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#Post#: 19496--------------------------------------------------
Re: The fearless evangelist
By: patrick jane Date: October 24, 2020, 7:36 am
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[quote author=patrick jane link=topic=889.msg19095#msg19095
date=1603120176]
[img]
HTML https://www-images.christianitytoday.com/images/119862.jpg?w=700[/img]
HTML https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2020/october/white-evangelical-voters-for-trump-pew-lifeway-survey.html
White Evangelicals Are Actually for Trump in 2020, Not Just
Against His Opponent
Polls show faithful supporters no longer see the Republican
incumbent as the “lesser of two evils.”
While white evangelicals’ support for President Donald Trump is
close to the strong backing he enjoyed in 2016, voters’
motivations have shifted during his first term at the White
House.
This year, a majority are excited to get behind Trump, rather
than being primarily motivated by a distaste for his opponent.
Among white evangelical Trump supporters, most characterize
their vote in 2020 as “for Trump” (57%) and not “against Joe
Biden” (20%), according to new Pew Research Center survey
breakouts provided to CT.
Last presidential election, the numbers told a different story.
White evangelicals voting for the Republican were more likely to
say their vote was “against Clinton” (45%) than “for Trump”
(30%) in Pew’s 2016 survey—which researchers caution isn’t
directly comparable to the recent numbers because it was done by
phone, while this year’s was done online.
Tony Suarez, executive vice president of the National Hispanic
Christian Leadership Conference, says four years will change
your perspective. He served on Trump’s faith advisory panel
leading up to the 2016 election. This time, he’s actively
campaigning for reelection.
“Now I’m more than an adviser,” said Suarez, who has spoken at
Evangelicals for Trump events around the country. “It’s my call
because of what I’ve seen in the last four years. … He respects
prayer, receives prayer, and respects the faith community, but
he gets a bad rap.”
Trump’s reputation is also an animating factor on the Left,
where more Biden voters overall say they are voting “against
Trump” than “for Biden.”
The only religious group that considers itself “for Biden” is
black Protestants; 90 percent back the former vice president and
over half say they are voting for him and not against the
current president, Pew found. In comparison, among the 17
percent of white evangelicals who lean toward Biden,
three-quarters say they are motivated to vote “against Trump.”
Nathan Hoag, an evangelical pastor in Colorado, says his choice
to vote Democrat “has little to do with my approval of Biden and
almost everything to do with my disapproval of Trump.” He said
the decision was easier this year after seeing four years of the
administration’s policies.
Though it’s still a minority position among white evangelicals,
faith-based opposition to Trump has grown far more organized in
2020 and is focusing on the concerns shared by voters like Hoag.
Not Our Faith, a bipartisan Christian super PAC whose advisers
include former Obama staffer Michael Wear, is the latest effort
to launch. The organization will join a burgeoning
number—Republican Voters Against Trump, Christians Against
Trumpism, Evangelicals for Biden, and Pro-Life Evangelicals for
Biden—formed to rally believers to vote the current president
out of office.
The increasingly vocal opposition cites Christian convictions
around issues like racism, health care, poverty, and climate
science, as well as concerns with Trump’s tone.
“We believe Christians who use, excuse and embrace toxic
rhetoric to achieve specific policy ‘wins’ are short-sighted and
wrong,” stated Christians Against Trumpism.
Pro-Life Evangelicals for Biden said that beyond abortion, “Joe
Biden’s policies are more consistent with the biblically shaped
ethic of life than those of Donald Trump.”
Suarez and other evangelicals siding with the president have
pushed back against the evangelical minority speaking up for
Biden.
The president still feels the love from his evangelical base. On
a prayer call on Sunday evening, he said, “Whether it’s
evangelical, whether it’s Christian evangelical, call it
whatever you want, people of religion, this is the most
important election of our lives. We have got to get out and we
have to vote.”
Joined by his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, pastor Paula
White-Cain, and other evangelical leaders who have joined
campaign efforts, the president—less than a week after being
discharged from his coronavirus hospitalization—offered up his
prayers.
“I want to thank God for working miracles, and I want to ask God
for the wisdom and grace to lead our country and to lead it on
the top level,” Trump said to more than 100,000 supporters
tuning in. “We’re going to make America greater than ever
before.”
For white evangelicals who have stood by Trump, this is what
they see from the president: a leader who prays and welcomes
their prayers and who has kept his promises to improve the
economy, uphold pro-life stances, and appoint conservative
justices.
Like white evangelicals overall, evangelical pastors have grown
more confident in the president. At this point in 2016, they
were more likely to say they didn’t know whom they’d vote for
than to side with candidate Trump, according to a LifeWay
Research survey.
This year’s survey found that more than two-thirds of
evangelical pastors plan to vote for Trump (68%). LifeWay found
that Pentecostal (70%) and Baptist pastors (67%) are more likely
to vote for Trump than pastors in the Restorationist movement
(49%), Lutherans (43%), Presbyterian/Reformed (24%), or
Methodists (22%).
The racial divide among evangelical voters holds for pastors
too. Only 6 percent of African American pastors say they support
Trump, while a majority (61%) will be voting for Biden.
[/quote] ???
#Post#: 19638--------------------------------------------------
Re: The fearless evangelist
By: patrick jane Date: October 27, 2020, 10:49 am
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[img]
HTML https://www-images.christianitytoday.com/images/120068.jpg?w=940[/img]
HTML https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/october-web-only/jesus-john-wayne-kristin-kobes-du-mez-masculinity.html
The Alpha-Male Style in American Evangelicalism
A historian asks whether a warped view of masculine authority
has corrupted our faith and political witness.
As a recent college graduate in 1983, I sat spellbound with
thousands in my southern city civic center, mesmerized by a
mousy man projected on a big screen who taught us we must submit
to authority in every domain of life. Authority is God-given,
Bill Gothard taught, and in his moral universe, any diversion
from obedience disturbed the force and ignited interpersonal
conflict, along with personal anger and resentment. Gothard’s
principles for life’s dilemmas included specific practices based
on the Bible. Obedience begets blessings, peace of mind, and
confidence in one’s relationship with God.
Specifically, Gothard directed us to seek out those we’d
offended and ask forgiveness. Past conflict clogged up one’s
conscience. To be released from former transgressions freed us
for future treasure, or something like that.
My mind immediately went to a high-school girlfriend I’d
heartlessly dumped as I made my way to college four years prior.
Gothard offered a script of contrition, so I looked up her phone
number, dialed, and read my repentance. Needless to say, she was
nonplussed and wondered why in the world I was calling. I told
her about the seminar, about obedience and the blessings that
awaited us both if she’d obey and forgive me. Moreover, God
structured things such that she actually had to forgive me since
she was a woman and I was a man. It was how authority in the
universe supposedly worked.
Fast forward 20 years to a congregation I served as a minister
in Boston. We hosted a special event featuring the popular
Reformed evangelical pastor John Piper, who like Gothard
stressed the importance of obedience in a hierarchical chain of
command starting with God and descending to men over women and
children. The Lord established male headship over women as part
of creation’s order, Piper taught, for his glory and our joy.
The place was packed, mostly with young, male, goateed
enthusiasts, wide-eyed in wonder over how good they had it as
men in God’s economy.
In her recent book, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals
Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, Calvin University
historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez situates Gothard and Piper in a
long line of white, alpha-male leaders whose devotion to a
militant Christian patriarchy and nationalism inevitably led to
exuberant support, among large numbers of white evangelicals,
for Donald Trump as President—despite his clear deviation from
anything evangelical in a spiritual or behavioral sense. As it
turned out, Du Mez argues, obedience wasn’t as much about
goodness and grace as it was about power and who wielded it.
A ‘Masculinity Problem’
Early in the 20th century, Du Mez writes, “Christians recognized
that they had a masculinity problem.” If America was to be truly
great and fully Christian, it had to man up. Effeminate features
of Victorian piety would no longer do for a nation aspiring to
righteous superpower.
The popular idea of America as God’s chosen nation traces back
to Puritan leader John Winthrop’s 1630 “city on a hill” sermon,
which went mainly unnoticed (except by historians) until Ronald
Reagan rolled it out amid the latter days of the Cold War.
Invoked by successor presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, the
notion of American exceptionalism became core to the national
identity. In the eyes of many Christians, America’s chosenness
was linked with its morality, specifically in the areas of
sexual ethics, family values, character education, freedom of
(Christian) worship, and a potent foreign policy. And
safeguarding that morality required various forms of government
action.
With the evangelical embrace of morals legislation came a
commitment to order and hierarchical authority, starting at the
top with God and manifested in strong male leadership in
government, business, the military, churches, and families.
Masculine power was essential to America fulfilling its calling.
Without it, America would allegedly go the way of wusses,
weakening as a nation into a soft and too-delicate democracy.
Du Mez saddles up with Teddy Roosevelt as a Rough Rider and
giddyups all the way to the present, lassoing the likes of Billy
Sunday and Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell and James Dobson, Duck
Dynasty and Mark Driscoll, along with plenty of other Christian
cowboys (and a few cowgirls too). She shows how militant white
Christian patriarchy paved the way for a fractured nation and a
ruined religion whose doctrine of grace and commandment to love
diminish in the face of political expedience. She stresses how,
as a political culture as much as anything, white evangelicalism
captivated believers enough to redraw the boundaries of faith
around political allegiance rather than creedal assent. (One
example of this dynamic at work: As I entered my new role as
editor in chief of Christianity Today, I was asked more about my
position on particular policy issues than about any thoughts on
theology.)
As Du Mez explains, “For conservative white evangelicals steeped
in this ideology, it can be difficult to extricate their faith,
and their identity, from this larger cultural movement.” So
true. This is especially the case as political loyalties hijack
faith commitments to the point that whom you vote for determines
what kind of Christian you are rather than the other way around.
Du Mez cites Doug Phillips, a Teddy Roosevelt aficionado and
leader of the Christian homeschool movement, as representative
of the patriarchal-political ideology:
[Phillips] called on men to assume patriarchal leadership “more
noble than the valiant deeds of shining knights of yore,” and,
quoting Charles Spurgeon, he instructed wives to set aside their
own pleasure, to sink their individuality into their husbands,
to make the domestic circle their kingdom and husbands their
“little world,” their “Paradise,” their “choicest treasure.”
