Monthly Archives: August 2014

ACNS: Anglican Vicar of Baghdad: “Child I baptised cut in half by ISIS”

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From the Anglican Communion News Service.

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Canon Andrew White

The five-year-old son of a founding member of Baghdad’s Anglican church was cut in half during an attack by the Islamic State1 on the Christian town of Qaraqosh.

In an interview today, an emotional Canon Andrew White told ACNS that he christened the boy several years ago, and that the child’s parents had named the lad Andrew after him.

“I’m almost in tears because I’ve just had somebody in my room whose little child was cut in half,” he said. “I baptised his child in my church in Baghdad2. This little boy, they named him after me – he was called Andrew.”

The fact that Andrew’s brother was named George after St George’s Anglican Church in Iraq’s capital demonstrates the strong ties the family had to the church there. The boy’s father had been a founder member of the church back in 1998 when the Canon had first come to Baghdad. Canon White added, “This man, before he retired north to join his family was the caretaker of the Anglican church.”

Though the move north should have proved safer for the Iraqi Christian family, the Islamic State made sure that it became a place of terror. “This town of Qaraqosh is a Christian village so they knew everybody there was part of their target group,” said Canon White. “They [the Islamic State] attacked the whole of the town. They bombed it, they shot at people.”

Read it all.

Statement from the Archbishop of Canterbury on Iraq

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From Anglican Mainstream.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, issued the following statement today on the situation in Iraq, shortly before he travelled from the Philippines to Papua New Guinea.

“The horrific events in Iraq rightly call our attention and sorrow yet again. Christians and other religious minorities are being killed and face terrible suffering.

“What we are seeing in Iraq violates brutally people’s right to freedom of religion and belief, as set out under Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is extremely important that aid efforts are supported and that those who have been displaced are able to find safety. I believe that, like France, the United Kingdom’s doors should be open to refugees, as they have been throughout history.

“The international community must document human rights abuses being committed in northern Iraq so that future prosecutions can take place. It is important and necessary for the international community to challenge the culture of impunity which has allowed these atrocities to take place.

“With the world’s attention on the plight of those in Iraq, we must not forget that this is part of an evil pattern around the world where Christians and other minorities are being killed and persecuted for their faith. Only this week I received an email from a friend in Northern Nigeria about an appalling attack on a village, where Christians were killed because of their faith in Jesus Christ. Such horrific stories have become depressingly familiar in countries around the world, including Syria, South Sudan and the Central African Republic.

“We must continue to cry to God for peace and justice and security throughout the world. Those suffering such appalling treatment in Iraq are especially in my prayers at this time.”

ISIS: We Will Raise Flag of Allah in the White House

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From Anglican Mainstream.

Troubling. Are we paying attention? May the scales fall from the eyes of those leaders and policy makers who are blind to this evil.

The Islamic State has warned the United States that it plans to attack America and raise “the flag of Allah in the White House.”

“I say to America that the Islamic caliphate has been established,” Abu Mosa, a spokesman for the terror group, also known as ISIS, told Vice Media in a video interview posted online  Thursday. 

“Don’t be cowards and attack us with drones. Instead send your soldiers, the ones we humiliated in Iraq. We will humiliate them everywhere, God willing, and we will raise the flag of Allah in the White House.” 

Read it all.

Cranmer: Canon Andrew White: “You have got to be prepared to die for your faith”

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A good but troubling piece from ABP Cranmer. God bless Canon White and all the faithful who are prepared for martyrdom.

“We have had people’s heads chopped off. We are having people convert. We are even having children slaughtered and cut in half.” And with these words, Newsnight’s interview with Canon Andrew White ends, as he leaves the Baghdad studio to carry on ministering to his flock. “We are living in worst crisis I have ever known,” he writes on Facebook. “Working day and night to meet the needs of those who have nothing. We are providing a huge amount and as you will see on this video we are all very tired, but our Lord is sustaining us.”

And he does look rather tired. But there is no sense of bitterness, exasperation, or even a hint of indignation. His whole demeanour is one of peacefulness and serenity. At times he sounds almost like a soul in bliss, and perhaps that is what makes his ministry so vital in a region where every waking day brings an expectation of death.

Read it all.

Ed Stetzer: Act Like Men: What It Means to Fight Like a Man

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I’m glad someone is addressing this issue. Spot on. See what you think. From Christianity Today online.

