inmate Richard Moore is simply “modern-day barbarism,” the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charleston said Friday.

“Respect for life is, and must remain, unconditional. This principle applies to all, even the perpetrators of terrible acts,” the diocese, which covers the entire state, said in a statement.

Read it all.

“Justice is not restored when another person is killed,” the South Carolina Roman Catholic Diocese of Charleston said Friday of Richard Moore’s scheduled April 29 execution. https://t.co/g1ce1eIqFq

— The State Newspaper (@thestate) April 8, 2022

Ukranian church leaders have hardened their tone amid growing evidence of Russian army atrocities in their country.

“As we received good news that the Kyiv region was liberated, we also received horrific footage of civilian killings: it is difficult to explain and understand how the murder of innocent people and children can be justified,” the leader of the independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Epiphany Dumenko, said.

“Today, we heard that the peoples of Holy Russia are peaceful, while we see the ideology of the ‘Russian world’ justifying murder, violence, and war. This ideology must be rejected and condemned, as was the ideology of Nazism.”

The message was published before a speech on Tuesday by President Zelensky to the United Nations Security Council, describing how civilians were shot in the streets, thrown into wells, and crushed by tanks in a list of alleged Russian war crimes.

Read it all.

“As we received good news that the Kyiv region was liberated, we also received horrific footage of civilian killings: it is difficult to explain and understand how the murder of innocent people and children can be justified.” https://t.co/SJnKlXc30T

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) April 6, 2022

Unfortunately, brethren, we do not like to acknowledge our transgressions. It would seem natural and easy for a person to know his own self, his own soul and his shortcomings. This, however, is actually not so. We are ready to attend to anything but a deeper understanding of ourselves, an investigation of our sins. We examine various things with curiosity, we attentively study friends and strangers, but when faced with solitude without extraneous preoccupation even for a short while, we immediately become bored and attempt to seek amusement. For example, do we spend much time examining our own conscience even before confession? Perhaps a few minutes, and once a year at that. Casting a cursory glance at our soul, correcting some of its more glaring faults, we immediately cover it over with the veil of oblivion until next year, until our next uncomfortable exercise in boredom.

Yet we love to observe the sins of others. Not considering the beam in our own eye, we take notice of the mote in our brother’s eye. (Matt. 7. 3) Speaking idly to our neighbor’s detriment, mocking and criticizing him are not even often considered sins but rather an innocent and amusing pastime. As if our own sins were so few! As if we had been appointed to judge others!

Read it all.

Tikhon
Bishop and Ecumenist, 1925

Open our eyes, we pray thee, as thou didst open the eyes of thy servant Tikhon, that we may see the faithfulness of others as we strive to be steadfast in the faith delivered unto us, that the world may see and know thee. pic.twitter.com/x3VAlWsARp

— Brian E. Denton🌐🌻 (@brianedenton) April 7, 2022

The former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Williams has backed calls for the Russian Orthodox Church to be excluded from the World Council of Churches (WCC), as Patriarch Kirill of Moscow praised his country’s armed forces for acting in line with the gospel and Christian teaching.

“The case for expelling is a strong one, and I have a suspicion that some other Orthodox Churches would take the same view. Many in the Orthodox world feel that Orthodoxy itself is compromised,” Lord Williams told BBC Radio 4’s Sunday programme.

“The riot act has to be read. When a Church is actively supporting a war of aggression, failing to condemn nakedly obvious breaches in any kind of ethical conduct in wartime, then other Churches have the right to raise the question and challenge it — to say, unless you can say something effective about this, something recognisably Christian, we have to look again at your membership.”

The Archbishop, a Russian speaker and expert on Orthodoxy, spoke as Ukraine’s Prosecutor-General, Irina Venediktov, confirmed that the remains of more than 400 civilians, some bearing signs of rape and torture, had been recovered from Bucha, Irpen and other towns recently abandoned by Russian forces north of Kyiv.

Read it all.