Phillips believed that patriarchy and patriotism were
inextricably connected, and both were God-given duties.
Patriarchy was key to the success of nations, and to be
“anti-patriotic” was to be a spiritual ingrate.
Mix white patriarchy and patriotism together with prejudice, and
you have all the ingredients for white supremacy, the fuel
behind America’s longstanding racial animus and recent political
hostility, which many worry could break American democracy
itself. In voting for Donald Trump, Du Mez writes, “Evangelicals
hadn’t betrayed their values. Donald Trump was the culmination
of their half-century-long pursuit of a militant Christian
masculinity.”
A Better Hierarchy
On one level, Du Mez’s thesis is compelling and extensively
researched. She shows how white evangelicalism worked as both a
basis and cover for white-privileged power plays and culture
wars, all in an attempt to preserve a hierarchy that served
white male agendas, excused misbehavior, and exonerated abuse.
Not that all of us white males imbibed the testosterone. Plenty
of us, including what Du Mez calls the “northern establishment
evangelicals—the Wheaton and Christianity Today types,” were
baffled by the overwrought Call of Duty discipleship. Still, our
devotion to specific social policies, our worries over the loss
of moral high ground and cultural hegemony, our fears over the
dissolution of Christian institutional influence, and our own
leadership led us to render unto Caesar the things that belonged
to God in a desperate last gasp for legitimacy.
At the same time, Du Mez seems guilty of a bit of confirmation
bias. If you’re hunting for white privilege and fragility, it’s
not hard to find. Having announced her thesis about militant
Christian-nationalist, male-patriarchal supremacy, she mines
American history for classic deplorables, most all of whom went
on to be exposed for the scandalous sins their pride and
prejudice invariably caused. On the other hand are plenty of
white evangelical men canceled out for political acts never
committed but only assumed and whose patriotism gets distorted
as nationalism simply because they’re white, Christian, and
male. As a political force they barely register compared to
Amazon, Facebook, and Hollywood.
But as the religion scholar Arthur Farnsley notes, white
American evangelicals make up about a quarter of the American
population. And “when this election is over,” he writes, “they
will still be here. And they will still be deeply intertwined in
American life. These folks are our fellow-citizens, part of our
country’s lifeblood. We need to be building bridges toward
evangelicals of goodwill, not burning them.”
As an older white southern male, weaned on evangelical Bible
studies and teaching, it’s possible I’m part of the problem and
that I have little ground from which to critique Du Mez’s
argument. Hierarchy has its upsides, as I’ve enjoyed genuine
privilege. And as one popular adage has it, when you’re
accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
The high-school girlfriend I dumped declined to forgive me. I’d
hurt her, she said, and grace wouldn’t come cheaply. That my
conscience bothered me four years hence was a good thing, she
thought. Better to let me stew in those juices for a while and
learn a lesson. I confess that I did.
Obedience doesn’t work like a math equation. And the joy it
brings comes at a high price. Jesus himself did not consider his
own equality with God as something to exploit but humbled
himself unto his own obedient death on a cross for our sake
(Phil. 2:1–11). This is the attitude to which we should aspire,
a hierarchy that locates our own interests at the bottom of the
pile. It may not seem very manly, but if Jesus is the ideal, so
much for John Wayne.
Daniel Harrell is editor in chief of Christianity Today.
#Post#: 19639--------------------------------------------------
Re: The fearless evangelist
By: patrick jane Date: October 27, 2020, 10:49 am
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[img]
HTML https://www-images.christianitytoday.com/images/119911.jpg?w=940[/img]
HTML https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/november/meet-tik-tok-generation-z-televangelists-seo.html
Meet the TikTok Generation of Televangelists
These young influencers want to #MakeJesusViral.
Gabe Poirot runs from the street toward the camera, yelling,
“Wait, wait, don’t scroll!”
If the urgency in his voice causes you to pause and watch his
video, you’re in for a 60-second blessing. Wearing a pink
crewneck sweatshirt with “#MakeJesusViral” emblazoned on the
front, he leans deep into the frame. “Let me pray with you
today,” he says earnestly, then bows his head and closes his
eyes. “Father God, let me just pray for the person on the other
end of this phone.”
Poirot, 19, is a student at Kenneth Copeland Bible College who
uses the social media app TikTok to share clips of himself
preaching short sermons and praying for his audience. TikTok
feeds users a constant stream of one-minute-or-less videos via
its “For You” page, making it easy for them to skip the ones
that don’t catch their attention within the first few seconds.
While much of TikTok is devoted to
less-than-youth-group-friendly content—like dances to Cardi B
and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP” and videos of users walking into
rooms naked to film their partners’ reactions—Poirot’s content
rests in a subgenre known as “Christian TikTok” (or, as rapper
Kanye West suggested, “Jesus Tok”). Christian TikTok influencers
publish sermonettes, cleaned-up versions of trending dance
challenges, best Bible study practices, and even tutorials on
how to stretch without participating in the Hindu elements of
yoga. And many of the young content creators are on a mission:
to spark revival among Generation Z—those born in the late 1990s
through the early 2010s.
At the beginning of 2020, TikTok set the record as the most
downloaded app in one quarter; to date, it’s been downloaded
over 2 billion times worldwide. Part of the app’s popularity
among contributors is its algorithm, which suggests new videos
based on users’ history and preferences. It can vault the
average video onto the screens of TikTok’s 700 million monthly
active users, launching the careers of aspiring social media
influencers.
The app has been controversial, not only because of concerns
that the Chinese government uses it to collect data on
Americans, but also because it has haphazardly spread videos
such as a girl documenting her abortion and a man filming his
suicide. But Poirot (@gabe_poirot2) and other Christian TikTok
creators hope to leverage the easy virality for the sake of
evangelism.
[img]
HTML https://www-images.christianitytoday.com/images/119913.jpg?h=684&w=1024[/img]
The app seems to be rewarding their efforts. Poirot’s two
accounts, where he posts videos with captions like “ITS TIME FOR
CHRISTIANS TO UNITE” spelled out in bright, eye-catching red,
cater to a combined following of 556,100 users. His audience is
young: One study indicated that in 2019, 41 percent of TikTok
users were between the ages of 16 to 24; other reports show
TikTok has roughly 18 million daily users in the US under the
age of 14.
If TikTok is fostering the next generation of populist
preachers, they share a lot in common with their predecessors:
wide smiles and amped-up personas, along with a keen awareness
of the rules of medium in which their message lives. And like
sawdust trail preachers and televangelists of old, Christian
TikTok stars must contend with accusations of false teaching and
strike a balance between self-promotion and proclamation.
From the beginning, religious broadcasters fought to “compete
for the hearts and minds of the nation,” wrote sociologist
Jeffrey K. Hadden in The Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science. Although broadcasting corporations
initially saw evangelical programs as more work than they were
worth, prosperity gospel preachers like Oral Roberts and Jim
Bakker soon dominated airwaves and created an entire industry of
televangelism.
Today, when virtually every prominent pastor and Bible teacher
has an online following, grassroots Christian video influencers
more commonly take the form of lifestyle vloggers. Atlanta
wedding videographers Nate and Sutton Eisenman’s YouTube
channel, for example, features Christian dating advice and
footage of their world travels, attracting more subscribers than
Beth Moore’s Living Proof Ministries or Tim Keller’s sermon
channel. Christian TikTok stars see the populist potential of
their platform as an untapped means for revival—part of a
longstanding evangelical tendency “to diagnose where is culture
moving, what is going to be the most influential, and then just
jump into that,” according to Candy Gunther Brown, who studies
evangelicalism at Indiana University.
When Poirot first started making TikToks in April, he didn’t
take it seriously; he mostly just posted Christian comedy
content. Then one of his videos accrued 50,000 views overnight.
“The thought came to my heart and it really struck me,” he said.
“I’m not out here to be famous for myself. I want to make Jesus
viral.”
The hashtag #MakeJesusViral was born, and Poirot began creating
more evangelistic videos. He created a 40-part series on why
“Everyone Deserves Hell” and often begins his clips with
questions like “What if you stopped scrolling for 60 seconds and
it changed your life?”
Poirot told CT that the Billy Graham crusades motivated his
thirst for revival. He watched Graham videos when he was younger
and was inspired by how Graham’s crusades helped “give
Christians a place to bring their friends.” As the coronavirus
pandemic limits in-person outreach, he thinks tools like TikTok
could have a unique role in evangelizing the unchurched.
But Graham isn’t Poirot’s only inspiration. He also cited the
traditional marketing funnel as his strategy for online
outreach. Similar to how sellers encourage people to buy a
product by generating awareness and buy-in, Poirot uses his
TikTok videos to drive people to his lengthier YouTube
livestreams. On Wednesday and Sunday nights, hundreds of eager
kids around the world tune in to sing praise songs, listen to
him preach, and recite a prayer of repentance along with him at
the end.
“If you prayed that prayer for the first time,” Poirot said
during one of his streams, “comment ‘First.’ If you prayed that
prayer for the second, third, or fourth or fifth, just say,
‘Recommit.’ ” He then counts these comments to gauge how
many people have been saved through his meetings and posts the
number of conversions online.
Poirot’s social media presence across platforms isn’t unique.
TikTok enables users to link their Instagram and YouTube
accounts to their TikTok profiles, and many creators encourage
their audiences to follow them in multiple places—giving them a
more stable online persona and more ways to publish longer-form
content that can be monetized.
This past summer, Poirot ran a TikTok collective called Carry
Christ, comprising himself and more than 10 volunteers who
helped create and promote videos. The Carry Christ account
gained over 100,000 followers in four months; the hashtag
#MakeJesusViral has garnered over 253.5 million views.
But virality doesn’t equal virtue. Within the fanfare lies a
bitter cacophony: Poirot is one of many Christian TikTok
personalities facing accusations of being a “false teacher.” For
instance, in a now-deleted video called “God Doesn’t Send Anyone
to Hell Part Twenty-Five,” Poirot claims that “God sends people
to heaven, not hell.” Dissenters commented “FALSE TEACHER
WARNING” and “this is false bro.”
When CT asked about the video, Poirot said he had made a mistake
and his title was unclear. His intent was to reach people who
wanted to know why God sends people to hell. Jesus has “given an
opportunity for every person to come to heaven,” Poirot said,
but some people “deny the free gift
of salvation.”
