I discovered a wonderful movement of the Kingdom of God in Guatemala City, Guatemala under the leadership of Pastor Francisco Bendfeldt in a recent visit. The new church is called Casa De Libertad (House of Freedom). This young church has the potential to ignite a revolution of new evangelical churches in Latin America. Casa De Libertad embraces the imperatives of orthodoxy and orthopraxis.

The church’s vision is “to be the Church, not just a church, and foster an environment of responsible freedom and true worship to Jesus that leads our families to serve and transform our community.” The five pillars of the church include “unity, responsible freedom, true worship of Jesus, family, and community transformation.”

From spending time with pastor and members, I was encouraged by their passion to see the Gospel transform people and the culture. In Creation Regained, Albert Wolters reminds us that all of creation is included in the scope of redemption. “It is all of creation that is included in the scope of redemption. . .through Christ, God determined ‘to reconcile to himself all things,’ writes Paul (Col 1:20), and the words he uses (ta panta) preclude any narrow or personalistic understanding of the reconciliation he has in mind.”

Following Jesus, then, is becoming an intimate Kingdom ally with God and pursuing our role in His cosmic plan to redeem the whole creation. In following Jesus, we not only care about saving souls but also about the restoration of creation here and now. Jesus followers are passionate about evangelism, redeeming the arts, education, business, social issues, politics, cities, science, our communities and so on. All of creation belongs to Christ and God’s people are called to apply redemption to all things on earth as it is in heaven.

As I witnessed in the powerful preaching and Christ-centered worship, those who attend are pointed to Jesus that they may be freed from sin, idolatry, legalism, and the power of the devil to live lives characterized by freedom (Gal. 5) not the false religious rules of “religion.” True freedom is freedom to be the kind of human being that God originally created humans to be and to live our human vocation with moral responsibility to the glory of God.

Embedded in a culture of Roman Catholicism and “health and wealth” prosperity Gospel evangelicalism, Casa De Libertad offers a fresh Kingdom-oriented, Christ-centered approach that could not only be a model for Central America but Latin America as a whole. You can hear more about this exciting new church (in Spanish) on YouTube.

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Iraqi Christians celebrated Easter dangerously this year. With the rest of the world, they marked the 4,000^th Iraqi death, mourned the abduction and death of a Christian leader, and faced more religiously-motivated attacks.

Earlier this month, church workers found the body of abducted Chaldean Catholic Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho in a shallow grave near Mosul, Iraq. Pope Benedict XVI called the death “an inhuman act of violence” and condemned the war in his Palm Sunday sermon, saying, “Enough with the slaughters. Enough with the violence. Enough with the hatred in Iraq!” Since Rahho’s death, other Mosul Christians have been kidnapped or attacked, Compass Direct News reports.

Rahho is one of several Christian clerics murdered since the war began. In Mosul last June, armed men killed a Chaldean priest and three deacons. The year before, Father Paulos Iksander was kidnapped and beheaded. According to Nina Shea in National Review, the list of Christians tortured and killed includes children and lay people.

A study by the World Health Organization and the Iraqi government found that between 104,000 and 223,000 Iraqis have died violent deaths since the invasion. BBC News says the war has uprooted over 4.5 million Iraqis, and Christians number among the unsettled. According to French Bishop Marc Stenger, half of Iraq’s 700,000 Christians are fleeing the country. France is granting asylum to 500 Iraqi Christians – a move some say discriminates against Muslims.

Christians experienced discrimination under Saddam Hussein as well, but Shea says as long as the Bush administration doesn’t acknowledge religious persecution, the lot of Iraqi Christians won’t improve:

No policies exist to address their specific needs in Iraq or facilitate their finding refuge abroad. No programs exist to train and support them to police their own villages — more critical than ever now that the military surge has flushed terror northward.

Despite the dangers, Iraqi Christians cling to faith. Mosul still celebrated Easter, and the Daily Progress quotes the daughter of an Iraqi minister: “Even during the worst threats, they still come to church.”