“The case for expelling is a strong one, and I have a suspicion that some other Orthodox Churches would take the same view. Many in the Orthodox world feel that Orthodoxy itself is compromised." https://t.co/JJlmV4yxth

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) April 5, 2022

Church leaders in Ukraine have begun talking more convincingly about victory over Russian forces.

The Primate of Ukraine’s independent Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Epiphany (Dumenko), told a Kyiv congregation on Sunday: “Although a heavy cross has fallen upon us, we must bear it with dignity, following Christ until we achieve victory — a spiritual victory over the evil brought to our homeland by the Russian aggressor. . .

“By the power of God’s truth and mercy, by the power of our people’s love, sacrifice, and faith, Ukraine — still wounded, tortured, and crucified by its enemies — will be resurrected.”

The Metropolitan preached as Russian forces continued shelling the capital, as well as Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv, Mariupol, and other cities, despite claims by Moscow last week that it was refocusing its offensive on eastern Ukraine.

He asked: “Have we, as a state and people, done something against Russia which merits this cruelty and murder — did we harbour evil plans against our neighbours, or did we just want to live in our own home as free people?”

Read it all.

Ukrainians hear note of hope as fighting goes on https://t.co/E4W1QKiuzT

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) April 1, 2022

“Unfortunately, today, Catholics have inculturated some of the worst divisions between science and Christian faith into our own mental worldview in America,” [Michael] Le Chevallier says.

“You have a number of Catholics who believe that evolution is in conflict with modern Catholic faith, and you have a number of young adults who identify that modern science and the Catholic faith are in conflict — often resulting in leaving the church.”

In February, the Lumen Christi Institute announced it had been awarded $3.6 million from the John Templeton Foundation to support a new three-year project that would create a national network of independent institutes of Catholic thought at U.S. universities.

Dubbed “In Lumine: Supporting the Catholic Intellectual Tradition on Campuses Nationwide,” the network includes six Catholic institutes: the Lumen Christi Institute at the University of Chicago; the Nova Forum at the University of Southern California; the Collegium Institute at the University of Pennsylvania; the St. Anselm Institute at the University of Virginia; COLLIS at Cornell University; and the Harvard Catholic Forum at Harvard University.

Read it all.

Now, with millions of dollars of new funding, a number of these institutes of Catholic thought will amplify their focus on science and religion.https://t.co/yWKbFH3TFU

— Religion News Service (@RNS) March 29, 2022

I recently received review copies of two books on the same day. The first, a galley of a book to be published by Eerdmans near the end of July, was Encountering Mystery: Religious Experience in a Secular Age, by Dale C. Allison, Jr. The second, just out from Hurst, was Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over the World, by Elle Hardy. The fortuitous juxtaposition was ironic, of course, but more than that, it was very close to my heart. Like you, I expect, I have seen an ever-increasing number of articles and books intimating a radical shrinkage of “religion,” ranging from Ryan Burge’s The Nones to recent provocative columns by Philip Jenkins (to mention just two examples from a vast field). And behind this, of course, we must acknowledge the enormous, though to me still unaccountable, influence of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age.

I will not issue any predictions. Many years ago, the admirable Joseph Ratzinger foresaw a radical shrinkage of the church, suggesting that, difficult as this passage might be, it could be purifying. I don’t know for sure what the future, even the “near future,” holds in this respect, but I do know that—for the moment, at least—we do not remotely live in a “secular age.” Imagine my surprise when, as I began to read Encountering Mystery, I discovered that Allison himself, despite the subtitle affixed to his book, also does not believe that we live in a “secular age.” On the contrary, and how strange. Whence then the framing? Perhaps that is why the superb scholar and memoirist Carlos Eire describes Encountering Mystery as a “marvelously daring book.” It is just that, describing many experiences (a few firsthand, many recounted by others) of the numinous, the mystical, the supernatural. I hope in due course that you will read it yourself. Nor, it’s important to add, are such experiences limited to Christians; see, for example, Susannah Crockford’s Ripples of the Universe: Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona.