Accusations of false teaching—which sometimes mirror broader
theological disagreements within the church—are not uncommon.
Hailey Serrano (@haileyjulia_) made a video calling out a TikTok
creator who claimed that people needed to be water baptized to
go to heaven. One user said he saw a profile of a man who claims
to be the Messiah.
But even with the criticism against him, Poirot doesn’t begrudge
his critics their opinions.
“A lot of people will screen record one of their videos and then
say their two thoughts on it,” he said, referring to the
different editing functions on TikTok that allow users to record
their “reactions” to other people’s videos. “Which is
cool—actually just brings more traffic to the page.”
T
here are a lot of false teachers on TikTok,” said Peter Park
(@bibleflexguy), 40, an elder at Lighthouse Bible Church in San
Jose, California, who makes apologetics videos in his spare
time. As a marketing professional and a parent, he started his
TikTok account last year in an effort to understand the
platform.
“The fastest way to grow on TikTok is to buy into the emotional,
and the [Christian accounts] that are the most popular on TikTok
are the ones that pray over you,” Park said. “Those tend to be,
I think, ultimately the most dangerous ones, but those are the
ones that usually shoot up to over 500,000 [or] over a million
followers fairly quickly.”
Park thinks the popularity of these videos motivates people to
make more of them. Such appeals to emotionalism find their roots
in the early days of American Christianity, particularly during
the two Great Awakenings that served as waves of “spiritual
revival.” Charles Finney, a leader during the Second Great
Awakening and the “father of American revivalism,” engineered a
methodology of revivalist technique that emphasized creating the
right spiritual environment for conversion. In “What a Revival
of Religion Is,” he wrote:
Men are so sluggish, there are so many things to lead their
minds off from religion and to oppose the influence of the
Gospel, that it is necessary to raise an excitement among them,
till the tide rises so high as to sweep away the opposing
obstacles. They must be so aroused that they will break over
these counteracting influences, before they will obey God.
The techniques that Finney pioneered—music, advertising, and the
altar call—won him many converts. They also provoked criticism
that extends to today. In her book Total Truth, Nancy Pearcey
challenges Christians to think more biblically about the
marketing tactics they use, both in terms of fundraising and
evangelism. She advocates for treating people as “made in the
image of God, not a mass of emotions to be manipulated.”
“Though Christians would never accept naturalism as a
philosophy,” she writes, “many have absorbed a naturalistic
approach to marketing, adopting techniques that treat a target
audience essentially as passive ‘consumers’ to be manipulated
into buying a ‘product.’ ”
Poirot, however, doesn’t see his ministry in this light—despite
his now-deleted Carry Christ GoFundMe page, and a merchandise
website that sells hashtag hoodies for $40. Other Christian
creators sell merch, like Jana Jaye (@janatiktoks), who recently
announced that she was selling T-shirts and accepting Venmo
donations to raise money for her college tuition, room, and
board.
“When I say marketing, the purpose of me preaching the gospel
and having a funnel is not to claim the impact of reach,” Poirot
said. It’s to offer seekers more ways to go deeper in faith.
“The purpose is so that they can learn more in every moment, so
that they can gain more learning and understanding.”
A
s with blogs and other forms of online discipleship, a major
challenge for TikTok is that no one is really guiding that
learning and understanding. Christian TikTok is not a church.
As COVID-19 has forced many places of worship to shift to
holding online services, Park is concerned about the blurred
lines between online church services and the “TikTok church”
livestreams and Bible studies that some creators host over Zoom.
“Ultimately, those aren’t real churches,” Park said. “There’s
going to be more and more Christians that call themselves
‘Christian’ that won’t ever be a member of a physical local
church. But they’ll be part of these types of social networks.
And they’ll be receiving some truth in these videos and they’ll
go pick and choose what they want to watch on YouTube.”
Park isn’t the only one who’s concerned. Elijah Lamb
(@elijah.lamb), 17, began making TikToks as a joke in 2019. He
later began making apologetics videos and sharing his testimony
with his 669,000 followers. (He’s currently creating a 66-part
series on the books in the Bible.) Lamb said that although the
app has given him the opportunity to build a lot of friendships,
the community lacks a church’s governing authority.
“No one’s the president of Christian TikTok,” he said, “so it’s
hard to maintain order.” Anyone can download TikTok and begin
preaching on it, a freedom that hearkens to America’s trademark
religious populism.
“Religious populism, reflecting the passions of ordinary people
and the charisma of democratic movement-builders, remains among
the oldest and deepest impulses in American life,” writes Nathan
O. Hatch in The Democratization of American Christianity. With
the birth of America, emphases on the dismantling of tradition
and the sovereignty of the people resulted in a crisis of
authority that ripped apart the fabric of society, including the
hierarchical structure of the church. Laymen began preaching,
often offending traditionally trained ministers; the most
extreme populist preachers claimed that “divine insight was
reserved for the poor and humble rather than the proud and
learned.” A fundamental flip in authority granted power to
anyone with a Bible and a voice.
Populist preaching lives on in the digital age. Even though
TikTok has been praised for the way that it can make anyone be a
star, Lamb noted that the free-for-all nature of the app made it
“easy for [Christian TikTok] to split apart.” Creators have the
license to say and do whatever they want—a liberty that provides
a diversity of viewpoints and cultivates an atmosphere of
creativity but also engenders a sort of recklessness in word and
deed.
But while Park believes that TikTok presents a lot of dangers,
he isn’t worried about all young evangelists. “I think a lot of
the younger ones, like Gen Z, they’re doing it just for fun.
They’re doing it to make friends,” he said. “We need to correct
but also encourage.”
Despite concerns about the app’s Wild West atmosphere, there are
plenty who fear that TikTok videos are, in fact, being
controlled. Religion Unpluggedreported in May that some
Christian influencers have claimed that TikTok “shadow bans”
Christian voices, a practice in which a social media platform
covertly removes or refuses to circulate certain videos.
“There was one point where we all felt like we couldn’t even put
Jesus in our captions because TikTok would pick up on it and not
put the video out there,” said 22-year-old Aatiqah Wright
(@uhteakuh). Wright said that while normally she would get
15,000 views in two minutes, the shadow ban made it so that
she’d get a thousand views in an hour.
Shadow banning claims aren’t unique to Christians. Last year,
the Guardianreported that TikTok banned depictions of alcohol
consumption, figures of Jesus, and LGBT content in Turkey. Slate
also reported last December that the app admitted to limiting
videos created by users who looked like they would be
“susceptible to bullying,” including disabled and overweight
people.
Perhaps the biggest crisis Christian TikTok faces, however, is
the uncertainty of the app’s future. TikTok, which is currently
owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, made headlines over
concerns that it was sharing user data with the Chinese
government. These concerns culminated in August, when President
Trump issued an executive order banning TikTok from the US if it
was not sold to an American company. In September, Walmart and
tech company Oracle announced they would become part owners of
TikTok in a deal that would satisfy White House demands—but the
arrangement leaves ByteDance as a majority owner of the company
and is unlikely to satisfy all critics.
F
or Christian creators like Wright—who boasts 1.2 million
followers on TikTok and only 10,600 on YouTube—building a
ministry means turning online connections into in-person
interactions.
Wright started making TikToks in 2018 and recently collaborated
with a group of Christian TikTok creators known as Praise
House—a collective formed in the style of the mainstream “TikTok
house,” where several TikTok stars move into a mansion together.
The close proximity allows them to more easily create content
and boost each other’s followings, especially during a global
pandemic.
Praise House members currently live around the US but eventually
want to live together (boys and girls in separate houses, Wright
said). They dream of traveling as a group and hosting
evangelistic events, an idea that recently came to fruition when
Praise House held a “meet and greet” in Marietta, Georgia.
(Wright said Praise House members plan their events in states
with looser COVID-19 restrictions.)
“Not only are these kids seeing us on TikTok,” Wright explained,
“but they can also see us in person and we can evangelize to
them and move from place to place.”
The glue that holds this subculture together seems to be a
universal desire to see revival sweep across the United
States—which they’ve tried to translate into more concrete
ministries, or at least larger platforms.
Lamb has a management team that handles speaking engagements for
him, and he wants to preach and travel in the future. He said
he’s seen thousands of people get saved through his livestreams
and TikToks. “I think social media, and TikTok especially, is
the new medium of revival in the 21st century,” he said.
Poirot recently transitioned the Carry Christ account into Gabe
Poirot Ministries, after other members of the collective left
due to conflicting time commitments. He still plans on making
TikToks and hosting livestreams, continually striving to
#MakeJesusViral.
“They’re sticking booties in the air, so to speak,” he said,
referring to Hype House, a popular mainstream TikTok collective
in Los Angeles. “But our motto is stick Jesus in the air,
bringing influence back to him.”
Rachel Seo is a staff writer at Christ and Pop Culture and a
senior at the University of California San Diego, where she is
studying literature and writing. Follow her on Twitter
@rrachelalisonn.
#Post#: 19644--------------------------------------------------
Re: The fearless evangelist
By: guest8 Date: October 27, 2020, 7:49 pm
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[quote author=patrick jane link=topic=889.msg19639#msg19639
date=1603813778]
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HTML https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/november/meet-tik-tok-generation-z-televangelists-seo.html
Meet the TikTok Generation of Televangelists
These young influencers want to #MakeJesusViral.
Gabe Poirot runs from the street toward the camera, yelling,
“Wait, wait, don’t scroll!”
If the urgency in his voice causes you to pause and watch his
video, you’re in for a 60-second blessing. Wearing a pink
crewneck sweatshirt with “#MakeJesusViral” emblazoned on the
front, he leans deep into the frame. “Let me pray with you
today,” he says earnestly, then bows his head and closes his
eyes. “Father God, let me just pray for the person on the other
end of this phone.”
Poirot, 19, is a student at Kenneth Copeland Bible College who
uses the social media app TikTok to share clips of himself
preaching short sermons and praying for his audience. TikTok
feeds users a constant stream of one-minute-or-less videos via
its “For You” page, making it easy for them to skip the ones
that don’t catch their attention within the first few seconds.
