Viral Faith

" Maybe the deepest tragedy of the Rwandan genocide is that Christianity didn't seem to make any difference" "It's too easy for Christianity to have no consequence in our world."  ~Emmanuel Katongole and Jonathan Hartgrove-Wilson in Mirror to the Church When the foundations are being destroyed,cwhat can the righteous do? Psalm 11:3 I have been reflecting on the dynamic between God and evil.  Specifically, the extension of God into this world: The Church and the manifestation of evil called suffering.  The question that continually comes into my mind in multiple different varieties is "Does the Authentic Church have redemptive influence on the world and its evil?".  Or sometimes I ask "just how much light is required to dispel darkness?" I have struggled with these thoughts for many years as I thought about the Civil rights movement of the United States and although it had a wide variety of self-identified Christians as its adh...

All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, Isaiah 64:6 Recently, I have been thinking about the nature of evil.  That malicious entity that is hard to define but identified quickly when experienced.  It is a destructive and dehumanizing force that is revealed in the actions, attitudes, and activities of people everywhere. This past week, I returned from Rwanda where I was immersed in a culture that had experienced some of the most heinous evil (genocide of 2 million people) I could ever imagine.  The idea that rational people could indiscriminately hack and bludgeon their neighbors, including children and infants is an unimaginable evil.  Its is numbing in its intensity and devastating in its scope. When I returned, I was greeted with the news that a former Youth Pastor at the church I pastor, was recently arrested and charged with aggravated sexual assault of a mi...

"Many churches during the genocide became places of death instead of places of life" Bishop Samuel Kayinamera, Free Methodist Church of Rwanda Now these things occurred as examples to keep us from setting our hearts on evil things as they did.  I Corinthians 10:6-7 I recently spent two weeks in the beautiful country of Rwanda.  Its hills, lakes and people make it a visually stunning place to witness and a loving place to experience..  It is a small, densely populated land locked nation in Central-Eastern Africa that has an agricultural basis of life that is often resource challenged.  Subsistence living is the way of life for the vast majority of Rwanda's people. Beneath the smiles, the tremendous hospitality, exuberant worship, and the sense of national hope, lies the horrific wound of genocide 18 years ago.  In this festering action from April through July of 1994, nearly 2 million of the 8 million inhabitants of Rwanda were systematically killed, ...