45307Despite accepted cultural norms, acting like men doesn’t mean being macho, arrogant, overbearing, rude, or harsh. That’s immaturity and sin. Men are to love and serve through controlled strength. The power of godly men is wrought through the redemptive work of Christ in our hearts and lives. To be a man in our world– a biblical man– will look different than much of what passes for manhood in the world and even in contemporary Christian cultural expressions.

This is what God redeems men to be: We aren’t afraid to act like men, to be courageous and to be godly examples in our home and in our community. It means standing firm in the faith when waves crash and when the beach erodes around us and around those we are called to lead, love and protect. Being men means building the lives of those we are responsible for on the bedrock that is Christ. But that can’t happen unless our own lives are founded on Christ. So let me briefly explain some ways we must act like menregardless of our current life stage.

Read it all.

A Prayer for the Feast of the Transfiguration

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Father in heaven,
whose Son Jesus Christ was wonderfully transfigured
before chosen witnesses upon the holy mountain,
and spoke of the exodus he would accomplish at Jerusalem:
give us strength so to hear his voice and bear our cross
that in the world to come we may see him as he is;
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Dr. Scot McKnight: The Jesus Posture is the Way of Forgiveness

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An outstanding post from Dr. McKnight. I would also encourage you to pick up his little book, 40 Days Living the Jesus Creed. Our small group used it during Lent two years ago and it is very meaty. You might even recognize the guy who wrote the study guide for it.

There are a lot of misconceptions about forgiveness and what it entails. Scot hits the nail on the head here for anyone who currently needs to forgive (or be forgiven). This is hard stuff and quite costly. See what you think.

From the Jesus Creed blog:

UnknownLoving our enemy begins in the mind with our memory, and it is a hard memory to travel. Remembering that we have been wronged leads us to two options. We can choose to stew in our memories of the wrong and enjoy a feast of condemnation, the feast that never satisfies, and we can choose to dwell in this stew of condemnation. If we do, we sadly let the wrongdoer define us.

Or, in the grace of God, we can let the cross of Jesus Christ – where the Innocent One was mortally wounded but who nonetheless offered grace through that moral wound – define us and our relationship with those who have wounded us. First, we offer the wounds and the one who wounded us to the cross by condemning the wrongdoing. Enemy-love doesn’t casually dismiss the wrongdoer or the wrongdoing; it condemns the wrong.

In God’s grace, enemy-love then remembers not only the wrong and the wound but that God has absorbed all wounds in order to turn them around into grace. Once we face God’s gracious reversal of wounds, we seek the grace of reconciliation by remembering that, in spite of our own wrongdoing, God loved and forgave us. In that work of God, we turn our memory of wounds into the hope of grace and offer that grace to those who have wounded us. In offering the grace that genuinely acknowledges wrongdoing, we unleash God’s cycle of grace by living out the cross of Jesus Christ.

We need a cross-shaped memory to practice the enemy-love of the Jesus Creed. At the cross not only did God forgive us but he established the cycle of enemy-love. Jesus said “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). As Volf expresses his own experience, “The memory of the Passion urges … me to place the memory of suffered wrong in the service of reconciliation” (125).

Read it all.

The Common Vision: The ACNA: A Church to Confront a Secular Age

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See what you think.

903125_490749150985901_1910601136_oEarlier today, Christian blogger Rod Dreher asked a question:  What is the best church for American Christianity in exile?  In light of Christianity being consistently sidelined and devalued here in America over issues of opposition to gay marriage among other controversies, he specifically asked for readers to contribute an argument for why they believe their own chosen church is the best “ark” in which to ride out the storm.  And so, under these parameters, here is my argument for the ACNA as Christianity’s best hope in the new century, which (I fully agree with Rod) certainly appears to be a long, secular winter.  This argument is long but I want  it to be thorough enough to be convincing.  I welcome dissent or correction in the comments as usual, but here it is:

The Anglican Church of North America is American Christianity’s best hope in a state of modern exile.  This is because it best understands that the challenges of modern exile do not proscribe the Church’s missionary vocation, instead it encourages it.  The ACNA has three things going for it that I’ll explain at length:  its missional nature inherited from the Global South, its intellectual seriousness, and a strong, battle-tested respect for biblical and ecclesiastical authority in the face of doctrinal controversy.

