Willow Creek Germany has ended its leadership summit a day early after a speaker tested positive for coronavirus.

The three-day summit opened in Karlsruhe, south-west Germany, on Thursday with talks from Craig Groeschel and Danielle Strickland.  It had been due to end on Saturday.

Willow Creek said in a statement in German on Twitter that the speaker, who has not been named, “was not at any time present during the summit” and that there was no risk to delegates.

Summit organisers said they had become aware of the diagnosis at midday on Friday and taken the decision to end early as a “preventative measure”.

“We would like to inform you that we have ended the Willow Creek Leadership Summit 2020 in Karlsruhe early,” said the announcement.

It continued: “This was done for reasons of safety. According to health officials, participants were never in any danger.

“Nonetheless, we have decided to end this event as a preventative measure so all participants can get home safely.”

SOURCE: Christian Post; Christian Today

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While speaking at the 2020 Conservative Political Action Conference Friday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California compared big tech censorship of conservatives to the “social score” system that the Chinese government uses to persecute political and religious dissidents. 

McCarthy joined Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, Donald Trump Jr. and Amber Athey of Spectator USA in participating in a panel discussion on the “right path forward for big tech.”

The panel comes as conservatives have for years complained about how social media platforms Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have censored their content or taken negative action against their accounts for voicing political or religious beliefs at odds with far-left and progressive viewpoints.

The social media giants have been accused of shadow banning and demonetizing conservatives’ accounts as well as censoring posts they deem as hateful.

“Did you see what recently was leaked by Twitter, what they are going to do next?” McCarthy asked. “They are going to allow liberal activists to determine whether your [post] is harmful or not. It’s like China’s social scoring.”

McCarthy was referencing an NBC News report of a leaked Twitter demo suggesting that the platform is experimenting with a new feature that would label tweets from certain politicians or public figures as misinformation.

Under one iteration of the system, according to NBC News, Twitter users could earn “points” and a “community badge” if they “contribute in good faith and act like a good neighbor” as well as “provide critical context to help people understand the information they see.”

Twitter’s demo used a McCarthy tweet from last September as an example.

“[Twitter] took an article I put up from The Federalist. They allowed these liberal activists to say this was harmful and wrong. Do you know why? Because we called out the whistleblower,” McCarthy explained. “Somehow that was wrong. They are letting these socialist ideas to be able to control what we are doing. That is what’s wrong. If they control so much of the market and they say, ‘it is just an algorithm,’ a human writes the algorithm.”

By comparison, China’s social credit system is a high-tech system that tracks citizens’ social actions and awards points based on whether their actions and beliefs are in line with the communist government.

SOURCE: Christian Post, Samuel Smith

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I was one of George Klopfer’s patients, the abortionist that kept 2,411 babies in his garage.

I was taken to him because I was a little girl impregnated by a rapist. It was suggested that abortion would fix my trauma.

That day forever changed me and my family. I have always said that my rape was worse than my abortion. What happened behind those doors traumatized and left me in the pit of hell trying to claw my way out. I tried to forget what happened and I never wanted to talk about it again, but it only bubbled out in very destructive ways.

I was running as fast as I could to get away from it and one night, after a heavy night of drinking, I had nothing left but to cry out to God for help. That night He met me with a love I had never felt before and He began restoring all that had been taken from me. I would begin my healing process and I would see Him apply a healing balm on my wounds time after time.

I slowly became transparent in sharing my story but never wanted to talk about my abortion. It was so painful I wanted to forget it. Even as a 13-year-old girl who was raped, I was given a mother’s heart and there was a giant hole left after my abortion.

Eventually I would begin sharing my story after seeing the movie Unplanned. I was invited to see the movie but I had no idea what it was about. As I sat in the theater it was like watching my life unfold before my very eyes. It was during that movie that I heard the Holy Spirit say, now is the time to tell the rest of your story. I began sharing my abortion story and I was met with so much love.

One of the first places I shared my story was with my local Right to Life. I asked them if there was an abortion clinic in the area so I can go and love on abortion-minded women from the sidewalks. I wanted to share my story so they would never have to experience what I did. It was during that time that Whole Women’s Health in South Bend, Indiana, opened without a license.

I knew I needed to go. It was on the clinic sidewalks that God laid it on my heart to hold a memorial service for post-abortive mothers and fathers. So I began preparing a memorial service for Sept 14, 2019.

The day before I had spent preparing and I was busy with the details and that had kept me off social media until right before I was headed to bed. That’s when I saw the story of George Klopfer, the man who did my abortion. He had died earlier in the month. His wife began cleaning out the garage and found that he had kept over 2,000 babies in their home. I crawled into bed that evening and wept and began praying. My first question to God was, “Is my daughter Elliana Grace one of the babies? And why was this happening?”

