Jimmy Carter funeral: a testimony to his 'deep' Christian faith
Nicola Laver
For anyone who hadn’t appreciated that the late US President Jimmy Carter was a Christian with a deep faith and love for God, his funeral service on 9 January has left no doubt.
The BBC currently has a programme on famous names who died in 2023 called Lives Well Lived. The typical worldly measure of a life well lived is their achievements, wealth accumulation, status, and doing good. Viewers of Jimmy Carter’s funeral service and its attendees were offered a far more valuable measure of a life well lived: a higher godly standard.
letter from America
Thinking through ‘Christian nationalism’
Josh Moody
It’s hard for me to tell from my current location in Chicagoland, but I suspect that the ideas floating around, dubbed at times ‘Christian nationalism’, have also made their way to the fayre isles of my homeland, the United Kingdom. Certainly, at any rate, they have caused some waves in America. How do we think through the issue of ‘Christian nationalism’?
Part of the problem is the slipperiness of the term. After all, raised as I was in England, the idea of a ‘Christian nation’ hardly seems strange –though, even by then, we were acutely aware that England was in no real sense ‘Christian’ anymore, if it ever had been. But the Church of England was, and is still, the established church. It has legal standing; there are bishops who sit in the upper house of the Houses of Parliament. The laws upon which the countries of the United Kingdom base their legal existence are deeply rooted in Christian ideas. None of this can be denied by anyone who has given much thought to the matter. Why then the controversy over ‘Christian nationalism’?
US Bible surge led by first-time buyers
Milla Ling-Davies
In the last year, the sale of Bibles in the US has jumped by a staggering 22%, despite overall book sales in the country only rising by less than 1%.
This increase, reported by Circana BookScan, has been attributed to people searching for stability and assurance, and is the latest sign of an encouraging trend of growth for Bible sales in the US. In 2019, 9.7million Bibles were bought by Americans, whereas last year that number leapt to 14.2 million, and in the first ten months of this year has already hit 13.7 million (Forbes).
Donald Trump: lessons in leadership?
Over the years, I have become more and more convinced that, from a human perspective at least, the most important factor in determining the growth and fruitfulness of the local church is leadership.
I have studied and analysed a large number of churches that have split, closed or gone into maintenance mode, and almost without exception the problem can be traced back to a leadership issue – either a lack of leadership, the wrong people in leadership, the wrong exercising of leadership or the wrong attitude towards leaders on the part of the congregation as a whole.