I am often struck by how well the Record stands out against magazines with budgets and staff that far exceed ours. It’s not that I’m thinking highly of myself. Rather, it’s the amazing team I’ve been blessed to work with at the Record over the years.
Our faith is in a God of Love—love that became enfleshed in Jesus Christ. And while it is true that if we truly believe this we will try to live in a certain manner, that perspective is quite different from treating the Bible as a set of rules to be followed so that God will accept us.
One of the first things people ask me about the closing of the Record is: “What’s the reaction out there?”
If hockey is our national religion, The Tragically Hip have been among our most revered preachers.
The first thing I want to do is say thank you to the 380 ministers who completed our online survey and the 30 people who wrote me in response to the April editorial with suggestions on how we could improve the Record.
It’s easy to become inward looking—concerned more about how we feel than how newcomers feel; concerned more about our buildings than about building a community where people experience God’s love through our deeds.
What do you want to read in this magazine? This is not a trivial question I’m asking. We really want to know what we could do better.
What do you do when you are wrestling with a big problem and you feel overwhelmed with anger and frustration either from your inability to resolve the issue or because others can’t see it the way you see it so very clearly?
Deceptively, all those Boomer children and their parents filled churches in the late 1950s and ‘60s to overflowing. The result was that mainline denominations in Canada thought they were on top of the world.
Yes, we should sympathize with France and all other peoples who are killed and terrorized in the world. But Christians can never countenance being unforgiving.
It’s hard to imagine anyone not wanting Canada to help out in the current worldwide refugee crisis. But despite the many positive responses I’ve heard about, including from the Christian community, I’ve also heard about some naysaying. So what’s going on?
Tony Plomp’s cover story not only gives us an opportunity to talk about death which senior editor Andrew Faiz does in a companion piece to our cover story—but about the nature of God.
Until we feel enough shame to make us feel vulnerable, I’m not sure we can move ahead. But moving ahead is where we need to aim.
It’s one thing to say that we trust God; it’s another to actually live in that trust.
This is not the first time we have addressed clergy health. Six years ago our award-winning cover story, Breaking the Silence, addressed the unhealthy state of many clergy in six Canadian denominations.
Today, as the Angus Reid poll observes: “Canadians are more likely to self-identify as spiritual rather than religious by a margin approaching two-to-one.”
It would be convenient to blame a hard winter for the state of the national psyche, but that would avoid addressing the real roots of fear and anxiety.
It seems pointless to review the Supreme Court’s ruling on physician-assisted dying at this stage. Our goal now should be to help craft a law that aims to prevent abuses, however blunt an instrument the law may be.
We are so used to the sound-bite declaratives of politicians trying to score points, that I wonder if we have forgotten the art of conversation, let alone dealing with the content of a conversation?
Some people wistfully hope conversations can or should happen at General Assembly. But overtures, motions and the like are part of the procedures that govern debates, not conversations.