Our April issue
Catch up on the latest news from The Christian Chronicle.
THE INTERACTIVE PDF of our April issue is available now!
This issue features our reporting on the Miami Valley Bible Bowl’s 40 years of developing Scriptural whizzes, discussions of rural ministry challenges and opportunities at the Equip Conference, Freed-Hardeman University men’s basketball national title, an effort to encourage Americans to read the Bible and more.
Also find below Cheryl Mann Bacon’s editorial on “Choosing the prophet’s role” and John Young’s review of “A Burden Too Heavy: An Invitation to the Spiritual Discipline of Confession.”
In this issue:
Matter of Fact
National
International
Life Matters
Editorial: Choosing the prophet’s role
By Cheryl Mann Bacon | Contributing Editor
We love to quote Micah:
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.
But we often forget Micah’s words follow five and a half chapters of diatribe calling out the powerful of Israel for exploiting the poor of their own nation.
In the parable of the Good Samaritan, we see ourselves as the willing helper or injured traveler — never as the priest or Levite. Applying the same pedagogy to the prophets, we’re inclined to do the same. We don’t see ourselves as abusers. We prefer the role of the downtrodden, thus invigorating our complaints against powerful leaders with whom we disagree.
But what if we should be Micah?
Read the rest of the editorial.
Review: ‘The Spiritual Discipline of Confession’
By John Young | Guest Contributor
Recent years have witnessed a surge of insightful new works on the history of Churches of Christ, including several aimed at a general readership within the fellowship. This trend reflects an increasing appreciation of the need for historical consciousness on a rapidly changing religious landscape.
Just as significantly, these kinds of books have been accompanied by others which engage in historical study not simply to understand where we have been, whether for good or for ill, but also to guide our path going forward.
In this vein, Jack Reese’s “At the Blue Hole: Elegy for a Church on the Edge” and, to a more specific end, Wes Crawford’s “Courage in the Sheer Silence: Challenging Racism in 20th-Century Churches of Christ,” offer historically informative and spiritually formative lessons from the past for our use in the present.
Still other studies go even deeper into the past, considering how Churches of Christ fit into the overall Christian story and what we might be able to glean from it. Notable here is Leonard Allen’s “In the Great Stream: Imagining Churches of Christ in the Christian Tradition.”
Paul Alan Smith’s “A Burden Too Heavy: An Invitation to the Spiritual Discipline of Confession,” a revision of his Fuller Theological Seminary dissertation, follows in this same trajectory. Smith, a minister and lifelong member of Churches of Christ, offers biblically minded readers no fewer than four Scriptural applications of confession.
