Divine hunger Marilyn Anderes shares a dimension to intimacy with God.
Gospel in the flesh Boyce A. Bowdon tells of one ministry spreading the gospel to inner cities.
Our working theology Philip Turner examines the theology of the Episcopal Church.
Ready for His return Joel Green reviews what John Wesley taught about the end times.
The cosmic catalystScott T. Kelso revels in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Editorial The gospel of radical inclusion
Next Generation Word becomes real
RENEW Women’s NetworkDo we honestly believe...
The Great Commission A quasi-Bohemian approach to mission
From the Heart The rescuer
Letters to the editor
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Pastor helps police with stressful job
Judicial Council declines reconsiderations
United Methodists in Indiana focus on Sudan
U.S. churches face crisis, discipleship leaders say
Membership dips in U.S., but increases in other countries
UM lobbyist calls for impeachment of Bush
UMW in financial crisis and membership decline
Culture in View
The Omen
It gives a whole new meaning to "wrong side of the tracks" in Gulfport, Mississippi. Train tracks run parallel to the beach and the two major roadways. When Hurricane Katrina slammed ashore August 29, the damage above those tracks was significant. But between the slightly elevated railroad tracks and the beach, it was like Katrina's giant hand had scrubbed the ground clean. A huge wall of water pushed in by the storm smashed buildings down to their cement slabs, and when the water receded, it carried the debris back out into the gulf. When people here say something was "below the tracks," that means it is gone.
Today, most areas don't look much different than they did the day after the storm. But work is happening that will eventually change all that. Local residents and volunteers from all over the nation, including many United Methodist teams, continue to pour in.
On Highway 49, at a United Methodist Committee on Relief warehouse, several tractor-trailers unload supplies for the relief effort each week. If it's a hot commodity-building materials such as sheetrock, shingles, or insulation, for example-it's gone in a matter of hours. The warehouse also has a food pantry and space to store heavy equipment.
"The government was not ready for this storm," says Ed Blakeslee, disaster relief coordinator for the UM Church's Mississippi Annual Conference. "And I mean all of them: local, state, and federal. The organization that stepped forward was the church. Faith-based organizations didn't have a plan; they just did what needed to be done."
United Methodist work teams crowd just about every inch of free space at Gautier UM Church, just a mile from the coast, where the Family Life Center and several Sunday school classrooms have been turned into living space. Teams are fed three meals a day and sleep on cots, with fabric hung from PVC pipe providing a small level of privacy. No one complains.
The Mississippi Conference has received thousands of workers since Katrina struck. It has worked to support the local churches, which are providing space for the workers. The conference also has helped provide food, water, housing and other resources, and it has scheduled reconstruction efforts. Churches that were still standing are providing worship space for those that were destroyed, sometimes with a different congregation in each corner of the sanctuary.
"It's amazing to see how this storm has affected the local churches," says Robert Sharpe, the Seashore District coordinator for disaster response. "The Catholics, the Baptists, and the Methodists are all working together." He says that while UMCOR is not always the first on the scene, it is always the last, being committed to staying until the job is completed long after other denominations and secular groups have packed up and gone home. "The United Methodist Church will still be shining five years from now, when everyone else has pulled out."
By Neill Caldwell, a freelance writer based in High Point, N.C. Adapted from United Methodist News Service.
When author Anne Rice turned her back on a literary focus that dealt with vampires and other spooky subjects, she focused her attention on Jesus Christ. That was not a career move as much as it was one guided by a renewal of her childhood faith (Good News, May/June 2006 "Anne Rice: The Dark Wing of Night").
In light of the hoopla surrounding The Gospel of Judas and Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code and other enterprises that claim to shed new light on the historical Jesus Christ, we were reminded of passages from Rice's "Author's Note" at the conclusion of her latest book Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt.
"What gradually came clear to me was that many of the skeptical arguments-arguments that insisted most of the Gospels were suspect, for instance, or written too late to be eyewitness accounts-lacked coherence. They were not elegant. Arguments about Jesus himself were full of conjecture. Some books were no more than assumptions piled on assumptions. Absurd conclusions were reached on the basis of little or no data at all.
"In sum, the whole case for the nondivine Jesus who stumbled into Jerusalem and somehow got crucified by nobody and had nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and would be horrified by it if he knew about it-that whole picture which had floated in the liberal circles I frequented as an atheist for thirty years-that case was not made. Not only was it not made, I discovered in this field some of the worst and most biased scholarship I'd ever read."
In addition to the sloppy research, Rice also sensed deep emotional baggage in the liberal scholarship. "I was unconvinced by the wild postulations of those who claimed to be children of the Enlightenment," she writes. "And I also sensed something else. Many of these scholars, scholars who apparently devoted their life to New Testament scholarship, disliked Jesus Christ. Some pitied him as a hopeless failure. Others sneered at him, and some felt an outright contempt. This came between the lines of the books. This emerged in the personality of the text.
"I'd never come across this kind of emotion in any other field of research, at least not to this extent. It was puzzling."
Her own extensive research into Jesus convinced her that he had truly risen from the dead. "It was the fact of the resurrection that sent the apostles out into the world with the force necessary to create Christianity. Nothing else would have done it but that."
Rice concludes: "Anybody could write about a liberal Jesus, a married Jesus, a gay Jesus, a Jesus who was a rebel. The 'Quest for the Historical Jesus' had become a joke because of all the many definitions it had ascribed to Jesus."
As a novelist who would be writing about the most pivotal figure in human history, Rice believed she had a great challenge and responsibility to search for the truth. "The true challenge was to take the Jesus of the Gospels, the Gospels which were becoming ever more coherent to me, the Gospels which appealed to me as elegant first-person witness, dictated to scribes no doubt, but definitely early, the Gospels before Jerusalem fell-to take the Jesus of the Gospels, and try to get inside him and imagine what he felt."
By Steve Beard, editor of Good News.
The board of directors of the Institute on Religion and Democracy is pleased to announce that the Rev. Dr. James Tonkowich has been named the organization's new president. Formerly managing editor of BreakPoint with Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship, Tonkowich is the successor to Diane Knippers, who died of cancer last April.
"Because Christ's Church is one, renewal in any part of the church causes the tide to rise for all churches," Tonkowich said. "Similarly if any part of the Church is diminished, we all suffer. The work of the IRD in seeking to restore accountability, theological integrity, and a vibrant social witness in the mainline is a benefit to all Christians."
The chairman of IRD's board, Dr. J. Budziszewski, commented: "Dr. Tonkowich brings an articulate, gracious, thoughtful voice that will represent IRD well. His commitment to church renewal is central to his vocation."
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