Things the North American Church Can Learn from the Global Church

I have tried to make it a practice over the past few years to read at least one book each year by a Christian writer from a non-American/European background. I have read So Great a Salvation: Soteriology in the Majority World,   a collection of essays on soteriology by Asian, African, and Latin American scholars. I also read Un Testimonio Visible: Cristología, Liberación, y Participación by Jules Martinez-Olivieri, a Puerto Rican theologian.

This week, I finished Faithful Disobedience: Writings on Church and State from a Chinese House Church Movement, a collection of essays and sermons by Wang Yi and other Chinese house church leaders. The steadfastness and resilience of these brothers and sisters, and their refusal to compromise even in the face of repeated, suffocating persecution, is inspiring and convicting at the same time.

Book Review - Songs of Resistance

R. Alan Streett's previous book, Caesar and the Sacrament: Baptism: A Rite of Resistance, demonstrated how Christian baptism functioned as an oath of a new allegiance toward King Jesus, forsaking former allegiances to other authority figures and structures such as Caesar and the Roman Empire.

Streett's new volume, Songs of Resistance: Challenging Caesar and Empire, takes the next step to demonstrate how the songs sung by characters in the four Gospels, and the portions of epistles often thought to be early hymns included by the apostolic authors, demonstrated resistance to and protest of the corrupt worldly power structures of the day.

Attitudes Toward Churches and Spiritual Leaders

This past Sunday, this line from my pastor's sermon stuck with me:

“Unresolved anger towards one spiritual authority leads to a bad attitude towards all spiritual authority." -- Rod Loy

Often, we see people who had a bad experience in a certain kind of church (progressive, Evangelical, Pentecostal/Charismatic, etc.) react to their bad experience with complete and total suspicion of anything and everything they were taught in their previous church. 

Someone who formerly went to a prosperity gospel church may end up seeing every discussion about tithes and offerings as an abusive attempt to promise financial blessings in exchange for giving to the church.

Is It of God?

For the past couple of weeks, we've all been seeing a lot of discussions on social media regarding what started on February 8 at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky. Some have called it a revival, others have called it a spiritual renewal, and others have simply named it a surprising move of God. Debates over what to call it have often had to do with whether or not it fulfills certain definitional lists of characteristics, and usually the debaters' lists don't include all of the same elements.

But here, I want to go past the arguments over which term is most accurate, and get to a more fundamental question: Is what is happening from God?