While much of TikTok is devoted to
less-than-youth-group-friendly content—like dances to Cardi B
and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP” and videos of users walking into
rooms naked to film their partners’ reactions—Poirot’s content
rests in a subgenre known as “Christian TikTok” (or, as rapper
Kanye West suggested, “Jesus Tok”). Christian TikTok influencers
publish sermonettes, cleaned-up versions of trending dance
challenges, best Bible study practices, and even tutorials on
how to stretch without participating in the Hindu elements of
yoga. And many of the young content creators are on a mission:
to spark revival among Generation Z—those born in the late 1990s
through the early 2010s.
At the beginning of 2020, TikTok set the record as the most
downloaded app in one quarter; to date, it’s been downloaded
over 2 billion times worldwide. Part of the app’s popularity
among contributors is its algorithm, which suggests new videos
based on users’ history and preferences. It can vault the
average video onto the screens of TikTok’s 700 million monthly
active users, launching the careers of aspiring social media
influencers.
The app has been controversial, not only because of concerns
that the Chinese government uses it to collect data on
Americans, but also because it has haphazardly spread videos
such as a girl documenting her abortion and a man filming his
suicide. But Poirot (@gabe_poirot2) and other Christian TikTok
creators hope to leverage the easy virality for the sake of
evangelism.
[img]
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The app seems to be rewarding their efforts. Poirot’s two
accounts, where he posts videos with captions like “ITS TIME FOR
CHRISTIANS TO UNITE” spelled out in bright, eye-catching red,
cater to a combined following of 556,100 users. His audience is
young: One study indicated that in 2019, 41 percent of TikTok
users were between the ages of 16 to 24; other reports show
TikTok has roughly 18 million daily users in the US under the
age of 14.
If TikTok is fostering the next generation of populist
preachers, they share a lot in common with their predecessors:
wide smiles and amped-up personas, along with a keen awareness
of the rules of medium in which their message lives. And like
sawdust trail preachers and televangelists of old, Christian
TikTok stars must contend with accusations of false teaching and
strike a balance between self-promotion and proclamation.
From the beginning, religious broadcasters fought to “compete
for the hearts and minds of the nation,” wrote sociologist
Jeffrey K. Hadden in The Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science. Although broadcasting corporations
initially saw evangelical programs as more work than they were
worth, prosperity gospel preachers like Oral Roberts and Jim
Bakker soon dominated airwaves and created an entire industry of
televangelism.
Today, when virtually every prominent pastor and Bible teacher
has an online following, grassroots Christian video influencers
more commonly take the form of lifestyle vloggers. Atlanta
wedding videographers Nate and Sutton Eisenman’s YouTube
channel, for example, features Christian dating advice and
footage of their world travels, attracting more subscribers than
Beth Moore’s Living Proof Ministries or Tim Keller’s sermon
channel. Christian TikTok stars see the populist potential of
their platform as an untapped means for revival—part of a
longstanding evangelical tendency “to diagnose where is culture
moving, what is going to be the most influential, and then just
jump into that,” according to Candy Gunther Brown, who studies
evangelicalism at Indiana University.
When Poirot first started making TikToks in April, he didn’t
take it seriously; he mostly just posted Christian comedy
content. Then one of his videos accrued 50,000 views overnight.
“The thought came to my heart and it really struck me,” he said.
“I’m not out here to be famous for myself. I want to make Jesus
viral.”
The hashtag #MakeJesusViral was born, and Poirot began creating
more evangelistic videos. He created a 40-part series on why
“Everyone Deserves Hell” and often begins his clips with
questions like “What if you stopped scrolling for 60 seconds and
it changed your life?”
Poirot told CT that the Billy Graham crusades motivated his
thirst for revival. He watched Graham videos when he was younger
and was inspired by how Graham’s crusades helped “give
Christians a place to bring their friends.” As the coronavirus
pandemic limits in-person outreach, he thinks tools like TikTok
could have a unique role in evangelizing the unchurched.
But Graham isn’t Poirot’s only inspiration. He also cited the
traditional marketing funnel as his strategy for online
outreach. Similar to how sellers encourage people to buy a
product by generating awareness and buy-in, Poirot uses his
TikTok videos to drive people to his lengthier YouTube
livestreams. On Wednesday and Sunday nights, hundreds of eager
kids around the world tune in to sing praise songs, listen to
him preach, and recite a prayer of repentance along with him at
the end.
“If you prayed that prayer for the first time,” Poirot said
during one of his streams, “comment ‘First.’ If you prayed that
prayer for the second, third, or fourth or fifth, just say,
‘Recommit.’ ” He then counts these comments to gauge how
many people have been saved through his meetings and posts the
number of conversions online.
Poirot’s social media presence across platforms isn’t unique.
TikTok enables users to link their Instagram and YouTube
accounts to their TikTok profiles, and many creators encourage
their audiences to follow them in multiple places—giving them a
more stable online persona and more ways to publish longer-form
content that can be monetized.
This past summer, Poirot ran a TikTok collective called Carry
Christ, comprising himself and more than 10 volunteers who
helped create and promote videos. The Carry Christ account
gained over 100,000 followers in four months; the hashtag
#MakeJesusViral has garnered over 253.5 million views.
But virality doesn’t equal virtue. Within the fanfare lies a
bitter cacophony: Poirot is one of many Christian TikTok
personalities facing accusations of being a “false teacher.” For
instance, in a now-deleted video called “God Doesn’t Send Anyone
to Hell Part Twenty-Five,” Poirot claims that “God sends people
to heaven, not hell.” Dissenters commented “FALSE TEACHER
WARNING” and “this is false bro.”
When CT asked about the video, Poirot said he had made a mistake
and his title was unclear. His intent was to reach people who
wanted to know why God sends people to hell. Jesus has “given an
opportunity for every person to come to heaven,” Poirot said,
but some people “deny the free gift
of salvation.”
Accusations of false teaching—which sometimes mirror broader
theological disagreements within the church—are not uncommon.
Hailey Serrano (@haileyjulia_) made a video calling out a TikTok
creator who claimed that people needed to be water baptized to
go to heaven. One user said he saw a profile of a man who claims
to be the Messiah.
But even with the criticism against him, Poirot doesn’t begrudge
his critics their opinions.
“A lot of people will screen record one of their videos and then
say their two thoughts on it,” he said, referring to the
different editing functions on TikTok that allow users to record
their “reactions” to other people’s videos. “Which is
cool—actually just brings more traffic to the page.”
T
here are a lot of false teachers on TikTok,” said Peter Park
(@bibleflexguy), 40, an elder at Lighthouse Bible Church in San
Jose, California, who makes apologetics videos in his spare
time. As a marketing professional and a parent, he started his
TikTok account last year in an effort to understand the
platform.
“The fastest way to grow on TikTok is to buy into the emotional,
and the [Christian accounts] that are the most popular on TikTok
are the ones that pray over you,” Park said. “Those tend to be,
I think, ultimately the most dangerous ones, but those are the
ones that usually shoot up to over 500,000 [or] over a million
followers fairly quickly.”
Park thinks the popularity of these videos motivates people to
make more of them. Such appeals to emotionalism find their roots
in the early days of American Christianity, particularly during
the two Great Awakenings that served as waves of “spiritual
revival.” Charles Finney, a leader during the Second Great
Awakening and the “father of American revivalism,” engineered a
methodology of revivalist technique that emphasized creating the
right spiritual environment for conversion. In “What a Revival
of Religion Is,” he wrote:
Men are so sluggish, there are so many things to lead their
minds off from religion and to oppose the influence of the
Gospel, that it is necessary to raise an excitement among them,
till the tide rises so high as to sweep away the opposing
obstacles. They must be so aroused that they will break over
these counteracting influences, before they will obey God.
The techniques that Finney pioneered—music, advertising, and the
altar call—won him many converts. They also provoked criticism
that extends to today. In her book Total Truth, Nancy Pearcey
challenges Christians to think more biblically about the
marketing tactics they use, both in terms of fundraising and
evangelism. She advocates for treating people as “made in the
image of God, not a mass of emotions to be manipulated.”
“Though Christians would never accept naturalism as a
philosophy,” she writes, “many have absorbed a naturalistic
approach to marketing, adopting techniques that treat a target
audience essentially as passive ‘consumers’ to be manipulated
into buying a ‘product.’ ”
Poirot, however, doesn’t see his ministry in this light—despite
his now-deleted Carry Christ GoFundMe page, and a merchandise
website that sells hashtag hoodies for $40. Other Christian
creators sell merch, like Jana Jaye (@janatiktoks), who recently
announced that she was selling T-shirts and accepting Venmo
donations to raise money for her college tuition, room, and
board.
“When I say marketing, the purpose of me preaching the gospel
and having a funnel is not to claim the impact of reach,” Poirot
said. It’s to offer seekers more ways to go deeper in faith.
“The purpose is so that they can learn more in every moment, so
that they can gain more learning and understanding.”
A
s with blogs and other forms of online discipleship, a major
challenge for TikTok is that no one is really guiding that
learning and understanding. Christian TikTok is not a church.
As COVID-19 has forced many places of worship to shift to
holding online services, Park is concerned about the blurred
lines between online church services and the “TikTok church”
livestreams and Bible studies that some creators host over Zoom.
“Ultimately, those aren’t real churches,” Park said. “There’s
going to be more and more Christians that call themselves
‘Christian’ that won’t ever be a member of a physical local
church. But they’ll be part of these types of social networks.
And they’ll be receiving some truth in these videos and they’ll
go pick and choose what they want to watch on YouTube.”
Park isn’t the only one who’s concerned. Elijah Lamb
(@elijah.lamb), 17, began making TikToks as a joke in 2019. He
later began making apologetics videos and sharing his testimony
with his 669,000 followers. (He’s currently creating a 66-part
series on the books in the Bible.) Lamb said that although the
app has given him the opportunity to build a lot of friendships,
the community lacks a church’s governing authority.
“No one’s the president of Christian TikTok,” he said, “so it’s
hard to maintain order.” Anyone can download TikTok and begin
preaching on it, a freedom that hearkens to America’s trademark
religious populism.
“Religious populism, reflecting the passions of ordinary people
and the charisma of democratic movement-builders, remains among
the oldest and deepest impulses in American life,” writes Nathan
O. Hatch in The Democratization of American Christianity. With
the birth of America, emphases on the dismantling of tradition
and the sovereignty of the people resulted in a crisis of
authority that ripped apart the fabric of society, including the
hierarchical structure of the church. Laymen began preaching,
often offending traditionally trained ministers; the most
extreme populist preachers claimed that “divine insight was
reserved for the poor and humble rather than the proud and
learned.” A fundamental flip in authority granted power to
anyone with a Bible and a voice.