The Holy Spirit reminded me that my daughter was with Jesus and so were all the babies. He had them all and they were safe and then I was reminded this was why He had laid the memorial service on my heart. He knew many people would be hurting when they heard the news.

SOURCE: Christian Post, Serena Dyksen

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A Bible school and Christian holiday center in the United Kingdom has quarantined six students and a teacher who returned from a trip to Italy, which is suffering an outbreak of coronavirus. Several schools in the country are closing or sending pupils home over fears of infection.

Capernwray Hall in Lancashire said it was nothing more than a precautionary measure as the students and the teacher came back after working with a partner church in Milan, which is 40 miles from the lockdown areas in northern Italy.

“We are not worried but we wanted to take extra caution and that is why the decision was made, as a cautionary measure not due to concern,” Capernwray’s managing director, Jonathan Halsey, told Premier. “None of the people have had any symptoms of Coronavirus.”

The returning team was housed in a separate accommodation on the Capernwray campus, about 500 meters away from the main hall.

At least 19 confirmed cases of coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, have been reported in the U.K., whose Foreign Office has advised against “all but essential travel” to 11 locked-down towns at the center of the Italian outbreak.

At least eight schools whose students made half-term trips to Italy have closed across the country, from Middlesborough, North Yorkshire, to Harlow in Essex, The Times (of London) reported.

An additional 19 schools have also told students and staff who have visited Italy to stay at home.

As more than 50 countries have reported cases of coronavirus, the World Health Organization has upgraded the global risk of the outbreak to “very high,” according to BBC.

However, WHO clarified that there was still a chance of containing the virus if its chain of transmission were broken.

SOURCE: Christian Post, Anugrah Kumar

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Yesterday was the Collegiate Day of Prayer in the United States. It’s a massive annual event put on by a coalition of campus ministries to encourage prayer for college campuses across America.

EveryCampus with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship helped support Collegiate Day of Prayer. InterVarsity’s Jon Hietbrink says yesterday, they saw people doing prayer walks on campuses, praying in churches, and hosting prayer events to see God move. Collegiate Day of Prayer even did a live simulcast from a historic Yale chapel that broadcasted all over the country.

“Part of what I love about Collegiate Day of Prayer is there are lots of different avenues for people to get involved and to participate,” Hietbrink says. “The hope is that it’s, of course, not just one day of prayer, but actually a day to shine a spotlight on the strategic need that campuses [have] so that folks would continue to pray for campuses long after Collegiate Day of Prayer is done.”

Other ministries involved in Collegiate Day of Prayer included Chi Alpha, Luke 18, Campus Renewal Ministries, Cru, and Navigators.

Hietbrink says the unity demonstrated between Christian campus ministries for Collegiate Day of Prayer is really unprecedented. But to reach the over 4,000 college campuses in the US with the Gospel, one campus ministry can’t do it alone.

“God knows every single one of those campuses and every single student and faculty and staff that comes through the doors of those campuses…. When we pray through Collegiate Day of Prayer, we get the chance to join in something that Jesus is doing and we gain a greater measure of God’s heart for these campuses and these students. It’s a privilege to be in that space.”

It’s not just ministry leaders leading the charge. Students are also taking the initiative to prompt a movement of the Holy Spirit on their campuses.

For example, Hietbrink says he heard of one group of students from Tennessee who road tripped from Knoxville to New York City. Along the way, “I think they prayer walked something like 20 or 25 different schools as they road tripped up the eastern seaboard. They visited campuses, they made contacts on those campuses, sought to pray for the blessing of God to rest on those campuses.”

SOURCE: Mission Network News, Lyndsey Koh

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Every parent dreads the question: “What is the Trinity?”

How do we explain the fact that our God is three and yet one?

The concept violates logic.

This issue is especially relevant when interacting with the Muslim world. Islamic faith is insistent on the unity and singularity of God. The central affirmation of Islam is this statement: there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet. To this way of thinking, Christians are tri-theists and thus idolaters.

How can we explain our trinitarian theology to Muslims, or even to ourselves?

And why does it all matter to our lives today?

What is the Trinity?

It has been said that if the mind were simple enough for us to understand it, we would be too simple to understand it. Likewise, if God were simple enough for my finite, fallen mind to understand him, he would not be God.

How does a mother explain marriage to her five-year-old daughter? How does a mathematician explain calculus to his third-grade son?

Yet we try. We sing as though we understood the words, “Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty . . . God in three Persons, blessed Trinity.” I speak the same words over new believers which were recited over me in the baptismal waters and over other Christians for twenty centuries: “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

Why? What is the Trinity?

And why is understanding it so essential?

