By Jeremy Del Rio
March 3, 2010
The Information Age has changed the cultural landscape, and our models for ministry must change along with it to stay relevant -- and raise more effective urban leaders.
As I watched countless groups of white kids invade our inner-city neighborhood to do "missions," I grew to depise the idea of "drive-by" urban missionaries. But years later, God gave me a new perspective. How I learned to love short-term missions.
A new Time magazine article explores the budding promise of racial diversity at evangelical megachurches that were once bastions of homogeneity. Can Willow Creek pastor Bill Hybels take his congregation all the way? An interview with Time religion writer David Van Biema.
Fifty Christian leaders from this Nebraska city traveled to the Deep South on a mission of racial healing and reconciliation. Now, they're working together to pass on the lessons learned from their life-changing Justice Journey.
When black and white church leaders from this deceptively pleasant Nebraska city recognized the need for racial healing in their community, they got on a bus together and traveled south to visit landmarks of the civil rights movement. On their "Justice Journey," they explored the complex emotions that still divide us as a nation -- and the divine grace needed for true reconciliation.
If race, as many agree, is a social construct, why are Christians so good at holding on to it as a way to define, describe, and divide ourselves?
"Integration" and "diversity" do not express God's purpose for reconciliation deeply enough. What we need is a fresh paradigm that declares our new culture in Christ.
Should church small groups be filed exclusively under the rubric of "Stuff White People Like"? That's the provocative question that Leadership Journal's Out of Ur blog recently posed. The ensuing conversation raises some interesting questions about faith, race, and the role that culture plays in shaping our ecclesiological practices.
Two-hundred years after a nasty split over segregated seating that led to the formation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the black and white descendants of a historic Philadelphia congregation unite to worship, repent, and heal past wounds.
Round Trip, Christianity Today International's new documentary-style DVD and curriculum about the lessons and adventures of short-term missions trips, can be boiled down to these three maxims:
1. Humankind is made in the image of God.
2. We have a lot in common that we may not be aware of.
3. There are things that others can teach me.
In expounding upon these themes, Round Trip offers Christian leaders and laypeople vital wisdom and guidance on a ministry ritual that is becoming an increasingly standard part of contemporary church life.
If spiritual renewal breaks out in a forest and no American Christians are around to witness it, does that mean it never happened?
Pardon the paraphrase of the old philosophical riddle, but this probably sums up the thinking of many in the evangelical community in years past. But the times are a-changin'. According to Soong-Chan Rah, author of The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity (IVP), if the American church is going to be a relevant participant in the future of global Christianity, it had better recognize the church's new multicultural reality. And the future is now.