Populist preaching lives on in the digital age. Even though
TikTok has been praised for the way that it can make anyone be a
star, Lamb noted that the free-for-all nature of the app made it
“easy for [Christian TikTok] to split apart.” Creators have the
license to say and do whatever they want—a liberty that provides
a diversity of viewpoints and cultivates an atmosphere of
creativity but also engenders a sort of recklessness in word and
deed.
But while Park believes that TikTok presents a lot of dangers,
he isn’t worried about all young evangelists. “I think a lot of
the younger ones, like Gen Z, they’re doing it just for fun.
They’re doing it to make friends,” he said. “We need to correct
but also encourage.”
Despite concerns about the app’s Wild West atmosphere, there are
plenty who fear that TikTok videos are, in fact, being
controlled. Religion Unpluggedreported in May that some
Christian influencers have claimed that TikTok “shadow bans”
Christian voices, a practice in which a social media platform
covertly removes or refuses to circulate certain videos.
“There was one point where we all felt like we couldn’t even put
Jesus in our captions because TikTok would pick up on it and not
put the video out there,” said 22-year-old Aatiqah Wright
(@uhteakuh). Wright said that while normally she would get
15,000 views in two minutes, the shadow ban made it so that
she’d get a thousand views in an hour.
Shadow banning claims aren’t unique to Christians. Last year,
the Guardianreported that TikTok banned depictions of alcohol
consumption, figures of Jesus, and LGBT content in Turkey. Slate
also reported last December that the app admitted to limiting
videos created by users who looked like they would be
“susceptible to bullying,” including disabled and overweight
people.
Perhaps the biggest crisis Christian TikTok faces, however, is
the uncertainty of the app’s future. TikTok, which is currently
owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, made headlines over
concerns that it was sharing user data with the Chinese
government. These concerns culminated in August, when President
Trump issued an executive order banning TikTok from the US if it
was not sold to an American company. In September, Walmart and
tech company Oracle announced they would become part owners of
TikTok in a deal that would satisfy White House demands—but the
arrangement leaves ByteDance as a majority owner of the company
and is unlikely to satisfy all critics.
F
or Christian creators like Wright—who boasts 1.2 million
followers on TikTok and only 10,600 on YouTube—building a
ministry means turning online connections into in-person
interactions.
Wright started making TikToks in 2018 and recently collaborated
with a group of Christian TikTok creators known as Praise
House—a collective formed in the style of the mainstream “TikTok
house,” where several TikTok stars move into a mansion together.
The close proximity allows them to more easily create content
and boost each other’s followings, especially during a global
pandemic.
Praise House members currently live around the US but eventually
want to live together (boys and girls in separate houses, Wright
said). They dream of traveling as a group and hosting
evangelistic events, an idea that recently came to fruition when
Praise House held a “meet and greet” in Marietta, Georgia.
(Wright said Praise House members plan their events in states
with looser COVID-19 restrictions.)
“Not only are these kids seeing us on TikTok,” Wright explained,
“but they can also see us in person and we can evangelize to
them and move from place to place.”
The glue that holds this subculture together seems to be a
universal desire to see revival sweep across the United
States—which they’ve tried to translate into more concrete
ministries, or at least larger platforms.
Lamb has a management team that handles speaking engagements for
him, and he wants to preach and travel in the future. He said
he’s seen thousands of people get saved through his livestreams
and TikToks. “I think social media, and TikTok especially, is
the new medium of revival in the 21st century,” he said.
Poirot recently transitioned the Carry Christ account into Gabe
Poirot Ministries, after other members of the collective left
due to conflicting time commitments. He still plans on making
TikToks and hosting livestreams, continually striving to
#MakeJesusViral.
“They’re sticking booties in the air, so to speak,” he said,
referring to Hype House, a popular mainstream TikTok collective
in Los Angeles. “But our motto is stick Jesus in the air,
bringing influence back to him.”
Rachel Seo is a staff writer at Christ and Pop Culture and a
senior at the University of California San Diego, where she is
studying literature and writing. Follow her on Twitter
@rrachelalisonn.
[/quote]
WOW, China will like that.
Blade
#Post#: 20337--------------------------------------------------
Re: The fearless evangelist
By: patrick jane Date: November 11, 2020, 1:17 pm
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HTML https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/november-web-only/evangelical-leader-pastor-scandal-prevent-accountability.html
How to Prevent the Next Evangelical Leadership Scandal
Working in PR, I’ve stepped in to help ministries after a crisis
hits. What they need is more accountability before it happens.
It’s a far-too-common story: A pastor or prominent leader of a
faith-based organization resigns because of sexual misconduct or
abusive or controlling leadership.
In 2020, we’ve seen a fair amount of cases like these among
evangelicals. When moral failure befalls our communities’
leadership, it can be a gut punch to our faith. Sexual
misconduct and abusive leadership can hurt marriages, impair our
institutions, forever damage the lives of those impacted, and
harm our witness to a watching world.
Working as a public relations professional in the Christian
world, I’ve had an up-close and personal view of how quickly
crises can develop and how easily they can engulf an
organization in controversy and confusion. I have been called on
to help numerous ministries in crisis, many of which were
struggling to come to terms with revelations of sexual
impropriety or abusive leadership. My role is to try to minimize
the public damage. But in many situations, it becomes clear that
organizational problems existed far before the sin was ever made
public.
Exposing the truth is necessary and helpful. We have a duty to
name and call out sin in our communities, churches, and
ministries. Open and honest media coverage can be a part of that
process. But we can and must do more than expose sin within
leadership when it happens. We must fight to prevent it from
taking root in the first place.
We all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God; none of
us is perfect. Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above
all things and beyond cure….” Each of us is prone to sinful
temptations in different ways. To deny this about ourselves is
in itself a prideful flaw. This is exactly why evangelical
ministries must do more to create systems and structures to
prevent and protect our leadership from moral failure.
More often than not, organizations are catapulted into crises
almost solely because they had little to no accountability
procedures in place to prevent abuses of power. When it comes to
protecting against sexual misconduct or preventing abusive and
controlling leadership, prayer and regular meditation on God’s
Word are key. However, there are also some simple, practical
measures Christian organizations should take to build
accountability and keep leaders in check.
1. All leaders should be faithfully attending a local church.
This may sound obvious, but you would be surprised how many
Christian leaders don’t commit to a local community of
Christians. Leaders and staff must support each other in finding
and committing to a local community of believers (Heb.
10:24–25). Some Christian leaders use travel or ministry burnout
as an excuse to stop going to church and submitting to a pastor
of a local church. This is dangerous. No one can uphold God’s
Word without regular, faithful church attendance and loving
biblical community. If you serve on a board of a Christian
ministry, you should ask the organization’s leadership about
this.
2. All leaders within the organization should be in
relationships in which they are accountable.
Every leader needs both professional accountability and personal
accountability. This could happen through the local church but
can be met in other contexts too. Leaders must regularly meet
with Christians with whom they can face hard questions about
their actions, thoughts, and temptations.
We are all prone to pride and power. Ironically, the very
personality traits that help leaders rise in popularity and
influence are sometimes the very things that lead to arrogance
and controlling behaviors. These sins fester when leaders are
allowed to act and make decisions in isolation. Though
accountability is not fail-safe, it’s much more difficult for
leaders in transparent accountability relationships to fall into
sexual, prideful, or controlling sin.
3. Prohibit the board from being stacked with family members and
friends.
Sometimes a board has to make tough decisions that may mean the
dismissal of an organization’s president or pastor. This becomes
even harder for leaders who are ministry founders. Too often,
hard choices are delayed or even avoided altogether because the
board members are too close to the leader. This dereliction of
duty inevitably impacts the organization, no matter the
circumstances. But with regard to sexual impropriety or abusive
leadership, it can also exacerbate the victims’ pain or even
lead to further victimization and persecution.
A board should also be mindful of the language in the employment
agreement with the organization’s leader. A recent incident of
reckless moral failure stemmed from the board giving carte
blanche to the organization’s president to lead however he saw
fit. The board must set clear expectations for a
leader—regardless of that leader’s perceived virtue or track
record.
4. Question whether a Christian organization should be named
after an individual.
For the sake of longevity, a Christian organization should think
twice before naming an organization after its founder. When that
leader dies, the ministry bearing his or her name almost
inevitably struggles for survival. However, an even bigger issue
is the potential for the leader of such an organization to
become prideful and start seeing the organization as an
extension of himself or herself. As the Book of Proverbs tells
us repeatedly, pride comes before the fall. If a leader falls,
the eponymous organization could fall with them.
5. Be thoughtful about the organization’s travel policy.
A Christian organization should not just be mindful of the per
diem and how receipts should be submitted. Careful consideration
should also be given to how much time staff should be separated
from their families, whether spouses are encouraged to join
staff on longer business trips, and how much downtime is
factored into company-sponsored trips. It’s common sense to
ensure that families are together more often than not. Everyone
within an organization has a vested interest in their leader
having a vibrant, healthy marriage and family life.
None of us is without fault, and all of us are susceptible to
sin. The question is how are we being held accountable. With the
right structures and expectations in place, a faith-based
organization is more likely to not only avoid a PR crisis but
also to protect its community and foster a faithful ministry
that better reflects the heart of God.
And don’t think of leadership crisis prevention as a PR exercise
or lesson in political correctness. This is a vitally important
part of living out our Christian witness. Matthew 5:16 reminds
us to “let your light shine before others, that they may see
your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” The world is
watching our good deeds as well as our bad ones. Our response to
failures and our dedication to preventing them will speak
volumes to the culture about the hope that we have in Jesus, and
our dedication to his righteousness.
Heather Cirmo is a public relations professional based in
Washington, DC, with 25 years of experience.
Speaking Out is Christianity Today’s guest opinion column and
(unlike an editorial) does not necessarily represent the opinion
of the publication.
#Post#: 20438--------------------------------------------------
Re: The fearless evangelist
By: patrick jane Date: November 13, 2020, 5:38 am
---------------------------------------------------------
[img]
HTML https://www-images.christianitytoday.com/images/120302.jpg?w=940[/img]
HTML https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/november-web-only/bible-is-our-blazing-fire-women-engagement-scripture.html
The Bible Is Our Blazing Fire
A look inside our special issue exploring women's passionate
engagement with Scripture.