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Magdi Allam — a prominent Italian journalist and lapsed-Muslim firebrand whose book titles, Viva Israele (“Long Live Israel”), have won him labels like the “Muslim Zionist” —converted to Catholicism over the Easter weekend. For security, Allam and the Catholic Church kept the news closeted until a few hours before a very public ceremony during Saturday’s nighttime Easter vigil at St. Peter’s, where Pope Benedict XVI himself performed Allam’s baptism.

Allam, whose notable print and TV oeuvre has criticized Islam’s extremist elements, called his conversion “the happiest day of my life” and explained the next day in Corriere della Sera, the influential newspaper where he is deputy editor, that he was escaping religion where “the root of evil is innate.” Islam, he said, “is physiologically violent and historically conflictual.”

The penalty in Islamic jurisprudence for apostasy is death, which is why Allam already has 24-hour security guards, à la apostates like Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. But many Muslim organizations are loath, for obvious reasons, to publicize this penalty.

Even though very few would actually enforce it, and even though it isn’t found in the Koran, but rather comes from several hadith, all major schools of Islamic jurisprudence defend it. The renowned sheikh and mujtahid Yusuf Al-Qaradawi Allam plainly admits, “The four main schools of jurisprudence . . . as well as the other four schools of jurisprudence . . . agree that apostates must be executed.”

But, so far, Allam’s conversion doesn’t have Muslim leaders bristling with denunciations. Issedin El Zir, spokesman for the Union of Islamic Communities (a group Allam has criticized for ties to Hamas), told The Associated Press that Allam “is an adult, free to make his personal choice.” Yahya Pallavicini, vice president of Coreis, an Islamic religious community group in Italy, told Reuters he respected Allam’s choice.

The dearth of attacks could stem from the fact that Allam had been a non-practicing Muslim for most of his life and even has a Catholic wife. Although he went on the hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) as a child, he admits to never making salat (the five daily prayers) and ignoring sawm (the fast during Ramadan), two of the five pillars of Islamic faith.

These strikes against him, says Jihad Watch blogger Hugh Fitzgerald, give Muslim leaders an opportunity to marginalize Allam’s conversion. “It’s nonsense, but it is the only way Muslims will have to deal with his scathing, unanswerable criticism of Islam and of many Muslims . . . with his conversion to Christianity,” Fitzgerald writes, “since they cannot deal with either the way they would dearly like to, if they could only get their hands on him. Their only recourse is to pretend he was a Christian ‘all along’ and the ‘Pope of the Vatican’ engineered the whole thing.”

Allam’s baptism comes only three days after Osama bin Laden’s latest message: that the Pope is leading a “new Crusade” against Islam, citing the Jyllands-Posten cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad as proof. Like the Netherlands—whose latest bout of Muslim thuggery surrounds the work of (another) filmmaker and cineaste Geert Wilders for his short film Fitna (whose Web site, containing only the words “Geert Wilders presents Fitna, 23 March 2008,” was shut down late last week for “violation of the Network Solutions Acceptable Use Policy”)—Italy is becoming the epicenter of a radical cultural divide bisecting Western civilization.

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In gearing up for the Iraq War’s five-year anniversary this week, several media have puffed a new book that fingers the war’s eventual high-end price tag at $3 trillion and labeled the vast discrepancy with the Bush administration’s numbers another chapter in the its warmongering deceit.

“After wildly lowballing the cost of the Iraq conflict” at $50 billion, the Bush administration “has been concealing the [war’s] full economic toll,” this month’s Vanity Fair reports in a prominent excerpt from the recently released book The Three Trillion Dollar War, by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard prof Linda Blimes. The excerpt highlights what the authors call “conservative” estimates that put the war’s cost, when all’s said and done, at $3 trillion. (They estimate at least $1.7 trillion alone in budgetary spending authorized by Congress.)