Read it all.

John Wilson reviews “Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over the World.”https://t.co/KLTHBepYjl

— First Things (@firstthingsmag) March 29, 2022

And so his question to all those who have the freedom to speak in the Church and for the Church is ‘who do you really speak for?’ But if we take seriously the underlying theme of his words and witness, that question is also, ‘who do you really feel with?’ Are you immersed in the real life of the Body, or is your life in Christ seen only as having the same sentiments as the powerful? Sentir con la Iglesia in the sense in which the mature Romero learned those words is what will teach you how to speak on behalf of the Body. And we must make no mistake about what this can entail: Romero knew that this kind of ‘feeling with the Church’ could only mean taking risks with and for the Body of Christ – so that, as he later put it, in words that are still shocking and sobering, it would be ‘sad’ if priests in such a context were not being killed alongside their flock. As of course they were in El Salvador, again and again in those nightmare years.

But he never suggests that speaking on behalf of the Body is the responsibility of a spiritual elite. He never dramatised the role of the priest so as to play down the responsibility of the people. If every priest and bishop were silenced, he said, ‘each of you will have to be God’s microphone. Each of you will have to be a messenger, a prophet. The Church will always exist as long as even one baptized person is alive.’ Each part of the Body, because it shares the sufferings of the whole – and the hope and radiance of the whole – has authority to speak out of that common life in the crucified and risen Jesus.

So Romero’s question and challenge is addressed to all of us, not only those who have the privilege of some sort of public megaphone for their voices. The Church is maintained in truth; and the whole Church has to be a community where truth is told about the abuses of power and the cries of the vulnerable. Once again, if we are serious about sentir con la Iglesia, we ask not only who we are speaking for but whose voice still needs to be heard, in the Church and in society at large. The questions here are as grave as they were thirty years ago. In Salvador itself, the methods of repression familiar in Romero’s day were still common until very recently. We can at least celebrate the fact that the present head of state there has not only apologized for government collusion in Romero’s murder but has also spoken boldly on behalf of those whose environment and livelihood are threatened by the rapacity of the mining companies, who are set on a new round of exploitation in Salvador and whose critics have been abducted and butchered just as so many were three decades back. The skies are not clear: our own Anglican bishop in Salvador was attacked ten days ago by unknown enemies; but the signs of hope are there, and the will to defend the poor and heal the wounds.

Read it all.

“I’ve been threatened with death many times, but I should say that as a Christian, I don’t believe in death. I believe in resurrection…A bishop will die, but the Church of God, which is the people, will never perish.”

St. Oscar Romero #24March pic.twitter.com/0S7u15QrtK

— Christopher Lamb (@ctrlamb) March 24, 2022

But we might do worse than ask why non-Western cultures so fear being sucked into what they consider a moral vacuum. If all they see is a series of reactive demands for emancipation acted out against a backdrop of consumerism and obsession with material growth, the suspicion and hostility is a bit more intelligible. What do we in the shrinking “liberal” world think emancipation is for? Perhaps it is for the liberation of all individuals to collaborate in a positive social project, in a society of sustainable and fair distribution of goods. Perhaps it is for the construction of a social order in which our interdependence, national and international, is more fully acknowledged.

Solidarity with Ukraine involves sanctions that will cost us as well as Russians – decisions that will affect our reliance on oil and gas and open our doors to more refugees. If we are willing to accept these consequences for the sake of a positive vision of interdependence and justice, we shall have a more compelling narrative to oppose the dramatic, even apocalyptic, myths arising elsewhere in the world.

Unwelcome neighbours, after all, tend not simply to disappear; in which case, we must work out how we live respectfully with them. One thing that might be said in response to Patriarch Kirill is that neighbours have to be loved, not terrorised into resentful silence – a matter on which the God first acknowledged in Kyiv in 988 had a good deal to say.

Read it all.