A brief history of God

The first biblical reference to God starts the mystery: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). The Hebrew term here translated “God” is Elohim. The im is how the Hebrew language makes a word plural, like putting s on the end of a word in English. Thus one could translate the word as Gods (though some Hebrew scholars believe that the plurality points more to God’s majesty than his number).

However, the following Hebrew verb “created” requires a singular noun, indicating that its subject is one rather than many. So, in “God created” we have our start into the mystery that is the nature of God.

From the earliest of times, the Jewish tradition has affirmed that “the Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4, the Shema, which is recited in daily Jewish spirituality). Such monotheism was a radical departure from the polytheism of ancient cultures. But the experience of the first Christians made simple monotheism problematic, for they knew Jesus Christ to be Lord and God (cf. John 1:1; 20:28; Romans 9:5; Titus 2:13). They also experienced the Holy Spirit as divine (Genesis 1:2; cf. Acts 5:2, 4; 2 Corinthians 3:17-18). But these three were independent (at Jesus’ baptism the Father spoke and the Spirit descended; Matthew 3:16-17).

There is no indication that apostolic Christians struggled with the logic of their experience of God. Paul could pray for the Corinthians, “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you all” (2 Corinthians 13:14). They knew God to be one, but they experienced him as three persons. This logical contradiction did not trouble them, for they were more pragmatic than speculative. They needed no words such as “Trinity” or theological formulations to explain their faith. But matters would quickly change.

The problem of God

As Christianity spread beyond its Jewish roots, it encountered a worldview steeped in logic and rationalism. Aristotle had taught the Western world that non-contradiction is the test for all truth. Something cannot be one and three at the same time.

So how can the Christian doctrine of God be reasonable?

The earliest answers to the question resolved the logical tension but created problems greater than the one they “solved.”

Some made the Son and the Spirit less divine than the Father, an approach known as subordinationism.” By this formulation, Jesus is not Lord and the Holy Spirit who makes us Christians (cf. Romans 8:9) is not fully God.

Others taught that God shifts from being Father (Old Testament) to Son (Gospels) to Spirit (Acts to Revelation), an approach known as “modalism.” This strategy cannot explain the baptism of Jesus, the work of the Son (John 1:3-4) and the Spirit (Genesis 1:2) in creation, or the presence of the Spirit throughout the Old Testament (cf. Psalm 51:11). “Dynamic monarchians” taught that divine power descended upon Jesus so that he was not himself divine.

At the Councils of Nicaea (AD 325) and Constantinople (AD 381), the orthodox Church declared all such formulations to be heretical and affirmed that the Son and Spirit are of the same “essence” as the Father. “God in three Persons” catches the sense of their approach.

From then to now, believers have sought to understand this paradox better.

Some suggest that God is like water, capable of being solid ice, liquid, or steam (but not at the same time). Perhaps he is like a three-sided pyramid seen from above (but the three sides do not work independently as did the Trinity at Jesus’ baptism). Maybe he is like an egg: yoke, sac, shell (but the three do not retain the same essence). Perhaps he is like a woman who is mother to her children, wife to her husband, and daughter to her parents (but she cannot act in three independent ways at the same time).

All analogies eventually break down, as they should. As we noted earlier, if we can understand fully the essence of God, he would not be God.

Commitment to a God whose essence transcends our logical comprehension is a problem for some in our rationalistic culture. We like our faith to make sense. We may not understand why a ship floats or an airplane stays in the air, but we know that someone does. We’d have a hard time taking medicine no one understands, expecting effects no one can explain.

But we’d best get used to it. The more we learn about the universe, the more incomprehensible it becomes. Physicians do not understand how the mind works, or even if there is such a thing as the “mind.” We assume the category of time, but none of us can define it without contradiction.

So it is with the major doctrines of Christian faith. Is God three or one? Is Jesus fully God or fully human? Does God know the future or do we have freedom? Is the Bible divinely inspired or humanly written?

The answer to each question is the same: yes.

The divinity of Jesus

Muslims, Jews, and Christians hold in common our belief that there is a God of the universe. When we speak of the “Father,” we are on a familiar footing with other monotheistic faiths. But when we elevate the Son and the Spirit to divine status, we create the kind of tension that leads to confusion and rejection. So let’s take a moment to examine the divinity of the Second and Third members of the Godhead.

“Jesus is Lord” is the central affirmation of the Christian faith. Its Greek original is found scrawled on walls in the Roman catacombs and at the heart of the most ancient formulations of faith. When the Empire forced Christians to say “Caesar is Lord” or die, believers by the multiplied thousands chose to die. If presented the same option, we should make the same choice. Why?

SOURCE: Christian Post, Jim Denison

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