God opens doors not for those who are strong, creative, or self-sufficient but for those who have little power.
As I Was Saying
This is The Banner's online opinion column, from a variety of different writers, published Fridays.
Righteous anger at blatant injustice and ungodliness can morph into mere outrage, a cheap adrenaline high damaging to both yourself and others.
Ever since these four days, every time I read Psalm 8, I see the Drakenstein Mountains and the faces of these African entrepreneurs.
The abundant life God extends to us in Jesus Christ is much more than a personal holiness of avoiding overt sins.
If my prayer is answered, I want to plant a church in my parents’ hometown so that I can share the gospel with everyone. I want to tell people there is a Home far more precious than our own hometowns.
We say it takes a village to raise a child, so what do we do when we no longer live in villages?
When the self is filled with self there is no room for God.
All the darkness and evil in the world cannot overcome God’s light of life with which Christians are called to shine.
When the United States celebrated the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, I was a young faculty member at Calvin College in Michigan, in my second year of full-time teaching.
Consistent in its absence is any sense from the church that the gospel has anything to say to this moment in time and the myriad of other times people of color are mistreated simply because, well, they exist.
As a faith-based journalistic ministry, our faith-shaped perspectives should influence all that we publish.
On March 6, 1957, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was in Accra.
On the day Billy Graham died and we remembered his life and message, high school kids in Florida were speaking out about gun control.
As a Christian, I feel called to live like Christ, which means to try to be good and kind, loving others as Christ has loved me. But as a white person, I am part of a larger history that is not good. Not kind. Not loving.
Parkland, Florida. To those of us living in northern climes, the name might evoke images of winter warmth and sunshine. But not any more. Since the afternoon of February 14, Parkland has become the latest in a litany of communities scarred by school shootings.
“I serve a congregation in an all-white town. The nearest city is an hour’s drive away,” he said. “How do I get my people to actually feel for people of other races?”
Over the past several months our society has experienced a monumental shift in the treatment of women—particularly in regard to how they are treated by men in power.
I am frequently invited to sign a declaration on some topic of public concern.
There isn’t really any way to prepare one’s heart for a horrific tragedy.
Back in the South African apartheid era, I helped organize anti-apartheid efforts in our local community in Michigan.
A friend recently asked me, “Is Reformed theology for black people?”
In the recent high-profile cases of film studio executive Harvey Weinstein and other men in high-profile positions,
The tone of my own encounters with North Koreans was quite different when I visited there six years ago.