‘By supporting the war, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow has both normalised sinful behaviour and polluted Russian Christian identity.’ Rowan Williams https://t.co/BmoCmmVQ6A

— John Inge (@BishopWorcester) March 21, 2022

For more than a dozen years, Christianity Today failed to hold two ministry leaders accountable for sexual harassment at its Carol Stream, Illinois, office.

A number of women reported demeaning, inappropriate, and offensive behavior by former editor in chief Mark Galli and former advertising director Olatokunbo Olawoye. But their behavior was not checked and the men were not disciplined, according to an external assessment of the ministry’s culture released Tuesday.

The report identified a pair of problems at the flagship magazine of American evangelicalism: a poor process for “reporting, investigating, and resolving harassment allegations” and a culture of unconscious sexism that can be “inhospitable to women.” CT has made the assessment public.

Read it all.

It's weird and hard and also good to read this and see so much truth of what I and other women who worked at CT saw and experienced. Thanks to @CTmagazine @danielsilliman @kateshellnutt for reporting and writing this. https://t.co/t1t8kb5Vzf

— Laura Leonard (@lmarieleonard) March 15, 2022

News coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has touched on religious dimensions of the longstanding conflict between the two countries. Russia and Ukraine are home to some of the world’s largest Orthodox Christian populations, but the Orthodox Church of Ukraine gained independence from the Russian Orthodox Church in 2019 amidst the ongoing political turmoil. Now, the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church has sought to justify the invasion, although other Russian Orthodox clergy have expressed opposition to the war.

Around the time of the split between the Ukrainian and Russian churches, we published a blog post based on data from a Pew Research Center survey of Central and Eastern Europe conducted in 2015 and 2016. The analysis found that even before the split between the two churches, a plurality of Orthodox Ukrainians (46%) looked to the leaders of the Ukrainian national church (either the patriarch of Kiev or the metropolitan of Kiev and all of Ukraine) as the highest authority of Orthodoxy, while just 17% saw the patriarch of Moscow as their spiritual leader. The patriarch of Moscow received higher levels of support in eastern Ukraine than in western Ukraine, consistent with a broader geographic pattern of views toward Russia within Ukraine at the time of the survey.

Church leaders in Ukraine have deplored the growing number of civilian deaths in the current war and have backed calls for firmer Western action, as the Patriarch of Moscow disregarded worldwide appeals for him to condemn the invasion and urge a halt to the fighting.

“All the people of Ukraine are suffering hourly from the terrible realities of war — and these are innocent sufferings, since they have done no harm to Russia,” the leader of Ukraine’s independent Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Epiphany Dumenko, said in a Sunday message to his clergy.

“Let us be comforted by the realisation that our innocent sufferings will be crowned inevitably with victory and eternal glory, just as the sufferings of Christ were crowned with them. . . With God’s help we will win — and Ukraine, now crucified by the Russian occupiers, will be resurrected.”

The message was one of several issued by the Metropolitan on Sunday, after talks with the Mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, and the commander of Ukrainian forces defending the capital.

Read it all.

"With God’s help we will win — and Ukraine, now crucified by the Russian occupiers, will be resurrected." https://t.co/fImRjcsxuG

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) March 8, 2022

Amen. pic.twitter.com/3HjYfQuAv6

— Taylor Wilton-Morgan 🇺🇦 (@TaylorWMorgan) March 8, 2022

Religious leaders in Ukraine have urged its citizens to continue resisting the Russian invasion…, as churches around the world condemned the war, and Anglicans in Europe held a special service for peace.

“Remember firmly that the truth is on our side — and where the truth is, there is God and victory,” the leader of the independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Epiphany Dumenko, told Christians this week.

“Defenders of Ukraine, brothers and sisters, you have ruined the aggressor’s intentions for a quick victory. The whole world admires how Ukraine has successfully resisted Russian aggression.”

The message was released as Russian tanks continued to advance on Kyiv, despite aborted peace talks. By mid-week, dozens of Ukrainian civilians had been reported killed by missiles and shells in the country’s second city, Kharkhiv.