Read the entire analysis.

Michael Bird: The Tragic Death of the Funeral

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Funeral or “celebration of life”? A spot-on analysis and worth your read, especially if you are being confronted by the death of a loved one.

Whereas a funeral, at least in traditional Christianity, takes death seriously, and balances the truth of grief and loss with the hope of life and resurrection, the Celebration of Life looks neither to the present of grief nor the future of hope, but solely to the past. Its focus is neither faith nor hope but only love of what was lost. And in this case, the greatest of these is not love. Call it a celebration all you want; life is not so much celebrated as death is ignored. Therein lies a great tragedy, for a Celebration of Life is a missed opportunity to understand death aright.

In the Christian tradition, neither life nor death are ‘natural.’ Life is always a gift from God and death is always the consequence of sin. Embedded within human nature is a mortality originally alien to it, but now inextricably united to our nature. Each death bears witness to that fact. Any talk of life which fails to talk of death, its origin and cause, is like drinking from a mirage. When a funeral degenerates into a Celebration of Life, mourners may find temporary relief in the nostalgia of the memories, but they will be deprived of true and lasting healing that comes only after confronting death and finding life in Another.

While the old adage, “A funeral is for the living,” is true, it is an ambiguous truth. It leaves unanswered the question: for what purpose is it for the living? The assumption behind the saying is that death creates a need, or needs, that must be addressed. While these needs vary in kind and number from individual to individual, at the core of them all is this: the need to find that death is not the end, that life will have the last word.

Despite its name, a Celebration of Life is ill-equipped to address that. It’s focus is upon a dead person, not a living and vivifying God. Nor does it take seriously the reality and cause of death, without which life cannot be understood. Indeed, it seems an ideal Trojan horse to roll into a religious service, for inside it are hidden many of the same errors that devalue life in our culture.

The bereaved need, and deserve, something better. They deserve a service that speaks frankly and honestly about death, while anchoring the survivors in a hope that extends beyond this world. If any life is to be celebrated, let it be the life of the One who alone can lighten the load of grief borne by the survivors, and who shines a ray of his life into the gloom of death.

Read it all.

Death, Resurrection, and Carlton Fisk’s World Series Home Run

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I hated that home run too, but for drastically different reasons. A wonderful personal story about the power of the risen Christ that is worth your read.

45182The day after my mom died, I told a neighbor I was glad, so that she wouldn’t have to suffer anymore. While sincere, I didn’t know what I was saying. When someone you love dies, Mark Twain said, it’s like your house has burnt down; it isn’t for years that you realize the extent of your loss. I’m not sure if I have realized it fully even yet.

Soon I grew accustomed to coming home to an empty house. My two oldest brothers were in college, and my other brother stayed away from home as much as possible. We never talked about my mother and soon stopped talking altogether. In our house, there was always noise but little communication. My last year in high school, my dad and my sister and I often would eat dinner in silence.

Some psychologists hypothesize on the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I flirted with denial at times. For years, I’d dream that my mother wasn’t dead. She had been at some type of medical clinic for years, and one day she unexpectedly and unannounced returned home. It wasn’t denial so much as avoidance. I skipped the bargaining stage and camped out in the anger and depression stages. I never came close to reaching the acceptance stage. My anger wasn’t directed at anyone in particular, even God, if I even believed there was a God. It was directed at death itself, as if death were some person. Like the hooded chess player in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, death deliberately and maliciously killed my mother. Had I the ability to kill death, I would have done it.

Even when I was having a good time, at my core I was defined by mourning. My hope for healing was captured by Abraham Lincoln in a letter to Fanny McCullough upon the Civil War death of her father. Lincoln observed that “in this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares.” Fanny’s hope was that “perfect relief is not possible, except with time.” My hope too was with the passage of time, the wound would heal. But time did not heal my wound; it made it worse. An untreated physical wound can result in infection or nerve damage, causing numbness, pain, or loss of feeling. Slowly over time, my heart became numbed, unable to feel anything except pain.

The Western calendar is divided between B.C. and A.D, with the birth of Christ marking the transition from one era to the other. My life could be divided between pre-October 1975 and post-October 1975. Carlton Fisk’s homerun became a permanent marker of the transition from one period to the other, from carefree childhood to adult loss, disappointment, and pain.

Read it all.