Imprisoned by the Nazis in Ravensbrück, Corrie ten Boom and the
other women in her barracks regularly gathered to covertly read
from a smuggled Bible. “The blacker the night around us grew,
the brighter and truer and more beautiful burned the word of
God,” ten Boom wrote in The Hiding Place. They’d crowd around
the Bible “like waifs clustered around a blazing fire … holding
out our hearts to its warmth and light.”
Though ten Boom had believed and loved the Bible throughout her
life, in the brutal conditions of a concentration camp—enduring
daily threats and violence, surrounded by evil and death—God’s
Word spoke to her with a new potency. “Sometimes I would slip
the Bible from its little sack with hands that shook, so
mysterious had it become to me,” she said. It was as if “it was
new; it had just been written. I marveled sometimes that the ink
was dry.”
We, too, can open the familiar Book and encounter unexpected
mystery. Well-worn passages we can recite by heart suddenly
speak in new ways directly to our hearts. Stories we already
know somehow know us. We read, and the living and active Word
does its sharp work, convicting us about our innermost thoughts
and attitudes (Heb. 4:12). We study, and amid the words we pore
over, we encounter the Word of Life himself (1 John 1:1).
Evangelical women have a high commitment to Scripture; in fact,
several studies demonstrate that American Christian women read
the Bible more frequently than Christian men. The articles below
were all featured in our CT special issue, “Why Women Love the
Bible.” In these articles, we highlight Scripture’s power in the
lives of those facing persecution, persevering amid racism, and
enduring life’s storms. We highlight women in church history who
studied Scripture as well as women today who turn to it for
prayer and evangelism.
For many of us, 2020 has been a difficult year. While the Bible
always speaks to us, in good times as well as bad, hardships can
deepen our sense of how profoundly we need and desire the
“blazing fire” of God’s Word. May it ever burn bright in our
lives.
#Post#: 20440--------------------------------------------------
Re: The fearless evangelist
By: patrick jane Date: November 13, 2020, 5:42 am
---------------------------------------------------------
[img]
HTML https://www-images.christianitytoday.com/images/119925.jpg?w=940[/img]
HTML https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/november/aaron-griffith-gods-law-order-evangelical-prison.html
Share the Gospel with Prisoners. Then Apply It to the System.
Evangelicals are superb at the first task. To what extent do
they embrace the second as well?
In 1979, Charles Colson, the nation’s best-known evangelical
prison ministry director, visited the Washington State
Penitentiary in Walla Walla to share the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Colson, who had been in prison himself only five years earlier
for his role in the Watergate scandal, was known for his
sympathy to prisoners’ concerns.
When he found out that the men in Walla Walla’s solitary
confinement facility had to live with human waste and rotting
food that the warden refused to clean up, he promised to lobby
the state legislature for change. The effort succeeded, and
Colson expanded his campaign for prison reform nationwide. But
because Colson was no liberal, his ministries depended on a
close alliance with law-and-order evangelicals and even
law-and-order politicians who helped create the prison system
that Colson found so troubling.
This paradox is central to the historical narrative that Aaron
Griffith presents in God’s Law and Order: The Politics of
Punishment in Evangelical America. With an undergraduate degree
from Wheaton College and a history of personal involvement in
prison ministry, Griffith sympathizes with many of the
evangelicals profiled in the book—especially Colson, whom he
describes as genuinely compassionate and sincerely interested in
prisoners’ well-being.
But with a doctoral degree from Duke University Divinity School,
Griffith is also well-versed in liberal Protestant critiques of
evangelical politics, and he shares the concerns of critics who
question whether evangelical support for law and order can be
squared with a gospel-centered theology. Have evangelicals
adopted their seemingly contradictory views of the prison system
in spite of their theology, or because of it?
Centers of Law and Grace
Prisons have long held an irresistible theological attraction to
evangelicals, Griffith argues, because conservative Christians
have seen them as centers of both law and grace—that is, places
where sinners are punished but also places where many find
redemption. As early as the 1920s, American evangelicals saw a
moral dimension to the nation’s crime wave. While liberal
Protestants thought that social reform could reduce crime,
evangelicals saw crime as a consequence of rejecting God—which
made gospel preaching the best antidote. Billy Graham made this
argument frequently in the 1950s, and his ministry produced
films to celebrate the stories of notorious criminals who
renounced their wicked ways after finding Jesus at one of
Graham’s crusades.
With their strong faith in the power of conversion, evangelicals
devoted more time to prison ministry than any other Christian
group in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. And as Griffith
argues, this faith in conversion was, in some sense, at odds
with law-and-order politics. In the 1950s and early 1960s,
evangelicals seemed more interested in converting criminals than
locking them up. The gospel, they thought, could produce far
better results in criminals’ lives than long prison sentences.
This was the belief, for instance, of David Wilkerson, the
charismatic minister who became famous for his evangelistic work
with New York youth gangs, as described in his best-selling
memoir The Cross and the Switchblade. It was also Graham’s
message. But in the 1960s, this changed. Amid widespread
conservative fears of rising crime rates and racial unrest, many
white evangelicals, including Graham, embraced law-and-order
politics. Even Wilkerson became convinced that troubled youth
faced greater problems than gospel preaching alone could solve.
He came to believe that the problem of the cities was heroin and
that tougher drug laws were the answer.
In the early 1970s, a few black evangelicals—Tom Skinner, most
prominently—challenged white evangelical support of conservative
law-and-orderpolitics and tried directing their attention to
racial injustice within the prison system. But most white
evangelicals were not receptive to Skinner’s message. When he
became more outspoken on racial issues, Moody Bible Institute
dropped his radio program, and the director of the National
Association of Evangelicals criticized him.
For a few years in the late 20th century, it seemed that Colson
might turn evangelicals away from law-and-order politics and
restore the conversion-centered approach that characterized
earlier evangelical thinking about prisons. Before his
born-again conversion in 1974, Colson had worked as a White
House aide to the Republican president most associated with the
politics of law and order: Richard Nixon. But after Colson was
indicted for breaking the law himself, he found Jesus and
changed his views.
Driven by a new spirit of compassion and a desire to see as many
criminals as possible come to know Jesus, he launched a national
prison ministry and began speaking out against the death
penalty. Execution, he told the Southern Baptist Convention in
1979, ended all chances of conversion. If Baptists believed in
saving the lost, they should never support prematurely ending
the life of someone who might not know Jesus.
This was the classic conversionist approach that viewed a
personal relationship with Jesus as the antidote to every social
problem while rejecting state solutions—punitive or
rehabilitative—as beside the point, if not actively harmful. At
first, Colson’s ministry focused almost entirely on evangelism
in prisons rather than campaigns for prison reform. But after
repeatedly hearing complaints about inhumane prison conditions
and seeing a few examples firsthand, he began lobbying for
reform, partly to remove barriers to the gospel but mostly out
of genuine compassion for people he didn’t want to see suffer
unnecessarily. He advocated alternatives to prison sentences for
people convicted of nonviolent crimes, and he called for
restorative-justice approaches that would prioritize making
amends to victims over simply locking people up.
Griffith finds much to appreciate in Colson’s approach, but he
also notes Colson’s unwillingness to challenge his law-and-order
allies, whether politicians or fellow evangelicals. In the early
1990s, he reversed his stance on the death penalty and endorsed
it. Although Colson went further than most evangelicals in
perceiving problems in the prison system, he, like nearly all of
his white evangelical peers, subscribed to a colorblind racial
ideology and individualist ethos that made it very difficult to
denounce the structural inequities of the criminal justice
system.
For more than half a century, white evangelicals (and even a few
black evangelical allies) assumed that prison was fair—that
pretty much everyone there deserved to be there. Crime resulted
from personal sin, and sinners were punished in jail, which
prepared them to encounter the life-transforming power of the
gospel. But what if the criminal justice system was not fair?
What if, as many nonevangelical liberals of the early 21st
century argued, it was a tool of racial oppression that
functioned to control a disproportionately poor and nonwhite
population? What if the greatest sin behind the prison system is
not the wrongdoing of the convicts behind bars but the injustice
of the legal system itself? Could evangelical theology offer an
effective tool to fight such structural sin?
Theological Retooling
Griffith seems conflicted about this. On the one hand,
evangelicals’ belief in the power of conversion has led them to
spend more time with those in prison than any other group of
Americans. When it comes to showing personal compassion to
individual prisoners, evangelicals motivated by Jesus’
exhortations in Matthew 25 have outshone adherents of any other
religion or philosophy.
And yet, to the extent that challenging structural deficiencies
in the criminal justice system is now a pressing matter,
evangelicals who have long held to an individualist view of sin
and a strictly personal view of salvation will need to do some
theological retooling. Liberal Protestants, not evangelicals,
are the Christians who have most often seen sin in structural
terms and viewed their theology as a resource for fighting
systemic injustice.
In Griffith’s opinion, convincing most white evangelicals to see
the prison system in these terms will require a theological
shift and a movement-wide repentance radical enough to
constitute what he calls a religious “conversion” in its own
right. This would involve admitting that individualistic views
of sin and salvation need to be supplemented with liberal
Protestant theologies of structural sin that white evangelicals
have eschewed for the past century.
As long as one remains committed to an evangelical theology of
personal sin and salvation, Griffith’s proposal will be
difficult to accept in its entirety. But perhaps addressing the
issues that concern Griffith will not require such a wholesale
theological revision, because evangelicals who adhere to the
ethics of the New Testament can likely find more resources in
their own theological tradition to address injustice in the
prison system than Griffith seems to acknowledge.
If the apostle Paul, for instance, could do evangelistic work
within a prison system that he and other early Christians knew
was unfair, perhaps contemporary American evangelicals can as
well. And perhaps they can also renounce their view that the law
is colorblind and begin to acknowledge the vast racial
disparities in the nation’s prison system, even while continuing
their evangelistic prison ministries.
