This is Thanksgiving weekend and it is appropriate in this edition of Issues in Perspective, to focus on Thanksgiving.  To that end, I want to concentrate on the Thanksgiving hymn, “We Gather Together.”  Melanie Kirkpatrick of the Wall Street Journal offers an instructive history about this traditional hymn.  The hymn, “We Gather Together” (“Wilt heden
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Paul, Barnabas, & Peter go to elders of the Church in Jerusalem, to dispute the false doctrine being taught, and educate them we are justified by Faith alone, & not by our works or the keeping of laws & traditions.

Continued discussion of Paul & Barnabas’ first missionary journey, performing miracles & sharing the Gospel

Vladimir Putin often repeats the claim that Russia and Ukraine are “one people.” Yet, his annexation of Crimea in 2014 and his subsequent “little war” in eastern Ukraine have pushed Orthodox religious folks in Ukraine farther away from his dream. What is his dream? Namely, to portray his government as a reincarnation of the old czarist empire where the Russian Orthodox Church served the interests of the Russian czar. Church and state were inextricably linked in czarist Russia. The Kremlin used the church as an instrument of its old imperial control. Putin has the same vision for Russia in 2018. But the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is not buying into Putin’s dream.

A review of Paul’s message to the Jews at Persidian Antioch, plus additional discussion of “sustaining grace vs saving grace”, and God’s divine sovereignty vs Man’s responsible freedom.

What is a citizen? When the Founders of this Republic wrote the Constitution during the summer of 1787, they did not include a definition of citizenship in the Constitution. During the early decades of the history of the American Republic, various laws were passed that heightened the ambiguity of what does citizenship mean and what are the requirements for citizenship?

Globally speaking, the church is at a significant crossroads right now. The geographical epicenter of our faith is shifting from its centuries-old epicenter in the northern hemisphere (e.g., Western Europe, the United States, Canada) to the southern hemisphere (e.g., Latin America, Africa, South Asia), where it continues to grow at astonishing rates. In his book The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South, Phillip Jenkins argues that 60% of the world’s population of Christians right now live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. By 2050, we’ll see these numbers shift even further; estimates indicated that there will be approximately 3 billion Christians in the world, 75% of whom will live in the Global South.

Paul speaks to Jews at Persidian Antioch, sharing how Jesus in the Messiah they’ve been awaiting.

The first Missionary journey of Paul: encountering false prophets in Cyprus, and sharing the Gospel with Jews in Persidian Antioch.

British historian, Fay Bound Alberti, co-founder of the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary University of London, writes that, “By the 21st century, loneliness has become ubiquitous. Commentators call it ‘an epidemic’, a condition akin to ‘leprosy’, and a ‘silent plague’ of civilization. In 2018, the United Kingdom went so far as to appoint a Minister for Loneliness. Yet loneliness is not a universal condition; nor is it a purely visceral, internal experience. It is less a single emotion and more a complex cluster of feelings, composed of anger, grief, fear, anxiety, sadness and shame. It also has social and political dimensions, shifting through time according to ideas about the self, God and the natural world.”