by Jeff Ritchie
It was my privilege to travel to China last month for the twenty-fourth time in my life. My traveling companion was the Rev. Choon Shik Lim, Regional Liaison for East Asia for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Choon and I have been friends for over thirty years, and it was the fourth time we had visited China together.
Read Moreby Rob Weingartner
When George Shultz was Secretary of State during the Reagan administration, he kept a large globe in his office. When newly appointed ambassadors had an interview with him and when ambassadors returning from their posts for their first visit with him were leaving his office, Shultz would test them. He would ask them to go over to the globe and identify their country. They would go over, spin the globe, and put their finger on the country to which they were sent.
Read Moreby Rob Weingartner
A number of years ago I had the privilege of traveling to India with my friends and mentors Bill Young and the late Harold Kurtz, each of whom led the work of Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship for a time. One of the places where we visited with partners was the state of Bihar. Bihar was, and some say still is, the poorest and most corrupt state in India, a place that used to be called the Graveyard of Missions. It is 80% rural and 80% illiterate.
Read Moreby Jeff Ritchie
This week I leave for a two-week trip to China. In a blog last year I mentioned the impact on my life of the Rev. Bao, Jia Yuan, one of the servant leaders of the Church in China. Today I would like to share some other testimonies of Chinese Christians. They are my offering to God in gratitude for thirty years of interaction with China, and especially, with Chinese Christians.
Read Moreby Marilyn Borst
We seem to be in a season of rankings, be it the likelihood of a candidate to secure a presidential nomination, the win/loss records of our favorite football teams, or the box office receipts of various movie blockbusters. We kinda like to know who is on top, don’t we? We feel good when our predilections seem to line up with the winners.
My trip to Pakistan this past November, in the company of three trustees of The Outreach Foundation, has given me a different perspective about such rankings.
Read Moreby Rob Weingartner
In 1870 after the death of two children, after sending his remaining two kids back to England, after the death of a newborn, after the death of his wife and in the midst of rebellion and war, Hudson Taylor wrote from China, "We did not come to China because the missionary work here was either safe or easy, but because He had called us. We did not enter upon our present positions under a guarantee of human protection, but relying on the promise of His presence. The accidents of ease or difficulty, of man's approval or disapproval, in no wise affect our duty. Should circumstances arise involving us in what may seem special danger, we shall have grace, I trust, to manifest the depth and reality of our confidence in Him, and by faithfulness to our call to prove we are followers of the Good Shepherd who did not flee from death itself..."
Read Moreby Marilyn Borst
I could hear those words echoing in the back of my mind as I read a letter from a young Christian student living in Kirkuk, Iraq. Sinan’s family had been displaced when ISIS brought its reign of terror into Mosul, where they lived, in June of 2014, destroying churches and marking the houses of Christians who would subsequently be given a choice: convert to Islam, remain a Christian and pay an impossibly large fine or die by the sword. Their flight of fear would lead them to Qaraqosh and then to Erbil. This young engineering student wanted to resume his studies and the University of Kirkuk would accept him…and hundreds of mostly-Christian students like him… but there was no housing available. The Archbishop of Chaldean Catholic Church in Kirkuk came up with a bold plan...
Read Moreby Jeff Ritchie
In last week’s blog, The Outreach Foundation’s Executive Director Rob Weingartner gave us two fundamental truths about every single person in the world:
1. Every person we meet has been created in the image of God.
2. Jesus Christ died for that person.
To live, speak and act in the light of these foundational realities will indeed change us and impact others.
This week I would like to share another perspective-shaping principle for mission.
Read Moreby Rob Weingartner
When I sit down at my desk each morning, I turn to a devotional book entitled “Grace Notes” that is a compilation of daily readings taken from the writings of Philip Yancey. In our performance-driven, merit-based, consumer-driven, appearances-obsessed society, Yancey’s reflections typically remind me that this work I do is not about me. It is about the good news of Jesus Christ, about the Gospel. The life of faith is possible because God has done for us what we could not do for ourselves. This action of God on our behalf is introduced well in Eugene Peterson’s translation of John 1:14 – “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.”
Read Moreby Jeff Ritchie
When I served as a missionary in South Korea in the 1980s, my last assignment was in the office of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Korea. We opened each day with staff devotions. I still remember one of those devotional times which took place at the beginning of a new year.
The Bible passage read that day was Psalm 90, especially focusing on verses 12-15: “Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom…. Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us….” As the worship leader spoke, I thought it was a rather somber way to begin a new year. “Life is short and full of trouble,” says the Psalmist. “Bad things are going to happen, so Lord, give us wisdom to know how to navigate the struggles, and please give us some reasons each day to rejoice and be glad.” Not very sanguine is it? But it is both realistic and hopeful.
Read Moreby Jeff Ritchie
A few weeks ago I watched my 6 year-old grandson, Alex, work on a machine he had made with his new science kit. He connected different-sized metal pieces to each other on a board, hooked them to a battery, and the result was sound and light. The “thing” worked! Not content with simply following the instructions to assemble his machine correctly, Alex then proceeded to experiment on his contraption. He moved pieces around to see if the sounds and lights still came on. He attached wires to different terminals to see if the connection was still there. Sometimes his changes worked; sometimes they didn’t. I could tell his mind was racing by the rapidity with which his fingers worked.