When it comes to proclaiming the power of the gospel to
transform every sinner, including those behind bars, an
evangelical Christian cannot compromise without, in some sense,
ceasing to be an evangelical. But if Griffith’s book prompts
evangelical believers to apply the gospel not only to
individuals in prison but also to the structure of the prison
system itself, that would undoubtedly be a good thing. And maybe
in the process, as Griffith suggests, the gospel will induce
repentance not only among those behind bars but also among some
evangelicals who voted for the policies that put so many there
in the first place.
Daniel K. Williams teaches history at the University of West
Georgia. He is the author of Defenders of the Unborn: The
Pro-Life Movement before Roe v. Wade and God’s Own Party: The
Making of the Christian Right.
#Post#: 20858--------------------------------------------------
Re: The fearless evangelist
By: patrick jane Date: November 21, 2020, 7:05 am
---------------------------------------------------------
[img]
HTML https://www-images.christianitytoday.com/images/120527.jpg?w=700[/img]
HTML https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2020/november/islam-christianity-evangelical-theology-society-ets.html
Muslims Join Evangelical Theology Conference
Annual gathering of Christian scholars seeks better engagement
with Islam.
It is not often that a Muslim appears at an evangelical
theological gathering.
Al Mohler invited three.
The trimmed-down 72nd annual conference of the Evangelical
Theological Society (ETS), held virtually this week, usually
welcomes up to 2,000 top scholars to present on the most salient
issues facing evangelical scholarship.
This year’s theme: Islam and Christianity.
“We are called to truth, and to understanding the world around
us more accurately and thoughtfully,” said Mohler, president of
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS), who also served as
ETS program chair.
“That certainly includes our understanding of Islam, which has
from the beginning represented an enormous challenge to
Christian evangelism, apologetics, theology, and cultural
engagement.”
Roughly 15 percent of the 130-plus events addressed these
challenges, including the three official plenary sessions—in
typical academic parlance:
“The Authority and Function of the Quran in Islam,” by Ayman
Ibrahim of SBTS
“Through the Prism: The Trinity and the Islamic Metanarrative,”
by Timothy Tennet of Asbury Theological Seminary
“American Christians and Islam: From the Colonial Era to the
Post-9/11 World,” by Thomas Kidd of Baylor University
But it was the challenge of “cultural engagement” that led ETS
to reach out to the Muslim panelists. Each was invited to share
their view of evangelicals, and address the issues that concern
them. It could “scarcely be more relevant and urgent,” said
Mohler.
Three Christians joined them on the panel, focused on
“Understanding Our Neighbor.”
“We don’t resist the idea we must love Muslims,” said John
Hartley, a research fellow at Yale, “but we hesitate and keep
silent, because the politics is so messy.
“This leaves the field open for those who spread hate.”
Asma Uddin, a religious liberty lawyer (previously interviewed
by CT) and a fellow with the Inclusive America Project at the
Aspen Institute, described the well-funded Islamophobia network
that tars Muslims and the political left in a joint conspiracy
to take over the world.
The effort seems to be working.
Uddin cited Pew Research Center statistics that found white
evangelicals to be twice as likely as Americans overall (76% vs.
38%) to support President Donald Trump’s 2017 “Muslim ban.”
And according to the 2019 American Muslim Poll, only 20 percent
of white evangelicals had a positive opinion of Muslims, with 44
percent feeling unfavorable.
Only 14 percent of Muslims had an unfavorable view of white
evangelicals, with one-third feeling favorable—but the damage
has been done.
“Political tribalism drives how these communities see each
other,” Uddin said, “and Muslims view evangelicals as
intrinsically linked to the Trumpian other.”
It was not always this way.
Hamza Yusuf, cofounder and president of Zaytuna College in
California, the first accredited Muslim liberal arts college in
the United States, said strong Muslim support for George W. Bush
helped him to the presidency in the razor-thin 2000 election.
But after 9/11, Republicans “anathematized” them.
“Muslims had a huge shift to the left in response to the love
showed them by Democrats,” he said.
“It changed the dynamics of our community.”
But being a religion of jurisprudence, Muslim obligation
remains.
When Jesus was asked, “Who is my neighbor?”, he told a story.
Islam, Yusuf said, defines the neighbor as up to 40 houses away.
Mohamed Majid, imam and executive director at the All Dulles
Area Muslim Society (ADAMS) Center, in Virginia, is going much
further.
Partnering with Baptist pastor Bob Roberts, he has traveled to
Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and other Muslim world hotspots to promote
better treatment of minority Christian communities.
But when invited to Roberts’s Texas, Majid said that local
pastors politely asked not to be pictured with corresponding
imams.
After three days of ta’arruf—the Arabic word for “getting to
know each other”—they volunteered to exchange visits in each
other’s houses of worship.
“We have so much in common with evangelical Christians,” Majid
said.
“But to be true to our faith we have to get out of our comfort
zone—which makes us better believers.”
Hartley agreed with the common evangelical dodge that says not
all believers are called to engage Muslims in their community.
But pressing the issue, he asked how many evangelical churches
have appointed a deacon to do so?
Uddin, who appeared in a second ETS panel with Matthew Kaemingk
of Neighborly Faith, offered political encouragement. The 2020
American Muslim Poll found 49 percent of that community willing
to build coalitions with conservatives to support religious
liberty.
Both she and Yusuf cited the importance of the ministerial
exception, which bars the application of anti-discrimination
laws to religious institutions. Muslims face many of the same
culture war challenges affecting Christians, and community
leaders need the freedom to impart their moral values, without
fear of being sued.
If this issue can help bridge the divide, maybe it can help heal
the nation?
“Evangelicals and Muslims are only a microcosm of political
tribalism in America,” Uddin said. “If we can work together, it
will provide a clue about how to overcome it nationally.”
Roughly 100 people viewed the online panel.
But not all were pleased.
“This is nothing more than Muslim propaganda,” wrote Derek
Newton in the ETS online chatroom, citing violent statements of
Muhammad in the Quran.
“Why would I take the word of a lesser teacher, over the one
they claim to follow?”
Martin Accad, chief academic officer at Arab Baptist Theological
Seminary, in Lebanon, wished the panelists might have taken a
more confessional approach toward Islamic history. Their tone
was a bit apologetic, he said—though understandable in a sea of
evangelicals.
But they represented “the best of Islam.”
Accad was invited to a separate panel to discuss his book Sacred
Misinterpretation, describing how both Muslims and Christians
view each other’s scriptures through the lens of their own. It
calls for a “kerygmatic” approach, in which the good news can be
proclaimed without having to make Islam look bad.
Doing so is counterproductive—and not only in evangelism.
“Showing the uglier side of Islam does not help our social
theology,” Accad said. “It makes it harder for us to love our
Muslim neighbor.”
Calling for evangelical leaders to normalize Islam in America,
he said the only way to do so is to promote the positive image
of Muslims.
Though incomplete, the image is not false.
Academics will always wrestle with the full picture. In his
writing Accad deals with the difficulty of understanding who
Muhammad was historically, as well as the complex textual
history of the Quran. As an Arab Christian, his hope is that the
scientific inquiry Muslim scholars encounter in America will
filter back to the Middle East.
But while scholars engage with complexity, experience drives the
perception of most Christians in the pews. Media discourse and
politics must not prevent the exchange of hospitality.
“I’m willing to risk painting the positive aspects of Islam,
even if it lacks nuance,” Accad said, “for the sake of avoiding
the alternative—more conflict at the personal, community, and
international levels.”
Uddin’s approach is similar.
“My advocacy also for Christian rights lowers their feelings of
threat,” she said. “This reduces the likelihood of hostile
reactions, opening a space for connection.”
Even so, Uddin confessed feeling “pretty demoralized” before the
conference. She grows tired of facing the same evangelical
questions, often asked with hostility. But her left-leaning
friends show little appreciation for the moral goodness of most
evangelicals. And sometimes when speaking in front of Muslim
audiences, she has been given a bodyguard.
“I want to plant a seed, so people will question their
assumptions,” Uddin said.
“Perhaps the academics at this conference will now do so with
the next generation.”
Mohler, in his welcoming remarks, called evangelical scholars to
ever greater faithfulness to Christ and his gospel.
Hartley, like Yusuf, invoked the Good Samaritan.
“When you see people suffering wounds and injustices, you go to
be their neighbor,” he said.
“So many of us feel a threat to our religious liberty. Can we
recognize that Muslim suffering parallels our own?”
#Post#: 20870--------------------------------------------------
Re: The fearless evangelist
By: guest8 Date: November 21, 2020, 5:04 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
[quote author=patrick jane link=topic=889.msg20858#msg20858
date=1605963932]
[img]
HTML https://www-images.christianitytoday.com/images/120527.jpg?w=700[/img]
HTML https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2020/november/islam-christianity-evangelical-theology-society-ets.html
Muslims Join Evangelical Theology Conference
Annual gathering of Christian scholars seeks better engagement
with Islam.
It is not often that a Muslim appears at an evangelical
theological gathering.
Al Mohler invited three.
The trimmed-down 72nd annual conference of the Evangelical
Theological Society (ETS), held virtually this week, usually
welcomes up to 2,000 top scholars to present on the most salient
issues facing evangelical scholarship.
This year’s theme: Islam and Christianity.
“We are called to truth, and to understanding the world around
us more accurately and thoughtfully,” said Mohler, president of
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS), who also served as
ETS program chair.
“That certainly includes our understanding of Islam, which has
from the beginning represented an enormous challenge to
Christian evangelism, apologetics, theology, and cultural
engagement.”
Roughly 15 percent of the 130-plus events addressed these
challenges, including the three official plenary sessions—in
typical academic parlance:
“The Authority and Function of the Quran in Islam,” by Ayman
Ibrahim of SBTS
“Through the Prism: The Trinity and the Islamic Metanarrative,”
by Timothy Tennet of Asbury Theological Seminary
“American Christians and Islam: From the Colonial Era to the
Post-9/11 World,” by Thomas Kidd of Baylor University
But it was the challenge of “cultural engagement” that led ETS
to reach out to the Muslim panelists. Each was invited to share
their view of evangelicals, and address the issues that concern
them. It could “scarcely be more relevant and urgent,” said
Mohler.
Three Christians joined them on the panel, focused on
“Understanding Our Neighbor.”
“We don’t resist the idea we must love Muslims,” said John
Hartley, a research fellow at Yale, “but we hesitate and keep
silent, because the politics is so messy.
“This leaves the field open for those who spread hate.”
