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Hip hop artists Lil Mike and Funny Bone got their start performing at churches. Now they’re acting on FX’s critically acclaimed television series. When Lil Mike and Funny Bone (who perform as the hip-hop duo Mike Bone) auditioned for the television show Reservation Dogs , they never expected the series to gain much attention outside the Native American community. Co-created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, the show follows the lives of four Native American teens in Oklahoma and finds humor in some of the dark realities of reservation life. Now in its second season on FX, the critically acclaimed series received a Peabody and has been nominated for numerous other awards. Fans of the show may not know that Lil Mike and Funny Bone —who appear as Mose and Mekko, respectively—have been Christian hip-hop artists for nearly 25 years. Using a style that draws together rap, dance, and comedy, they got their start performing at churches and house parties and eventually appeared on Ameri...

Reforms have legalized 2,400 Christian structures, yet Abu Seifein represents problems from when construction and repair permits were impossible to obtain. As Egypt reels from the tragic church fire that killed 41 worshipers on Sunday, many search for where to put the blame. “God forgive the fire department,” said Ishak Henin, a deacon at Abu Seifein Coptic Orthodox Church in Imbaba, a dense urban neighborhood of Cairo. “If they had come earlier, they could have saved more people.” Egyptian authorities stated they arrived almost immediately after the 9 a.m. fire was first reported. Eyewitness testimony varied ; some stated 15 minutes, others over two hours. Abu Seifein means “the father of two swords” and is the Arabic moniker for second-century martyr Saint Mercurius, whose icon reflects his military origins. But the word church may give the wrong impression to overseas audiences, as the sanctuary was located between ground floor shops and towering residences. Illegally repu...

As refugees flee, the war-torn country is left in a pastoral leadership crisis. About 400 Ukrainian Baptist congregations have been lost in Russia’s war on Ukraine, said Ukrainian Baptist Theological Seminary (UBTS) president Yaroslav Pyzh, who is working to restore pastoral leadership to impacted cities. While volunteers at six humanitarian relief We Care Centers across Ukraine are helping internally displaced people winterize their homes, replacing roofs, windows, and doors, Pyzh said the real challenge for UBTS is to rebuild pastoral leadership in places pastors have been displaced. “Since the war started, six months already, we lost about 400 Baptist churches. And so the real build is the rebuilding of leadership capacity, because if you rebuild buildings and you have no pastors to lead churches, I don’t think it’s going to do any good,” Pyzh, a graduate of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, told Baptist Press last week. “So the real challenge is n...

How believers are living out their faith amid unprecedented political upheaval. On July 9, after months of taking to the streets, Sri Lanka protesters successfully pressured President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to resign and flee the country. Demonstrations began in early April as prices of fuel, food, and medicine began to soar. Gotabaya’s tenure, which began in 2019, failed to mitigate much of the damage that his brother Mahinda Rajapaksa had put in place when he served as president from 2005 to 2015. Corruption and disastrous economic policies characterized their respective administrations. COVID-19 dealt the final blow to an already struggling, poorly managed economy, with Sri Lanka even defaulting on external debt for the first time in its history. No one in the island nation of 22 million people has emerged unscathed. “For the first time in my living memory, the protests have united people from all walks of life and all ethnic and religious communities,” said Christian political blo...

Success for the church looks different depending on your discipline. On March 1, the Chinese government enacted wide-ranging restrictions on religious communication, teaching, and evangelistic efforts conducted online. Now, only religious groups with government approval can carry out such activities. Various media outlets around the world shared this news, which is unsurprising. When we think or talk about Christianity in China, its social impact and implications for issues such as human rights and China’s international relations—rather than its pastoral and theological developments and challenges—have received disproportionately large attention in the Western press in the recent decades. There are many methods and approaches we can apply in observing and interpreting Christianity in China. But this leads to a larger question: How do we read Christianity in general? Religion is a complex social phenomenon, and different disciplines can draw varying—even opposite—conclusions about ...

My kids ask the darndest theological questions—putting my seminary degree to the test. I was six months pregnant when I walked across Fuller Seminary’s commencement stage in 2012. Underneath the cap and gown, my mind and body felt full: the former with all the theology I’d read to complete my master’s degree, and the latter with anticipation for my forthcoming life as a mother. After graduation and before my first daughter was born, I had a dream of propping her up on my lap to look at an ABC board book that began with Augustine and ended with Zizioulas. This was, I think, my psyche’s way of creating some continuity from one chapter of life to the next. But as all new parents can attest, babies don’t work like that. Arriving a little past her due date at just past 3 a.m., my firstborn was a healthy, pink tornado that ripped through my orderly and cerebral life. Then three years later, my second daughter, Olivia, was born. For an exhausting decade, my husband and I have juggled two...

Frederick Buechner diffused the power of disbelief and brought hope to wandering hearts. In The Alphabet of Grace , the late writer Frederick Buechner gave an account of his conversion. He was agnostic at the time but had been attending a church because he liked the preacher, George Buttrick. Queen Elizabeth had recently been crowned, and Buttrick made a connection to those events by saying that unlike the queen, Jesus has been crowned again and again in the hearts of those who trust him. Here’s how Buechner describes it: He said in his odd, sandy voice, the voice of an old nurse, that the coronation of Jesus took place among confession and tears and then, as God was and is my witness, great laughter , he said. … At the phrase great laughter , for reasons that I have never satisfactorily understood, the great wall of China crumbled and Atlantis rose up out of the sea, and on Madison Avenue, at 73rd Street, tears leapt from my eyes as though I had been struck across the face. I s...