Pray for peace in East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, South Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda, and Eastern Democratic Republic). This region has been the territory of unending conflicts. Pray that people in East Africa will be able to move freely and that refugees will be able to return home.
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We ask for your intercession on behalf of Beni. Our town has been brutally attacked twice in six days. The armed group that has been killing civilians in the Beni territory since 2014 has made incursions into the town of Beni and into our neighboring town of Oicha, killing over 75 of the most vulnerable inhabitants over the last three weeks. On November 24, one of the members of our contractor’s construction crew, the son of one of our campus guards, was killed in his neighborhood near our main campus.
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The DR Congo has been affected for several years by social, political, and economic crises. In the last month the area around Bunia has experienced renewed conflict and the displacement of about 300,000 people. Many have again fled into Bunia.
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Continue to pray for peace and healing of the DR Congo at the spiritual, economic, political, health (Ebola), and security levels. The needs are still great at those levels.
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Cameroon is a Central African country with ten regions. There is an English-speaking Cameroon and a French-speaking Cameroon. In the past few years, there have been social and political crises in the Northwest and Southwest between the Ambazonian separatists and the government, and in the Far North because of the Islamist Boko Haram. These crises seriously affect peace in our country and the Church has suffered seriously. Churches are closed and pastors have run away. People live in very bad conditions.
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Suffering is the daily lot of many of the world’s Christians, particularly those in Western Africa. Unfortunately, churches give little heed to this reality in most Sunday services. Behind this lies a barely concealed apprehension Christians have with regard to the proper stance to adopt toward suffering. In the following reflection, I explore lamentation as …
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Introduction Since 9/11, hardly a day goes by without some religiously motivated act of extremism. According to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, religious extremism worldwide claims nearly 100,000 Christian lives annually. Since the 1980s, Sunni Islamic extremism has been on the rise in Pakistan, where the tiny Christian …
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Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil.— Ephesians 5:15-16 (NRSV) The Crisis More than three years have passed since the beginning of the “Arab Spring,” a term that symbolized hope for the people of the Middle East. However, …
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Muslim-Christian interfaith dialogue often raises the question: Do we worship the same God? The answer is usually colored by the preferences, presuppositions, or theological-doctrinal understanding of the individual. In this essay, I affirm the complexity of this question, explain some of the challenges, provide arguments Muslim and Christian scholars voice, and offer an understanding to …
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While we generally welcome theological differences stimulated by the cultural context, discussions that address the socio-political dimension of life often cause discomfort for evangelical believers. In my context of Latin America, we take contextual realties quite seriously. With an approach to theology that is “from below” we bring the questions of society to the truth …
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The Iraqi people have experienced a deep wound. Since 2003, national unity has been torn apart, creating an irreparable fissure in what was probably a superficial unity within the country. After 2003, Iraq developed a system that consolidated democracy along sectarian, religious, and ethnic lines, deepening fragmentation and benefitting only the ruling elite. The system …
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Although urbanization is not new, the degree and speed with which the world, and especially the non-western world, is turning urban is remarkable. People from every culture and ethnicity are moving to our cities by the millions. Yet we still tend to work in traditional ways of doing mission. We assume that the unreached millions …
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How does God awaken someone to a fresh Kingdom vision? For Manohar James, it involved getting beaten up in the “land of the gods,” game-changing findings during his doctoral studies, and a twelve-hour train ride with a carful of opinionated Hindu women.
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Love calls for Solidarity. Loving one another includes especially caring for those who are persecuted and in prison for their faith and witness. If one part of the body suffers, all parts suffer with it. We are all, like John, “companions in the suffering and kingdom and patient endurance that are ours in Jesus” (Revelation 1:9, …
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To be in transition is to be in an in-between place – neither here nor there. Anthropologists and theologians call this ‘liminal’ space. For many of us, this can be a difficult time because we feel unsettled, uncertain, and insecure. Old rules no longer apply, but we may not be quite sure what the new …
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