By: John Woodward on February 13, 2015
I remember being assigned in second grade the task of drawing a picture of what our houses would be like as our planet became overpopulated. This was 1965 and I lived in a crowded suburb of Detroit. From my limited world, overcrowding seemed inevitable. It was a scary and very real scenario that our teacher…
By: Julie Dodge on February 13, 2015
When a child is young, he or she has an innate “uh oh” feeling. Perhaps it seems innate, but it is actually learned. It is the feeling associated with fear, when something bad is going to happen. Perhaps it happens when we have when we have done something wrong. The “uh oh” alarm goes off:…
By: Telile Fikru Badecha on February 13, 2015
The dreadful multiple tragedies unfolding around the globe are truly overwhelming and too depressing to think about. The mainstream Western media play a major role in feeding our anxiety by skillfully focusing on the stories that often target certain religions, ethnicities, and/or races. People are becoming not only hopeless but also desensitized to the suffering…
By: Miriam Mendez on February 13, 2015
There have been two times in my life that I have had an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness. The first was the time after John’s death. It was a very dark, dark time in my life. I could barely breathe…I could barely live. The second time I had this feeling of hopelessness was when I worked…
By: Michael Badriaki on February 13, 2015
Macy and Johnstone’s book Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy, is a relevant contribution to discussion of environmental sustainability and humanity’ on going quest peace and tranquility on earth. The search for meaning has led to interesting discoveries for some, but many people are also left with a sense…
By: Mitch Arbelaez on February 12, 2015
Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone describes “active hope” as a practice, something that we must do rather than have. Stating that this active hope is a process that can be applied to any new situation involving three steps: a clear view of reality, defining a clear direction that we would like things to move-in or…
By: Liz Linssen on February 12, 2015
I have to admit, the past few weeks have been tough. Opening a community café has been a greater challenge than I could ever have imagined. On Monday this past week, I caught myself in the midst of negatively, “I can’t do this…I can’t, I can’t.” Staffing problems, teething troubles with menus, opening hours, finding…
By: Ashley Goad on February 12, 2015
It would have been really easy to write this week’s blog about mission teams going into Haiti. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy is made for Haiti. In a land that has been deforested beyond measure, where people have suffered for centuries, where the environment has been all but…
By: Deve Persad on February 12, 2015
The stories being written in the world this week, can seem to be ones that tells of a declining mess. Perhaps nothing sharper than the disqualification of the U.S. Little League Champions from Chicago, for recruiting violations, speaks more to that fact than any other. A team of mostly, pre-pubescent children, put together through the…
By: Stefania Tarasut on February 10, 2015
As I read through Mark Noll’s, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, I was left with one thought… just one thought. The problem is not necessarily the lack of great Christian thinkers but the lack of everyday thinking Christians. I’m not sure when the church began to be divided between the clergy and the lay,…
By: Stefania Tarasut on February 10, 2015
This weeks reading left me with more questions than answers. It left me excited about the future and skeptical about our willingness to step into that future. The idea of contextualization gave me a sense of awe as I think about how great God is and how little we, the people of God, actually understand.…
By: Clint Baldwin on February 9, 2015
“There is no such thing as ‘theology’; there is only contextual theology,”[1] writes Stephen Bevans in his Models of Contextual Theology. There are a number of critics that take him to task for this statement and also for limitations they see in his six (used to be five; Bevans made it six in the current…
By: rhbaker275 on February 7, 2015
I recall a number of years ago, while preparing for a mission assignment, my wife and I attended a missionary training institute in Colorado. We attempted to prepare for the many situational experiences that awaited us in a country and culture that we knew very little about. I recall our discussions about “place, presence, participation”…
By: Telile Fikru Badecha on February 7, 2015
In Ethiopia, most non-believers associate Protestant Christianity with foreign aid, Americans or Israel, to segregate believers and disqualify the authenticity of Protestant Christianity. In my Arsi Oromo culture, becoming a believer is equal to denying the values and unity of the clan, because religion is more than just an individual affair. Religion is a shared…
By: Richard Volzke on February 7, 2015
Models of Contextual Theology, by Stephen Bevans, resonated with me because it explains theology within the context of one’s culture and experience. This book explores the differences between traditional and contextual theology. In the opening chapter of his book, Bevan states, “There is no such thing as “theology”; there is only contextual theology: feminist theology,…
By: Carol McLaughlin on February 7, 2015
First of all, I “felt” at home in our reading this week. I realize just how much I have been and am being shaped by Contextual Theology. It just resonates. This is no small matter for me, as I have not seen it quite in the same manner as I did this week. The surprise…
By: Julie Dodge on February 7, 2015
How often I have heard the story of the six blind men who were asked to describe an elephant. Each man felt with his hands a different part of the elephant. Each man described the elephant in a different way based on what he felt and what he knew of the world. The man near…
By: Mitch Arbelaez on February 6, 2015
The contextualization of the Gospel of Christ is the continual challenge of the international-cross-cultural missionary. As the representative of God and His message to a people, the missionary has the responsibility to be the embodied message of the one who desires to communicate to all people. The pressure is further exacerbated knowing that, to a…
By: Bill Dobrenen on February 6, 2015
I was a Biblical/Theological Studies major at Biola University in the 1970’s. Biola is located in Southern California, the place where the “Jesus Movement” began in the late 1960’s. I was one of those “Jesus Movement” kids, caught up in the Calvary Chapel movement of the day: Christian Rock and Roll concerts, Hippie clothes, Afro…
By: John Woodward on February 6, 2015
Last Spring, I had the daunting task of preparing lessons for a week of camp for 20 Lakota Sioux teens. Most of these young people had been to our camp once or twice. I had visited their communities, schools, and some of their homes. Most were un-churched. Most were angry. Most were familiar with drug…