In a new sign of its distancing itself from the Moscow Patriarchate, the Primate of the Moscow-linked Orthodox Church in Ukraine, Metropolitan Onufriy Berezovsky, instructed all parishes to pray for God’s mercy amid the “cries and groans of the Ukrainian people” and “making the authorities wise and strengthening our army with courage”.

Read it all.

“Remember firmly that the truth is on our side — and where the truth is, there is God and victory.” https://t.co/xaJccdOXA6

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) March 2, 2022

Vanessa Franklin lost her mother, her father, and her husband in a 12-month span. But the grief of their deaths paled in comparison to parting with her three teenage daughters in the same year, 2008, when she went to prison for fraud.

“Being separated from them was worse,” said Franklin, who served four years in Oklahoma.

She couldn’t imagine a deeper hurt until a few years later, when her daughter, Ashley Garrison, was sentenced while pregnant. The 20-year-old went into labor the day she checked into prison.

Garrison had a boy and named him William. She held him for an hour before she was forced to relinquish custody to his father’s family.

Read it all.

As the female prison population continues to rise, there are more horror stories of pregnant women giving birth behind bars.

Christian ministries and advocates are stepping in. @MariaforW reports:https://t.co/sxCor4u8UP

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) February 22, 2022

Taking a look at the new set of numbers is instructive.

For one thing, the Annuario notes that Catholicism added 16 million new members in 2020, the latest year for which statistics are available. Granted, that meant the church did no more than keep pace with overall global population growth, but it’s still significant at a time when most western perceptions are that the church is shrinking due to the fallout from the sexual abuse crisis, various scandals at senior levels, bitter political infighting, increasing irrelevance to younger generations, and any number of other alleged failures.

For sure, if you live in western Europe or in some parts of the United States, where parishes are closing or consolidating and Mass attendance seems in free fall, those perceptions are understandable. Yet the reality is that on a global level, Catholicism enjoyed the greatest expansion in its history over the past century, more than tripling from 267 million in 1900 to 1.045 billion in 2000 and 1.36 billion today.

Consider that 16 million is more than the entire Catholic population of Canada, and the church added that number of new followers in one year alone, Today, Catholics represent a robust 17.7 percent of everyone on earth.

In other words, the dominant Catholic story today is not decline, it’s breakneck growth.

Read it all.

In new Catholic numbers, an ‘imponderable’ movement shaping history https://t.co/C6vwCAs1M0 In other words, the dominant Catholic story today is not decline, it’s breakneck growth. pic.twitter.com/mm57Su44B4

— Phillips Seminary (@phillipstheosem) February 16, 2022

John the Baptist was not being unreasonable when he sent his disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” (Luke 7:20) And when the disciples on the road to Emmaus said to their traveling companion, the recently crucified Jesus, “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” (24:21)—Jesus revealed to them that their hopes has been met in ways they couldn’t have imagined until that very moment.

The question is not whether we will deconstruct, but what we will deconstruct.

Will it be the wood, hay, and stubble that is destined to burn up and burn out? Or will it be our own souls? Sometimes the people we think are “deconstructing” are just grieving and asking God where he is at a moment like this. That has happened before.

By contrast, sometimes the people who appear most confident and certain—who are scanning the boundaries for heretics—are those who have given up belief in the new birth, in the renewal of the mind, and in the judgment seat of Christ. For them, all that’s left is an orthodoxy grounded not in a living Christ, but in a curated brand.

And that may be the saddest deconstruction of all.

Read it all.

"If our moral ideals are strong but we reassure ourselves with a false version of reality, we will end up seeing through our own delusions—and others certainly will." –@drmoore https://t.co/gCdgiAAF3m

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) February 11, 2022

Of course there is a lot of division across many parts of American society. But for evangelicals, who have dedicated their lives to Jesus, the problem is deeper. Christians are supposed to believe in the spiritual unity of the church. While differing over politics and other secondary matters, they are in theory supposed to be unified by their shared first love — as brothers and sisters in Christ. Their common devotion is supposed to bring out the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

“We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord,” say the opening lines of a famous Christian song commonly known as “By Our Love.” In its chorus it proclaims, “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love.” The world envisioned by that song seems very far away right now. The bitter recriminations have caused some believers to wonder if the whole religion is a crock.