Asma Uddin, a religious liberty lawyer (previously interviewed
by CT) and a fellow with the Inclusive America Project at the
Aspen Institute, described the well-funded Islamophobia network
that tars Muslims and the political left in a joint conspiracy
to take over the world.
The effort seems to be working.
Uddin cited Pew Research Center statistics that found white
evangelicals to be twice as likely as Americans overall (76% vs.
38%) to support President Donald Trump’s 2017 “Muslim ban.”
And according to the 2019 American Muslim Poll, only 20 percent
of white evangelicals had a positive opinion of Muslims, with 44
percent feeling unfavorable.
Only 14 percent of Muslims had an unfavorable view of white
evangelicals, with one-third feeling favorable—but the damage
has been done.
“Political tribalism drives how these communities see each
other,” Uddin said, “and Muslims view evangelicals as
intrinsically linked to the Trumpian other.”
It was not always this way.
Hamza Yusuf, cofounder and president of Zaytuna College in
California, the first accredited Muslim liberal arts college in
the United States, said strong Muslim support for George W. Bush
helped him to the presidency in the razor-thin 2000 election.
But after 9/11, Republicans “anathematized” them.
“Muslims had a huge shift to the left in response to the love
showed them by Democrats,” he said.
“It changed the dynamics of our community.”
But being a religion of jurisprudence, Muslim obligation
remains.
When Jesus was asked, “Who is my neighbor?”, he told a story.
Islam, Yusuf said, defines the neighbor as up to 40 houses away.
Mohamed Majid, imam and executive director at the All Dulles
Area Muslim Society (ADAMS) Center, in Virginia, is going much
further.
Partnering with Baptist pastor Bob Roberts, he has traveled to
Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and other Muslim world hotspots to promote
better treatment of minority Christian communities.
But when invited to Roberts’s Texas, Majid said that local
pastors politely asked not to be pictured with corresponding
imams.
After three days of ta’arruf—the Arabic word for “getting to
know each other”—they volunteered to exchange visits in each
other’s houses of worship.
“We have so much in common with evangelical Christians,” Majid
said.
“But to be true to our faith we have to get out of our comfort
zone—which makes us better believers.”
Hartley agreed with the common evangelical dodge that says not
all believers are called to engage Muslims in their community.
But pressing the issue, he asked how many evangelical churches
have appointed a deacon to do so?
Uddin, who appeared in a second ETS panel with Matthew Kaemingk
of Neighborly Faith, offered political encouragement. The 2020
American Muslim Poll found 49 percent of that community willing
to build coalitions with conservatives to support religious
liberty.
Both she and Yusuf cited the importance of the ministerial
exception, which bars the application of anti-discrimination
laws to religious institutions. Muslims face many of the same
culture war challenges affecting Christians, and community
leaders need the freedom to impart their moral values, without
fear of being sued.
If this issue can help bridge the divide, maybe it can help heal
the nation?
“Evangelicals and Muslims are only a microcosm of political
tribalism in America,” Uddin said. “If we can work together, it
will provide a clue about how to overcome it nationally.”
Roughly 100 people viewed the online panel.
But not all were pleased.
“This is nothing more than Muslim propaganda,” wrote Derek
Newton in the ETS online chatroom, citing violent statements of
Muhammad in the Quran.
“Why would I take the word of a lesser teacher, over the one
they claim to follow?”
Martin Accad, chief academic officer at Arab Baptist Theological
Seminary, in Lebanon, wished the panelists might have taken a
more confessional approach toward Islamic history. Their tone
was a bit apologetic, he said—though understandable in a sea of
evangelicals.
But they represented “the best of Islam.”
Accad was invited to a separate panel to discuss his book Sacred
Misinterpretation, describing how both Muslims and Christians
view each other’s scriptures through the lens of their own. It
calls for a “kerygmatic” approach, in which the good news can be
proclaimed without having to make Islam look bad.
Doing so is counterproductive—and not only in evangelism.
“Showing the uglier side of Islam does not help our social
theology,” Accad said. “It makes it harder for us to love our
Muslim neighbor.”
Calling for evangelical leaders to normalize Islam in America,
he said the only way to do so is to promote the positive image
of Muslims.
Though incomplete, the image is not false.
Academics will always wrestle with the full picture. In his
writing Accad deals with the difficulty of understanding who
Muhammad was historically, as well as the complex textual
history of the Quran. As an Arab Christian, his hope is that the
scientific inquiry Muslim scholars encounter in America will
filter back to the Middle East.
But while scholars engage with complexity, experience drives the
perception of most Christians in the pews. Media discourse and
politics must not prevent the exchange of hospitality.
“I’m willing to risk painting the positive aspects of Islam,
even if it lacks nuance,” Accad said, “for the sake of avoiding
the alternative—more conflict at the personal, community, and
international levels.”
Uddin’s approach is similar.
“My advocacy also for Christian rights lowers their feelings of
threat,” she said. “This reduces the likelihood of hostile
reactions, opening a space for connection.”
Even so, Uddin confessed feeling “pretty demoralized” before the
conference. She grows tired of facing the same evangelical
questions, often asked with hostility. But her left-leaning
friends show little appreciation for the moral goodness of most
evangelicals. And sometimes when speaking in front of Muslim
audiences, she has been given a bodyguard.
“I want to plant a seed, so people will question their
assumptions,” Uddin said.
“Perhaps the academics at this conference will now do so with
the next generation.”
Mohler, in his welcoming remarks, called evangelical scholars to
ever greater faithfulness to Christ and his gospel.
Hartley, like Yusuf, invoked the Good Samaritan.
“When you see people suffering wounds and injustices, you go to
be their neighbor,” he said.
“So many of us feel a threat to our religious liberty. Can we
recognize that Muslim suffering parallels our own?”
[/quote]
a prophecy of the Bible is those who practice Islam will come
over to the false prophet (the RCC) and worship the antichrist.
Blade
#Post#: 21031--------------------------------------------------
Re: The fearless evangelist
By: patrick jane Date: November 26, 2020, 5:26 pm
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Despite COVID-19, Evangelicals Mobilize for Mission in Europe
In challenging circumstances, European evangelicals share a
message of hope.
As the coronavirus pandemic continues its relentless march
across the world, Europe battles a frightening second wave. New
lockdowns, overwhelmed hospitals, and social unrest are
increasingly the norm across the continent.
But as a dark winter looms, European evangelicals can look back
with gratitude and look ahead with expectation, thanks to a
renewed rediscovery of fervent prayer, fresh creativity, and
resilient hope in this trying year.
Fervent prayer
When churches were prevented from meeting in the spring, small
communities scrambled to minister to people online while larger
congregations grieved the loss of members who had weak links to
the faith and attended church sporadically before the pandemic.
“Not since the Second World War has something so profoundly
affected the lives of all Europeans simultaneously,” explained
Jim Memory, leader of the process team for Lausanne Europe
20/21.
The pandemic’s effects were also felt by continent-wide
gatherings of evangelical leaders, such as Lausanne Europe 20/21
and the annual European Leadership Forum. “Not being able to
come together was like not being with your family at Christmas,”
explained Greg Pritchard, director of the European Leadership
Forum.
But as the discouraging news mounted, intercession initiatives
sprung up across the continent. Local churches launched virtual
prayer rooms, Evangelical Alliances hosted National Days of
Prayer, and student movements such as IFES hosted prayer
meetings for people across the continent. “The pandemic brought
the European church to our knees,” reports Sarah Breuel,
director of Revive Europe. “We have never seen so many calls to
prayer and fasting like this before.”
Fresh creativity
Out of such an environment, the European church was forced to
make an opportunity out of a crisis. The Lausanne Movement, like
many others, postponed its conference until 2021, but launched
impact groups and conversations that multiplied interactions
among leaders. “Despite initial disappointment when postponing
the Gathering, we have a real sense of God opening new doors
through this extended process,” declared Lars Dahle, chair of
Lausanne Europe 20/21. “The Conversation started as a supplement
to the Gathering. It has now become increasingly significant in
its own right, with fresh missional material every month.”
Other conferences switched from physical to virtual gatherings,
reaching a surprising number of people both in and beyond
Europe. The 2020 European Leadership Forum was attended by 5,360
participants from 123 countries, a seven-fold increase in
attendance from the previous year. Exponential, a movement of
pastors and church planters, hosted 130 roundtables on the topic
of multiplication in European cities in October.
A similar phenomenon took place among European students. Before
the pandemic, the youth ministry Jesus House planned to host
hundreds of events in German-speaking countries. “The lockdown
came, and that dream became a nightmare. We had to cancel all
our events, and we were so frustrated,” confessed Julia
Garschagen, one of the ministry’s leaders. “But then we realized
all those young people would now be at home in front of their
computers watching Youtube.” Over half a million people watched
live streams broadcasted by the ministry during the pandemic.
“That far exceeded everything we would have ever dreamed of,”
added Julia.
Lindsay Brown, founder of the FEUER network of university
evangelists, affirmed that “The pandemic has shaken the
foundations of many secularists. So many are seeking answers to
existential questions.”
In addition to ministering online, evangelicals witnessed the
power of unity across national and denominational barriers. In
the UK, a group of churches recorded a blessing over the nation
that inspired believers in numerous countries to do the same.
Balkan student movements in Albania, Bosnia, Croatia,
Montenegro, and Serbia came together for shared Zoom lectures,
which helped a Serbian professor of mathematics embrace faith
for the first time.
Resilient hope
European evangelicals have experienced their share of hardships
this year. But many of them feel strengthened by God’s
faithfulness during the coronavirus pandemic. Lars Dahle points
to growing emphases on church planting and apologetics and the
increasingly significant role of Majority World Christians in
today’s Europe as encouraging signs for Christians in the
continent.
“The lesson of history is that the church tends to thrive and be
renewed when it is faced with crises. For that is when the
church looks to the one who is above the storm,” commented Jim
Memory. “And that, of course, is a lesson many of our sisters
and brothers in the Global South know all too well.”
This may be one of the most significant lessons Christians in
Europe will cherish in future years, when they will look back to
the COVID-19 pandemic. In a continent with a long history and
rich traditions, the next step forward may be born out of the
most basic of Christian convictions: childlike faith and
dependence on God.
René Breuel is the founding pastor of Hopera, a church in Rome,
Italy, and author of The Paradox of Happiness.
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