Stiglitz and Blimes’ inflated numbers tally up costs holistically, which is where critics have focused attacks on the work. While noting the Bush administration calculates the cost on a “cash” basis—that is, without factoring in future obligations through accrual accounting—they estimate “true costs” by figuring future expenditures (e.g., replenishing equipment, providing health care to returning soldiers) and even things the private sector foots the bill for (e.g., medical care Iraq veterans seek from the private sector because the Veterans Health Administration is underfunded, filling the military’s ranks with National Guardsmen and thereby depleting the civilian labor force). But that “doesn’t mean it isn’t a cost—it means only that someone else pays it.”

A “budgetary sleight of hand that makes a mockery of a democratic budget process” is how the authors characterize the administration’s procurement of war funds. (The administration labels them “emergency” funding, knowing that this area isn’t “subject to standard budget caps or vigorous scrutiny.”) This, they say, is “intended for genuine crises, such as Hurricane Katrina, where the utmost speed is required to get the money to the field.”

The White House, expectedly, isn’t enthused by these numbers and has questioned the book’s premise—one that began with a 2006 Columbia report the authors did documenting the real and potential costs of the war, which, at the time, “[broke] the taboo against counting up the costs of an ongoing war,” Salon’s Gary Kamiya wrote. “People like Joe Stiglitz lack the courage to consider the cost of doing nothing and the cost of failure,” White House spokesman Tony Fratto told a reporter for McClatchy Newspapers. “One can’t even begin to put a price tag on the cost to this nation of the attacks of 9/11.” He wondered what price Stiglitz puts “on attacks on the homeland that have already been prevented.”

The New York Times’ Bob Herbert, who has a reputation of being as the paper’s resident boringly just-the-facts liberal columnist, agreed in a March 2 piece that the war’s bill exceeds $2 trillion. He traced how, after release of the book a few weeks ago, the congressional Joint Economic Committee held a public hearing to discuss its estimates. By the committee’s calculations, Herbert wrote, the government “spends enough on the war each day to enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start for a year, or make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low-income students through Pell Grants, or pay the annual salaries of nearly 11,000 additional border patrol agents or 14,000 more police officers.”

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A new Bible translation is enthralling both web junkies and kitty lovers. According to PopSci.com, there’s a new effort to translate the Bible into lolspeak, a cutesy mix of “baby talk and IM speak” usually accompanied by pictures of furry animals. God becomes “Ceiling Cat.” Genesis 1:1 somehow turns into, “In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.”

One wonders about the people orchestrating this project — Christians with a dual passion for the Word of God and lolspeak? It isn’t the first time someone has given the Bible a new twist, however. People expend efforts on quirky Bible versions to reach new audiences all the time.

Most recently, SMSBible conveniently allows you to text 150-character Bible passages to groups of people. In Australia, Christian author Kel Richards wrote the Aussie Bible. The Angel Gabriel’s speech to Mary in Luke 1 goes like this:

You are a pretty special sheila. … Don’t chuck a wobbly. God thinks you’re okay. You’re about to become pregnant, and you’ll have a son, and you’re to call him Jesus. He will be a very big wheel … and he will be in charge of the whole show forever.’

It’s no joke. Richards told Christian Science Monitor that chaplains use it for prison ministry, and others have told him the book inspired them to read the full-length Bible: “It’s accessible. It’s not a big black book the size of a telephone directory.”

Bible rapper Matt Bar used rap to hold the attention of his middle school Hebrew class and then attempted to spur a Bible rap movement. He sees his rap as poetry: “Through iambic pentameter, Shakespeare reached depths and through rap, I also believed that you can reach the real spirit of things.”

In Britain, a teacher put the Bible into cockney rhyming slang and even got an endorsement from the Archbishop of Canterbury, who said, “This version puts the energy and passion back into the stories.”

The 100-minute Bible is perhaps the most energized version. This one is tailor-made for the “harried and hurried generation” and allows you to get the gist of the Gospel in two minutes.

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Every religion has its times of upheaval. The 16^th Century Protestant Reformation shook the Church to its core, and now Islam may be experiencing its own Reformation.