As I looked at my grandson and his venturous spirit, I thought, how creative our children and young people can be in God’s mission if we give them a chance. They need a little education through exposure to the needs of the world – in our own country and globally. They need to be inspired through our teaching and our personal participation in God’s mission. But then we need to let them dream and give them opportunities to turn those dreams into realities.
Read MoreA wall of children awaited us on the steps of the church! Sunday School had finished that Friday morning and the pastor, Rev. Isaac Estanfanous, had asked them to stay and greet us. I have no idea how long they had been waiting, but we were re-energized by their enthusiasm – and truth be told, we needed that, because this was the 12th church we had visited in the past seven days. As we made the 75 minute drive from dense and chaotic Cairo and were approaching this spacious and well-planned “new city” called Tenth of Ramadan, I had wondered if there could be anything here that could move us after having already seen so many of the vibrant ministry sites of the Synod of the Nile. I need not have worried because, as had been the case for each church and every one of the 20+ Presbyterian pastors with whom we had met, there was no shortage of vision and energy here to see Christ made known in this particular 3,000 square meters in this most ancient of lands.
Read Moreby Rob Weingartner
The most respected man in Eta, an outcaste village that I visited a decade ago in the Uttar Pradesh state of India, was the village elder. For years he let people worship, but he refused to allow the 500 people of the village to be baptized. Everyone respected his order. The Presbyterian pastors faithfully visited and held services each week. One night, the elder dreamed that he was responsible for preventing the salvation of his people. His heart had been hardened against the Christian faith. In his dream he heard Jesus say, “Why are you keeping your people from me?”
Now, as an elderly man near the end of his life, the dream helped Sadhu Maharaj to realize the wrong that he had done. In a panic upon awakening from his dream, he traveled quickly to where church leaders were to request that a pastor come immediately to baptize all his people.
Read Moreby Jeff Ritchie
By the time I met Harold Kurtz, a central figure in my mission formation for 20 years, he had had two completely different ministries. For twenty-two years Harold Kurtz was a missionary to Ethiopia doing pioneer evangelism. In 1974 the Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selasie, was overthrown and most of the missionaries, including the Kurtz family, had to leave the country within a few years. From the late 1970s until his retirement in 1989, Kurtz served as pastor of an urban parish in Portland, Oregon, a very different kind of missionary challenge from Ethiopia.
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by Rob Weingartner
As Presbyterians who trace our theological heritage back to John Calvin and the Reformation, we are part of a tradition that has asked the question, “How do you recognize a real church?” Drawing upon the work of Calvin and his followers, Presbyterians down through the centuries have affirmed that real churches are characterized by certain marks: the Word of God purely preached and heard, the sacraments administered according to Christ’s institution, and church discipline uprightly ministered, as God’s Word prescribes.
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by Jeff Ritchie
In the fall of 1973 I was a brand-new student at Fuller Theological Seminary. I was interested in mission service, and I had an opportunity to take an elective mission course, “Historical Development of the Christian Movement,” taught by Dr. Ralph Winter, engineer, anthropologist, and former Presbyterian missionary to Guatemala. In the orientation prior to the beginning of the school year we first-year students had already been told by other faculty that “Dr. Winter has 100 new ideas every day, and 99 of them are crazy. But pay attention to that one good idea.” So I was ready for some “out of the box” thinking on a subject in which I had great interest. I was not disappointed.
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by Rob Weingartner
In a few hours I will be arriving in Rwanda, a place that I have not visited before. It is a country where the church has done some hard learning about God’s grace and forgiveness, and I expect that it will be a challenging trip. I’ll let you know how it goes. I always look forward to visiting with followers of Christ in other cultures and contexts. They help me to understand what it means for me to live faithfully as Jesus’ disciple.
Read Moreby Jeff Ritchie
Mention the name of Jonathan Edwards, 18th century pastor and theologian, and many people think of his sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” a sermon preached during the First Great Awakening, a revival movement in the American Colonies and Great Britain in the 1730s and 1740s. Scholars of American religion view him as a profound philosopher and thinker and refer to such works as Freedom of the Will and the Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World as they speak and write about him.
Read Moreby Jeff Ritchie
The Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Egypt has been in existence since 1854 when the first Presbyterian missionaries came to Egypt. Their aim was to renew the 1,800 year-old Coptic Orthodox Church for mission to the Muslim majority. Their efforts did not accomplish that purpose. Instead, an evangelistically oriented Egyptian Presbyterian Church came into being.
Until the 1950s the Egyptian Presbyterians evangelized their own people, including colonies of Egyptians in what is now the Republic of Sudan. However in the 1950s the Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Egypt appointed a couple to work cross-culturally among people groups in what is now South Sudan. The couple chosen, the Rev. Swailem Sidhom Hennein and his wife, Mrs. Sameera Rizk Hennein, were fully funded by the Egyptian Church and spent seventeen years in Sudan and Kenya.
Read Moreby Rob Weingartner
A number of years ago when I was visiting partners in Ethiopia, we visited a synod office that had been built as an income generating project. The church used the office space on one floor of the building and rented out the rest of the space to various businesses and shops. It was a great idea.
When we were up on the top floor of the building looking out over the center of town, Mizan Teferi, I saw something that confused me. It looked like an old man walking along the way holding out his arm – as if he was reaching for something. Because of the press of people I couldn’t see clearly what was going on. Then, the crowd parted for a moment.
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