Russell Moore resigned from his leadership position in the Southern Baptist Convention last spring over the denomination’s resistance to addressing the racism and sexual abuse scandals in its ranks. He tells me that every day he has conversations with Christians who are losing their faith because of what they see in their churches. He made a haunting point last summer when I saw him speak in New York State at a conference at a Bruderhof community, which has roots in the Anabaptist tradition. “We now see young evangelicals walking away from evangelicalism not because they do not believe what the church teaches,” he said, “but because they believe that the church itself does not believe what the church teaches.”

The proximate cause of all this disruption is Trump. But that is not the deepest cause. Trump is merely the embodiment of many of the raw wounds that already existed in parts of the white evangelical world: misogyny, racism, racial obliviousness, celebrity worship, resentment and the willingness to sacrifice principle for power.

Read it all.

Worth reading and reflecting, by @nytdavidbrooks with @KSPrior, @DavidAFrench, et al. “The Dissenters Trying to Save Evangelicalism From Itself” https://t.co/GDhkPG4Cvo

— Dr. Michael J. Svigel (@Svigel) February 5, 2022

A former Bishop of Chester, Dr Peter Forster, was received into the Roman Catholic Church last year, it was confirmed this week.

The news follows the reception of Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, a former Bishop of Rochester, into the RC Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, and the resignation of the Bishop of Ebbsfleet, the Rt Revd Jonathan Goodall, to be received into the RC Church….

Dr Forster retired as Bishop in September 2019, aged 69, after more than 22 years in post…. Concerns about his handling of safeguarding matters had been raised, and, before his retirement, he delegated all safeguarding responsibilities to the Suffragan Bishop of Birkenhead at that time, the Rt Revd Keith Sinclair….

Dr Forster and his wife have moved to a house in Scotland, which has been under construction for several years. It is understood that he was received in Scotland.

Read it all.

Another one!
Former Bishop of Chester received into Roman Catholic Church https://t.co/vGUh5ayLAT

— Fr David Palmer (@FrDavidPalmer) February 4, 2022

The Tablet understands that the issue has been raised directly with the Pope in recent months, who in turn asked for the question to be considered by Vatican officials. While there is no sign that Apostolicae Curae will be overturned, for several decades Rome has been moving away from the language used by Leo XIII and towards a recognition of the fruits of Anglican ministry. It is already a very different approach to the one found in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 1998 document, Professio Fidei, which claimed the teaching on Anglican orders was one of the “truths connected to revelation” and was to be held definitively.

The shift draws on the teaching of Vatican II, which recognised the “significant elements” that build up the Church outside of the “visible boundaries” of the Catholic Church, and on the many agreed statements on doctrine that have emerged from the formal dialogues between Anglican and Catholic theologians since the council.

“This issue causes hurt, and the Anglicans are diffident about raising it,” one Church source told The Tablet. “It’s a wound in the relations between the Churches and it would be great if a small step could be taken to healing the wound particularly as Pope Francis in practice recognises Anglican bishops through his joint initiatives with the Archbishop of Canterbury.”

Read it all.

As Churches pray for Christian unity, a re-appraisal of the Catholic position on Anglican orders is once again on the agenda. I understand it has been raised directly with Pope Francis. #25January #ChristianUnity https://t.co/gEZCVACNeR

— Christopher Lamb (@ctrlamb) January 25, 2022

At a time when pastors feel particularly under pressure, here’s some good news from the pews: Evangelical churchgoers are pretty happy with how things are going at their churches.

Most don’t think the sermons are too long; if anything, they’d like to see more in-depth teaching from leaders. They aren’t bothered by too many messages about giving. They don’t think social issues and politics play an outsized role in the teaching.

