Not Of This World

I'm reading a really good book right now called God's Smuggler  by Brother Andrew. I started it just over twelve hours ago, and I felt certain that I was probably going to finish it before I went to bed tonight. But just now, God stirred in my heart, and I feel like I ought to write down what He is saying before it flits out of my mind. Besides, it's the long weekend, and I will have time to read more tomorrow. When I was a teenager, I read The Voice of the Martyrs  and I kind of got a little bit obsessed about the Underground Church. I admired their faith, their tenacity, and how God transformed that faith in the face of adversity into something so much stronger than could ever be found in a place where Christianity was built into the culture, but stretched thin by it. Of course I knew that visiting an underground church would be dangerous, but also, I wanted to go anyhow. I was drawn to the idea of taking risks in order to help others. In reading books about the Undergr...

Why do I try so hard sometimes to convince people of what I believe? God is certainly able to defend Himself, if He is who I think He is. And, in fact, He didn't even always try to do so... In John 6 , Jesus gives a teaching that His disciples find a little hard to swallow. When some of the disciples left Him, He did not run after them or beg the rest to stay. Instead, He turned to those that remained and asked, "You do not want to leave too, do you?" (John 6: 67).  In Luke 15 , Jesus tells the famous parable of the prodigal son. When they tell this story, most people focus on how the father, who represents God, welcomes back his long-lost son with open arms. Not many people pay attention to the beginning, when the son asks his father for his inheritance early--basically saying that all he wanted from his father was his money, and that he wished his father were dead--and the father freely gives it to him and lets his son go. Although he wishes his son would stay--as ...

The other day I was thinking about the persecution of the church. And I don't mean like when people got upset because Starbucks stopped putting Christmas trees on their holiday cups. I mean like when people are risking their lives for their faith. It all seems kind of surreal from our relatively comfortable cocoon of religious freedom here in North America, but things are not the same in other parts of the world. I recently got a message from a friend in Norway. She had visited my church here on a business trip a while back, and we became Facebook friends. A couple she knew from Iran had converted to Christianity, she wrote, and had fled to Norway on a student visa. Their visa is expiring soon, it is not safe for them to return to Iran, and they want to come to Canada. Could I help? I met a woman from Yellowknife yesterday whose church is welcoming Eritrean refugees fleeing religious persecution.  Canadian pastor Hyeon Soo Lim made the news recently for getting releas...

Warning: the post contains spoilers for The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis. (Do I have to give a spoiler alert for a 61-year-old book?) In the last book of the Chronicles of Narnia, the world (Narnia, not our world) comes to an end and most of the main characters end up in that world's version of Heaven, if they were followers of Aslan. Interestingly, a man from Calormen who worships the god Tash is also there. It is explained that, although he worships this other god in name, his good deeds and righteousness could only be accepted by Aslan, since Tash could only accept evil acts. Thus, he was worshipping Aslan, though he did not know it.  This is not in line with the accepted canon of most mainline churches. Indeed, I am quite surprised that Lewis has not been accused of being a heretic and his writings derided, much like the reaction to Rob Bell when his book  Love Wins came out a few years ago.  Such a view is at odds with verses such as:  "Jesus answered, ' I am...

My field of study, linguistics, has an interesting little overlap with my faith in the domain of Bible Translation. Many linguists work as Bible translators. Many people who want to get involved in Bible translation become linguists to do that work better.  However, academic linguists (that's me) and so-called missionary linguists don't always see eye-to-eye. This weekend, at a linguistics conference, I overheard one professor telling a graduate student how they work with SIL (that's a Bible translation organization) linguists when doing fieldwork, but they actually do good work , she said, as if that would come as a surprise. In class, once, we spent the seminar ripping apart this paper that had several big problems with it. It was co-authored by two people, a woman and a man, with the same last name. As we left the room afterwards, one of my classmates remarked, I betcha they're missionary linguists . I looked it up later. They weren't--they were anthropologists....