The coming of the new year, from New Year’s Eve throughout the entire month of January, is always a challenging time for me which requires taking some extra time for contemplation and grounding. As someone who grew up in a fundamentalist and apocalyptic tradition, the end of each year often felt like a time where the veil between life as I knew it and the coming Day of Judgment felt very thin. Although the Bible teaches that “No one knows the day or the hour, not the angels in heaven nor the Son, but only the Father knows,”1 I remember hearing when I was growing up that the world would certai ..read more

Sometimes in the middle of the week, we would bike, walk, or drive about a kilometer down a dusty road through farm fields and past mango trees from Kulp Bible College to Church of the Brethren (Ekklesiyar Yan’uwa a Nigeria) Headquarters and the Women’s Fellowship (Zumuntar Matan Ekklesiyar) Restaurant. Often Grace was working and would come to the table to ask what we wanted to eat. The menu varied per day, so we would ask what they had and she would list things off—we have white rice, jollof, egusi, and food. Food was not a generic summary of the items found on the restaurant’s menu.  ..read more

Image Credit: Chibuzo Petty. In Acts 2, Peter preaches about Jesus and the Holy Spirit, interpreting the words of Joel and David as prophetic witnesses to what they were experiencing. In his sermon, Peter goes on to explain that repentance – true turning – is at the root of forgiveness in Christ. The passage goes on to tell us that in response to the Spirit’s presence, the church grew numerically as the disciples shared meals together and shared all their resources in common. What an amazing picture of the early Church! Many look to Pentecost as a model for church growth and with good reason ..read more

I share two poems centering my Palestinian identity and experience. As a Palestinian Christian, I aspire to walk in Jesus’ footsteps in challenging oppression, empire, and occupation. I provide an introduction to Palestine for readers to better understand the context of the poems. I first provide a brief introduction to the beginning of Israeli settler-colonialism and then highlight two elements of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. I focus on the West Bank, as I am from Bethlehem in the West Bank and thus the setting, I’m familiar with. I then discuss Sumud as a Palestinian response to ..read more

Why join one of the Historic Peace Churches? Jesus is at the center of this question. Jesus is at the center of this passage (Romans 5:1-11). Jesus at the center of our faith. Jesus is the source of our strength. Jesus is the source of our peace. Jesus is the source of our hope. We are forgiven and reconciled through Christ. Our very life is in him. Forgiveness is hard to come by in this life. That’s why forgiveness is so countercultural. Do you remember the West Nickel Mines School shooting? On October 2, 2006, a 32-year-old milk tank truck driver went to a one-room Amish schoolhouse and mur ..read more

Image Credit: Chibuzo Petty. For the last 8 months, I have been engaging in a daily ritual of prayer and worship with the Iona Community. The Iona Community is an international, ecumenical Christian movement based on the island of Iona off the west coast of Scotland. The community was founded in 1938 by Reverend George MacLeod when MacLeod brought together trained clergy and unemployed craftsmen to rebuild the Iona Abbey. The combination of clergy and laity living, working, and worshiping together created a foundation upon which the community continues to build. Today, members and associate m ..read more

As I sat and began to think about what to write for this second article with the goal of some kind of practical equipping,  I thought back on some of the most important lessons that I’d learned – some of the most memorable and influential aspects of my spiritual life. I already wrote about my love of Biblical Studies in a prior article, but another idea quickly came to mind as I thought back to my time as an undergraduate at Messiah College (now Messiah University). One particular class stood out – Christian Spirituality. It was taught by my advisor, whom we lovingly referred to as “Uncl ..read more

When I was in seminary, one of my assignments was to develop a Rule of Life. A Rule of Life is a thoughtful, practical plan for how we arrange our lives, giving special attention to what spiritual practices we are going to engage in to support the work of our lives and help us remain connected to God, others, and ourselves. I had to examine both my life and the resources surrounding me (other people, books, spiritual texts) to discover which spiritual practices I already engaged in and which I would like to experiment with. Many practices I identified were ones that are typical spiritual prac ..read more

Right from creation and soon after the fall of humanity, war and conflicts became part of human nature. In some parts of the world, Christians are witnessing unspeakable continuous attacks and killings perpetrated by terrorist groups in the name of religion. This ongoing violence is slowly worsening the mental health of many people, significantly children. The experiences of these individuals are explicit, hopeless, and have no mental or physical boundaries concerning age, gender, socioeconomic, physical status, race, ethnicity, geographical location, and sexual orientation. When physical and ..read more