That’s according to a new survey of evangelical churchgoers in the US, the Congregational Scorecard conducted by Grey Matter Research and Consulting and Infinity Concepts.

Around three-quarters are satisfied with their congregation approach to various areas of church life and wouldn’t want it to change, the survey found.

Read it all.

Evangelicals are largely happy with their church and its teaching—if anything, they want to see pastors go more in-depth.

New Grey Matter survey: https://t.co/AhIzO2wpba

— kate shellnutt (@kateshellnutt) January 18, 2022

Tatiana Aparecida de Jesus used to walk the city’s streets as a sex worker, high on crack cocaine. Last year, the mother of five joined a small Pentecostal congregation in downtown Rio called Sanctification in the Lord and left her old life behind.

“The pastor hugged me without asking anything,” said Ms. de Jesus, 41, who was raised a Catholic and is one of more than a million Brazilians who have joined an evangelical or Pentecostal church since the beginning of the pandemic, according to researchers. “When you are poor, it makes so much of a difference when someone just says ‘good morning’ to you, ‘good afternoon,’ or shakes your hand,” she said.

For centuries, to be Latin American was to be Catholic; the religion faced virtually no competition. Today, Catholicism has lost adherents to other faiths in the region, especially Pentecostalism, and more recently to the ranks of the unchurched. The shift has continued under the first Latin American pope.

Seven countries in the region—Uruguay, the Dominican Republic and five in Central America—had a majority of non-Catholics in 2018, according to a survey by Latinobarómetro, a Chilean-based pollster. In a symbolic milestone, Brazil, which has the most Catholics of any country in the world, is expected to become minority-Catholic as soon as this year, according to estimates by academics that track religious affiliation.

Read it all.

Brazil is poised to lose majority-Catholic status, part of the Church’s litany of setbacks in Latin America under the region’s first pope https://t.co/9uS4MpbVXE

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) January 12, 2022

A few days after a tearful Vaus made his way to the front of the tent to publicly commit his life to Christ, he came to visit Mr. Graham, and he had an unusual request. He asked if the evangelist would be willing to meet with Mickey Cohen.

“I’ll go anywhere to talk to anybody about Christ,” Mr. Graham said.

As he wrote in his autobiography, Just As I Am:

“By arrangement then, we slipped out of the tent by a back exit after the meeting one night, in order to avoid the press, and got away undetected in Jim’s car. As he drove toward Mickey Cohen’s home, I had mixed feelings—a little uncertainty and hesitation, to be sure, yet a deep-down boldness as well.”

He said the boldness came from knowing he was going in the name of Jesus Christ to share the Gospel.

Seeing Cohen reminded Mr. Graham of Zacchaeus, a notorious figure from the Bible who was short in stature.

Read it all; from a story that was used in yesterday morning’s sermon by yours truly.

LA gangster Mickey Cohen with his body guard—- only in America– a Highway patrol copper👀🤔😁 I'll leave it there I'm sure there are other examples😉 pic.twitter.com/C3DFGlEEfC

— No brands 😴 wear your own😫 (@SohoGeorge) September 17, 2020

How does New York City set the culture for the rest of the country and the world? In the ’90s I heard New Yorkers discussing and expressing their views on gender and sexuality in ways that are now, many years later, mainstream on a national level. The city is a pacesetter for the culture, whether we like it or not. Some might think therefore that Christians should stay away from cities, but when you look at Scripture, you can’t deny that Jesus went from city to city in his ministry, or that Paul was willing to argue with the cultural intelligentsia in city centers such as Athens and Ephesus. In fact, I went back to Acts 17 over and over while I was in NYC to learn how to interact faithfully with center-city people.

How can Christians influence New York City for good? I started wondering, “What if there could be a movement of the gospel in one of the most religiously hostile and influential cities in America?” That was a goal. And it has been partially realized. A great number of people who became Christians here are now serving as salt and light in all sorts of places you’d never expect to find Christians.

