Do not answer a fool according to his folly, Or you will also be like him.
Answer a fool as his folly deserves, That he not be wise in his own eyes.
~ Proverbs 26 : 4 – 5
Trump’s core supporters are those who don’t go to church but who largely still considered themselves religious, and those that go to church but practice cheap grace.
Who informs your worldview?
What you understand can never be stolen from you…. What and how do you navigate life? What set of principles? And my response was your values. Your values are what’s most important to you. Your values are what you believe in, what you stand for, what you are willing to pay the price for, what you are willing to give your life for. Those are your values….
Values are important because values guide your thinking. Your purposes guide your activities but your values guide the way you think. And what you do, begins with the way you think.
~ Pastor A. R. Bernard
New Book Coming Soon
The American form of government is messy and complex by design. Efforts to simplified it will always lead to fascism and misery.
The Bible was written by a tiny nation spending most of its time under the oppressive boot of one Empire or another: Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome. Currently. the United States has far more in common with these empires than we do with any of the biblical writers.
The Bible is also messy, and considering that many of us have more in common with the enemies of the biblical writers makes our interpretation even messier. Yet, we believe in a messy God, a God who still sees so much value in the broken and flawed. This is a God who cares more about relating to us than about factual perfection, and that shines through when we allow the Bible to be the complicated mess that it is. That is a higher view of Scripture, so much more beautiful than an abstract rulebook or “my tradition’s interpretation of the Bible.”
Another way to frame this is that the Bible is the wrestling mat with God. This phrase goes back to the foundational story when Jacob is given the name Israel after wrestling with God — or possibly an angel, again, the Bible isn’t always concerned with factual detail. The name Israel means one who wrestles with God. If we are to be the ones who follow in those spiritual footsteps, we must be willing to wrestle with God as well. The Bible is often a place we can encounter God and do that wrestling.
The unchurching of America is at the root of America’s economic and social problems.
[I]f we see the early primaries—when voters were choosing among Rubio, Cruz, Kasich, Jeb, Trump, and a dozen others—as a referendum on the American Dream, the most pessimistic were those who didn’t go to church but who largely still considered themselves religious.
Economic woe, social dysfunction, family collapse, and community erosion all characterized the places where Trump was strongest in those early nominating contests. So did empty pews. This suggests something very important and far bigger than the 2016 election: The unchurching of America is at the root of America’s economic and social problems.
Alienated America
By Timothy Carney
Clayton Powell Sr and wife (Mattie Buster Shaffer), June, 1946. Original Caption Reads: ‘Mr and Mrs Adam Clayton Powell, Sr.’ (Photo by Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images)
And He said to them, “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.”
~ Matthew 4 : 19
Adam Clayton Powell (May 5, 1865 – June 12, 1953) was an American pastor who developed the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, New York as the largest Protestant congregation in the country, with 10,000 members. He was a community activist, author, and the father of Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Born into poverty in southwestern Virginia, Powell worked to put himself through school and Wayland Seminary, where he was ordained in 1892.
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