christian living on Xenophobia

Scripture calls us to offer a radical welcome to strangers, but we are not able to give what we do not have. Before we can love our neighbor, we must love and care for ourselves so we can have somethi...

The following article was originally written for the author’s denominational newsletter as part of the celebration of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. It is meant to provide some insights into t...

One of the costliest requirements of Christlike love is Jesus’s call to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5: 44). What does this look like for Christians in today’s world...

In today’s world, holy is the most offensive of all four – letter words. It’s far more acceptable to say, “My life is so messed up,” than it is to say, “I am striving to be holy.” For many, Christiani...

One of the gravest dangers to the Christian faith is its wholesale appropriation of the larger culture. When this happens, the citizens of those places cannot recognize the difference between their cu...

Persecution is simply the clash between two irreconcilable value-systems.

Lamin Sanneh, the African theologian who would be pivotal in the development of missional theology, was raised in an orthodox Muslim household in Gambia. He found himself drawn to Christianity after e...

The accomplished science fiction writer and futurist H.G. Wells lived through the dark days of the Blitz in London (during the Second World War). One evening, a fellow writer named Elizabeth Bowen fou...

Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared that we would become a trivial culture. . . . Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

We used to hate and destroy one another and refused to associate with people of another race or country. Now, because of Christ, we live together with such people and pray for our enemies.

Fear grows in darkness; if you think there’s a bogeyman around, turn on the light.

Our hunger is the exile’s hunger, but it is also the first step in our homecoming. We hunger, and in doing so learn the shape of our emptiness is the world’s great emptiness in or to prepare room for ...

Fear and growth go together like macaroni and cheese. It’s a package deal. The decision to grow always involves a choice between risk and comfort. This means that to be a follower of Jesus you must re...

Extreme poverty anywhere is a threat to human security everywhere.

We are a society that despises lack. We despise weakness and need and insufficiency. We turn the other way and pretend to be watching oncoming traffic when the red light halts us and the beggar reache...

Across all barriers of land and language, wealth and poverty, knowledge and ignorance, we are one, created from the same dust, subject to the same laws, and destined for the same end. With this compas...

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.

For some people, a lack of purpose and meaning in life can provide fertile ground for the development of panic attacks and phobias.

We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.

All fear is but the notion that God’s love ends.

We have conducted the previous exercise in dozens of middle-to-upper-class, predominantly Caucasian, North American churches. In the vast majority of cases, these audiences describe poverty differentl...

When I was six years old, my dad let me stay up late with the rest of the family and watch the movie The Wolf Man. Boy, did he regret that decision. The film left me convinced that the wolf man spent ...

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.

Those who have to be ordered to love God usually believe that obedience involves those excluding all other loves, to the extent of hating the world, the flesh, and even the self. We therefore find amo...

Biblical orthodoxy without compassion is surely the ugliest thing in the world.

In another day and age, God, religion and church enjoyed the general respect of the culture. Not today. Religion is suspect, church is weird, and Christians are hypocrites. Distrust has become the nor...

Belonging can be such a fickle and painful process in life. As the popular researcher and writer Brené Brown describes in her book, Braving the Wilderness, she struggled to fit in after moving to New ...

Anger is also fear with an armour. It works as a defensive, pre-emptive reaction before something hurtful can be done to us.

We are suspicious of grace. We are afraid of the very lavishness of the gift.

I’ve asked strangers and casual acquaintances, “Why do Christians stir up such negative feelings?” Some bring up past atrocities, such as the widespread belief that the church executed eight or nine m...