At the time were there other contemporary pastors who preached about loving and investing in the city? Well, we have to start by pointing out that this question is something of a white-centric question. Or at least it’s the kind of question an upper-middle-class professional would ask. Because black, brown, and Asian churches never left the city. When white evangelicalism grew so much from 1965-1995, it was shaped by this “white flight” mentality and so had a very anti-urban bias to it.

However, during my five years teaching practical theology at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia alongside Harvie Conn and Manny Ortiz, I was exposed to a host of thoughtful, dynamic, and theologically informed African American, Hispanic, and Asian pastors and their ministries. They had thriving ministries at a time when U.S. inner cities were in terrible shape. But there they were. When Kathy and I announced we were moving to New York City, a number of people told us we were sinning against our children by taking them to the city, that they would lose their faith—and maybe their lives. (The opposite was true.) But the white evangelical view of the big cities as complete “spiritual wastelands” was wrong. So yes, in the 1980s, there were not many white and middle-class pastors talking about loving and investing in the city.

Read it all.

When I asked @MarvinOlasky if he can connect me w @timkellernyc for a Q&A, he said that's as easy as connecting me w Putin.

Well, in the midst of chemo & crazy schedule, Tim Keller sent me a 16-page response to my questions.

Here's part I of our Q&A:https://t.co/TaLs18p035

— Sophia Lee 소현 (@SophiaLeeHyun) December 9, 2021

Holy Trinity Brompton (known as HTB), the largest church in the Church of England, is to have a new Vicar lead its 4,000-strong congregation.

The former curate who pioneered its first ‘plant’ outside of London – the Revd Canon Archie Coates, 51, currently Vicar of St Peter’s Brighton, has been chosen as HTB’s Vicar Designate. It is expected that Canon Coates will become Vicar in September 2022, taking over from the Revd Nicky Gumbel, 66, who has announced his intention to resign his post from July 2022. Mr Gumbel has been Vicar of HTB since 2005 and has overseen considerable growth in that time. His books, which include Why Jesus? and Questions of Life, have been international best-sellers.

HTB is located in Knightsbridge, west London, and comprises a large, young and diverse congregation including a significant number of students, youth and children. Eleven services take place each Sunday across six sites in South Kensington, Earl’s Court and on the Dalgarno estate in west London.

Read it all.

Holy Trinity Brompton (@HTBChurch), the largest church in the Church of England, is to have a new Vicar. The Revd Canon Archie Coates, 51, currently Vicar of St Peter's Brighton, has been chosen as HTB's Vicar Designate. See more below:https://t.co/fOv68dn9g1

— London Diocese (@dioceseoflondon) December 5, 2021

A narrow focus on public schools, a hierarchical structure in which Bible teachers enjoyed greater levels of authority, and a lack of diversity among its leaders, drawn from the conservative Evangelical wing of the Church of England, are among the factors that have increased the risk of abuse at holiday camps run by the Titus Trust, an independent review concludes.

The review, carried out by Thirtyone:eight, an independent Christian safeguarding charity, and published in full on Wednesday, was commissioned by the trust in the wake of revelations about abuse perpetrated by a former chairman of the Iwerne Trust (now part of the Titus Trust), John Smyth (News, 10 February 2017, 27 August). It focuses mainly on the past five years, and responses come largely from current leaders on holidays, campers, current staff, and supporters. Visits to camps were also undertaken this summer.

It notes that “a significant amount of contributors were happy with the culture of the trust and its camps and did not have any issues with how they had been treated, nor any concerns about safeguarding,” but cautions that few responses were received from young people who had stopped going on the holidays.

The report explores nine themes, commenting that “some of these are not problematic in themselves, but it is the way in which they interrelate which increases the potential for abuse occurring.”

Read it all.

A narrow focus on public schools, a hierarchical structure in which Bible teachers enjoyed greater levels of authority, and a lack of diversity among its leaders. A look at the review https://t.co/H9ttsLAEx4

— Madeleine Davies (@MadsDavies) December 9, 2021