Stroll through Istanbul or Beirut and you’ll see Westernization everywhere, from clothing to music trends. Flip on a satellite TV, and you might stumble upon one of these reformers: Moez Masoud. This 29 year old Egyptian challenges the Islamic world with a message of love, compassion and tolerance, and his programs are attracting millions.

Masoud is part of what some call an Islamic Reformation promoting an upbeat, modernized interpretation of the faith. Masoud says that “imams who outlawed art and music were misinterpreting their faith.” He believes that “art, culture and music should be appreciated,” bringing vibrancy to a religion descending into radicalism. Masoud’s modern tone, with ideas like allowing dating while still rejecting sex before marriage, stands in contrast to the traditionalists calling for a return to orthodoxy.

Sheikh Moussa Drammeh, another forward thinking Muslim, actively condemns violent Islam. “We living in a community,” he told WoW, “and we need to respect each other.” Drammeh helps runs a community program, the Jamhiyatut Tahaawun Islamic Center, in the north Bronx. He is also involved in taking teen gang members off the street and putting them in Wall Street internships.

Globalization brings the world’s ideologies face to face. Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Muslims around the world have been grappling with how to adjust. In face of a global Jihadist movement, Muslims like Masoud and Drammeh are crucial for developing a peaceful tone in Islam.

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The Vatican recently came out with a list of “new sins” for its constituents to avoid: drug use, pollution, economic injustice, and genetic manipulation. Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, the Church’s official that oversees “matters of conscience,” discussed the new categories in the Vatican’s paper, l’Osservatore Romano. (Join the WMB discussion here.)

According to an AP newscast, the Vatican remains concerned about issues such as abortion and pedophilia, but an analyst for the Vatican said people are too obsessed with sex and that there are other, more important sins to take into consideration. Although one critic of the new injunctions thought the Vatican “gets its nose into too many things,” the Catholic Church is not the only religious entity redefining and refining its positions.

The Southern Baptists have also jumped on the “new sin” bandwagon, turning the focus from the more commonly invoked sins to climate change when Southern Baptist leaders drafted a declaration criticizing their denomination for being “too timid” on environmental issues. The leaders seek to change impressions that Southern Baptists are “uncaring, reckless, and ill-informed.”

With 60 percent of Italian Catholics no longer attending confession, this multi-denominational push to recognize a wider set of “sins” may be an effort to retain relevance in light of changing cultural values and scientific progress. The church’s emphasis on premarital sex and abortion arose from the same impulse in the wake the sexual revolution and Roe v. Wade.

Providing people with a list of additional things to feel bad about may be even more alienating, though, especially in a culture that increasingly rejects sin itself as a concept. Some Jewish groups have decided to forgo the sticky issue of sin altogether, divesting religious practice of all reference to God, sin and repentance through the uncommon marriage of secular humanism and ancient liturgy.

Although expanding a list of sins and denying sin itself are opposite impulses, both show an evolution of religious practice and prompt questions of how faith can both accommodate culture and transcend it.

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President Bush mixed faith and foreign policy this week when he addressed the National Religious Broadcasters, prompting the New York Times to write, “Rarely has the president mixed the language of faith and God so closely with talk of war and terrorism.”

Bush spoke of the universality of freedom and couched it in religious terms: “Freedom is not America’s gift to the world; it is God’s gift to all humanity. … We undertake this work because we believe that every human being bears the image of our maker. That’s why we’re doing this. No one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave.”

The evangelicals there applauded, but other evangelicals weren’t thrilled. Frank Schaeffer used the speech to spin a diatribe against a “born-again president whose miserable presidency was brought into existence by and aided and abetted by the religious right.” He bemoaned “eight years of failed Republican/Bush misrule-by-fear,” and says seeking the evangelical vote has diminished John McCain.

On God’s Politics, Jim Wallis gives a more measured reply: “We also see the image of God in all those who have become the collateral damage of this awful war, and in the countless American lives snuffed out or broken forever.” He issues “A Call to Lament and Repent.”

The speech comes as Christianity Today interviews Walter Russell Mead about evangelical influence in foreign policy. Mead argues that the Anglo-American world offers “this idea of faith in the future and optimism, a willingness to embrace change and even stimulate change to make a better world.” He cautions, though, that this easily turns into utopianism. He says Christians need to recognize “that humanity is imperfect, that perfection will come only from God, and in God’s time and in God’s way.”

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In some respects, the Christian West’s colonization of Asia has proved harmful for women. In The Jesus of Asian Women, Filipino author Muriel Orevillo-Montenegro offers a sobering narrative of female oppression in the Philippines, India, Korea, and Hong Kong. Because Western Christian imperialists saw Asian religions and culture as vile and idolatrous, they thought redemption possible “only if Asia’s heathen souls adopt Western culture and abandon Asian religions and ways of life” (11).

Orevillo-Montenegro also laments the fact that the first Western Christians only seemed concerned with saving souls and failed to address the oppressive social realities facing Asian women. One of the book’s major themes is that the teachings of Jesus should expose “the oppressive elements of religion and the dehumanizing structures of society” (19) rather than enable them:

Christology should not endorse the oppressive structures in culture, religion, and society, by being silent and hiding behind metaphysical concepts while the broad masses of Asian peoples, mostly adherents of Asian religions, suffer poverty, exploitation, and marginalization under the imperial powers of this world. Women and children in particular continue to suffer under patriarchy and sexism in the church and society.

When Western missionaries reduced Christianity to an escape-from-Hell-plan instead of seeing it as a way of life that embraces God’s sovereign covenantal redemption of all creation, they missed the connection between “the historical context of Jesus’ death and the suffering inflicted on the colonized peoples by the colonizers” (44).

It should be noted that the author intertwines her poignant concerns about the conflation of Christianity and Western culture with her own conflations of Christianity and feminism (another Western culture). She notes that Asian men are captive to the “Euro-American, middle-class, white, male theologies that are not only patriarchal, androcentric, and sexist, [but] sometimes misogynistic” (53). However, is it really true, as she says, that “a male-centered or androcentric Christology inevitably promotes patriarchal norms and sexists attitudes toward women” (53)?

If readers can get past Orevillo-Montenegro’s more extreme points, she presents challenging issues that the gospel needs to address. If our missionary activities are directed at the reality of Christ redeeming all things, should not Christians also fight passionately for the human rights of Asian women who are culturally oppressed?

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On Monday, leaders in the Southern Baptist church captured the attention of Christians and non-Christians alike when they signed a declaration entreating Christians to become more active in preventing global climate change. It called their denomination’s previous environmental activities “too timid” and accused them of “failing to produce a unified moral voice.”

Signatories include current Southern Baptist president Frank Page and former presidents James Merritt and Jack Graham. The resolution admitted that leaders needed “considerable convincing before becoming persuaded that these are real problems that deserve our attention. But now we have seen and heard enough to be persuaded that these issues are among the current era’s challenges that require a unified voice.”

Baptists like Daniel Akin, the president of Southeastern Seminary, are excited about the proactive approach: “I see it as building on what Southern Baptists have said in previous statements and position papers.” The statement is not an official resolution and the SBC’s 2007 position on global warming remains unchanged. This resolution acknowledged much “conflicting scientific evidence” surrounding the issue of climate change and supported “the development of environmental public policy that will improve the stewardship of the earth’s resources.”

The man behind Monday’s statement is 25-year-old Jonathan Merritt (son of signer James Merritt), who says he first became concerned with the problem of climate change when a professor of his compared destroying creation to “tearing a page out of the Bible.” He is one of a growing number of young evangelicals closing the gap between “religious right” and “evangelical center.”

As more Christians become active in social and environmental issues, the priority shift could benefit presidential candidate John McCain, who has taken a positive stance toward “common sense” strategies to lower carbon emissions.

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