Not Of This World

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...

Several weeks ago, a friend asked me whether my belief in God was falsifiable --that is, what would it take (if anything) to convince me that He didn't exist. Now, this question struck me as a really good question. In my academic research, any claims we make need to be falsifiable. If you make a claim that can't be falsified, it's not really useful for discovering new ideas and proving them. So that question got me thinking about what, if anything, would convince me that God didn't exist. But here's the thing--I haven't come up with anything (nothing specific, anyhow). If for example, there is a prayer that is not answered, I would assume that means that either the time is not right, or that it is outside of God's will. If there is a piece of theology that I find hard to understand, I assume that it means that God is bigger than my capacity to understand. Having been trained in a field where all hypotheses must be falsifiable, this began to bother me. ...

The news from Virginia this weekend filled me with a deep sense of grief. In the news coverage, one thing that stood out to me was the call for white pastors to condemn these racist actions and attitudes from their pulpits. I'm not a pastor, but I do write a blog on Christianity and social justice, so I thought I should say something. But it's hard to come up with words to say.  As a white person, I can't claim to really understand what it feels like to be racially discriminated against, and especially not what it feels like to see someone who fought to own your people as slaves be celebrated in the form of a statue. As a Canadian, I mostly only witness the special American brand of racism through the media, safely watching from a long distance.  So I thought I'd turn to my own backyard.  Canada takes pride in their status as a multicultural nation. We pat ourselves on the back and say, look, we have people all over the world here, living and working...

On Saturday night, I had the privilege of volunteering at Community Night at my church. Community Night is basically an evening when the church is opened up to the community. We serve a meal, open up our clothing and food bank, and often there is even a nurse available to provide some basic care. At the end of the evening, we have a little church service for everyone who would like to stay.  To me, Community Night is in many ways the epitome of what it means to be a Christian, what it means to follow Christ. Jesus said, " Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind." In this blog, I have spent a lot of time talking about I love God with my mind. But at Community Night, I can love God with my strength, by using my hands and my feet in ways that honour Him, I can love God with my soul, by praying for the staff, volunteers, and community members, and I can love God with my heart, by loving and caring for t...

This blog will not be updated for the next month or so. See you in August!

This weekend, I attended a seminar on hearing God held at my church. Some might think that such a seminar is an exercise in wishful thinking, and yet, I believe nearly everyone who was there was able to share at some point some story of how God had communicated with them. Sometimes it was through circumstance, sometimes it was through someone else, sometimes through a dream or vision, and sometimes through the Bible, but the most common way was through the 'still, small voice'; an authoritative prompting or strong sense that one ought to be doing something, and somehow you just know it came from God.  "The  Lord  said, 'Go out and stand on the mountain  in the presence of the  Lord , for the  Lord  is about to pass by.'  Then a great and powerful wind  tore the mountains apart and shattered  the rocks before the  Lord , but the  Lord  was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the  Lord ...

I used to work as a cabin leader at a summer camp. The camp had a mix of well-to-do kids and some low-income kids who were sponsored to come. One year, during the camp for the high school aged kids, I had a girl in my cabin from a foster home. We'll call her B. B was hurting so much, and had walls around her a mile thick. She shut out all of the other kids in the cabin, and spent most of her time with the other kids from foster homes in other cabins. On the last night of camp, B started telling me about how she didn't feel included in the cabin.  It seemed to me that the other girls weren't deliberately excluding her. Instead, from the very beginning, B didn't really engage with them, and so the others soon gave up. So I talked to her about how friendship is a two-way street. In order to make a friend, you have to be a friend. In order to build trust with someone, you have to give them something to be trustworthy with. I talked to her about how it can be scary to open...