By Dănuţ Mănăstireanu
Originally appeared in The Cry: The Advocacy Journal of Word Made Flesh vol. 11, no. 4 (Winter 2005)
“No man appears in safety before the public eye, unless he first relishes obscurity. No man [...]
By Miroslav Volf
His name I have forgotten, but the image of him eating at our table is indelible. Every month on the first Sunday he would make his way from the back country to the city of Novi Sad, where my father was a pastor. A fellow Pentecostal, surrounded by a sea of hostile nonbelievers [...]
By Jean Vanier
In 1976, we welcomed Claudia into our l’Arche community in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. She was seven years old, blind and suffering from severe autism. We found her in a local asylum where she had been abandoned as a child. When she arrived in l’Arche, she used to scream a lot; she was totally confused; [...]
By Christine Pohl
Seeking and claiming intimacy with God would involve extraordinary presumption if it weren’t a possibility that runs through the Scriptures. The idea that we, God’s broken, obstinate creation, could be drawn into the privileges of intimacy with the creator and redeemer of the universe should strike us as outrageous. Rather than taking this [...]
By Jürgen Moltmann
This was the saving experience of my life. It was 1944, at the end of World War II. As a boy of 18 years, I was drafted into the German army. In February 1945, I was taken prisoner of war and spent more than three years behind barbed wire in Belgium, Scotland and [...]
By Phyllis Kilbourn and Chris Heuertz
“Compassion fatigue” was the term coined to describe the effect that media coverage of horrific atrocities and desperate human traumas has had on us. It’s usually marked by a disinterest and an apathetic disconcern about the reality around the world. North American culture has learned to protect itself from the [...]
By Dr. Samuel Kamaleson
We are created for community. Relationship constitutes the core of redemption. St. Paul writing to Timothy about his gifted role in transforming mission reminds him about the Holy Spirit’s ability to heal us from the fear of people: “For the Holy Spirit, God’s gift, does not want you to be afraid of [...]
By Viv Grigg
Is Word Made Flesh a Protestant order among the poor? In Protestant Mission Societies: The American Experience, Dr. Ralph Winter argues that mission structures are equivalent functionally to Catholic orders. Protestant orders are built around core values that resemble those of the early phases of Catholic orders. With the emergence of new Protestant [...]
By Jayakumar Christian
Abuse, violence, exploitation, poverty and neglect all have a strong “power-powerlessness” flavor. Analyses of these situations immediately raise the issue of power. Any transformational initiative, therefore, must address issues of power and powerlessness.
In Kanpur, India, while talking to children involved in rag picking, I asked them, “What is a good time for collecting [...]
By Walter Brueggemann
The powerful usually prefer to live in a self-contained social environment where “never is heard a discouraging word.” Very often the powerless, beguiled by the powerful, collude in such a self-contained social system, and so live without hope. The powerful and the powerless conspire to make sure nothing is said except by the [...]