The Church of Tomorrow Revisited

For years we’ve heard how students are the church of tomorrow. To be honest, I hate this statement for all kinds of reasons. First of all it assumes a definition of the church that is inaccurate. If the church is a group of people following Jesus and living life together, would we dare say anyone under 21 isn’t a part of that experience?

Saying students are the “church of tomorrow” assumes students will lead someday, not today. Middle school and high school students who are growing in their faith are ready to lead now. We simply have to challenge them and give them space.

Those are the opening lines of a short article “The Church of Tomorrow” posted August 4, 2010 on the IBC website. I first want to say that the article was excellent and shows to me, one of the older members of IBC, that the next generation of “church,” while possibly different than during my day, will continue its grand march through time. But these opening lines lead me in a different direction of thought. I do not diminish or disagree with what the original writer said, but look at a different way to understand that comment about the church of tomorrow.

Immigration Politics and the Christian

A response to several discussions on the immigration issue predicated upon reading “Christian Immigration”

Over the past couple of years there have been occasional articles concerning the immigration issue in America and proposed positions that Christians might take.

The first of these that I saw concerned the New Sanctuary Movement that began in the 1980s in response to the flood of refugees from Central American countries. A prominent web site with information on the movement — "allies," links, etc. — is found at the link in the footnotes [1]. It opens with the following paragraphs:

In the early 1980's, thousands of Central American refugees poured into the United States, fleeing life-threatening repression and extensive human rights violations by their governments.

At the time, federal immigration policy would have denied the majority political asylum simply because their governments were allies of the U.S. Many of these refugees had actively participated in the liberation theology movement and naturally sought protection from congregations.

The discussion that brought the New Sanctuary Movement to my attention related to the desire of a friend to at least consider this as a way to help in obeying the command to care for the widow, the orphan, the oppressed, and the alien. The premise is that it is much easier to help them when they are nearby than when they are at some distance, such as in remote parts of distant countries.

And the article that was presented at the time concerned a particular case in which a mother and father were to be deported as illegal aliens but their child (of uncertain age) was not required to leave with them. As I cannot at this time find the article that started the discussion (it was on a forum that crashed and the old files not recoverable) I probably do not have details completely accurate. But I believe that the underlying premise was that the mother desired the child to remain in America, and would prefer to stay with the child, so had sought refuge in a church that was part of the New Sanctuary Movement.

In the same time frame, there was an article by Keith Giles in THEOOZE titled “Christian Immigration” that speaks somewhat to a position on immigration politics. While THEOOZE is no longer online, the article is archived within Mr. Giles' blog.[2] Some paragraphs that show Mr. Giles' position on the subject are as follows: