Holistic Ministry Archives

Building Futures from the Ground Up: How Zion’s Closet Is Transforming Title I Schools

By Terence Lester, PhD

(Editor’s note: This is Part 3 of a 4-part series on economic injustice. You can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here. In this post, Dr. Terence Lester shows how compassion can grow into systemic change.)

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In 2016, with the support of my family and board of directors, I launched a campaign called MAP16 (March Against Poverty) to walk from Atlanta, GA, to the White House to raise awareness about homelessness in the U.S.

Would You Intervene?

By Kathy Khang

Editor’s Note: This essay was originally published on September 5, 2016, as This Is My Country and is used by generous permission of the author.

The older man walks up to the closed register next to me and looks at the wretched KFC/Pizza Hut menu at the travel oasis/rest stop near Elkhart, Indiana.

Dear Pastor Conflicted about LGBTQ+ Inclusion

By Bill White and Brenna Rubio
Dear Pastor Conflicted about LGBTQ+ Inclusion, we have been in your shoes. You’ve started to wonder whether the church – YOUR church – needs to become more inclusive, especially of LGBTQ people, and you feel conflicted. Your heart is torn, your mind is spinning.

Why Abandon Culture Wars?

By Rick Barry
Ultimately, the culture war paradigm is not just destructive to Christians or to the church—it is also destructive to the country.

The Sacred Art of Paying Attention

By Kristyn Komarnicki
When we make space to lean towards each other with attention, to listen and to hear, not just the words we speak to each other but the actual hopes and hurts and fears and joys, we are offering each other the most sacred gift available to us.

Biblical Feminism and the Chicago Declaration: A Women’s History Month Special

By Lē Weaver
The Chicago Declaration was intended to serve as a framework for concrete evangelical engagement with the pressing social issues of the day. Christian Feminism Today (known originally as the Evangelical Women’s Caucus) came into being as a direct result of that Thanksgiving workshop, and with it a movement known as biblical feminism was born.

Easter Liberation for the Oppressed

By Heidi Weaver-Smith
If liberation is so central to the message Jesus came to accomplish and proclaim, it must also be to those of us who profess his name and take part in his resurrected body. Christ’s life, death, and resurrection point us towards the liberative future of shalom he has accomplished for us, the already-but-not-yet Kingdom of God which breaks into our world daily, yet has not finalized its work.

The 8 Women Who Shaped the Chicago Declaration

By Lē Weaver
This Women’s History Month, we remember the women who helped shape the Chicago Declaration of Evangelicals for Social Action, CSA’s founding document. The Chicago Declaration, signed by 53 evangelical leaders in 1973, was written as a call for Christians to engage in issues of justice and to reject racism, economic injustice, violence, and sexism. While the group that signed the document were diverse theologically, they lacked the racial and gender diversity we strive for today.

A Litany of Lament for Liberation

By Kristan Pitts
May peace never come until justice is actualized. Expose to everyone injustice that is both overt and covert. Then make it so that inequity may never be hidden again.

Nice Churchy Patriarchy: A Q&A on Reclaiming Women’s Humanity with Author Liz Cooledge Jenkins

By Liz Cooledge Jenkins

Even in the warmest and most welcoming evangelical churches, patriarchy looms as an ever-present force, suppressing women’s possibilities and debilitating whole communities. Well-intentioned churchgoers and church leaders have bought into deeply-entrenched male-dominated mindsets, power structures, and theologies that are not working—not for women, and really not for anyone.

Lamento y Liberación | Lament and Liberation

By Inés Velásquez-McBryde
Racism has joined with sexism to dismember women of color at a cost to our heads, hearts, bodies, and souls. It has also dismembered women from women and women from men. We must repent, restore, and re-member back the places long devastated and rebuild the broken bride of Christ.

An Unapologetic Commitment to Grieving

By Cole Arthur Riley
It takes real commitment, real awareness to commit yourself to pause and to know that the thing you are grieving is worth sadness.

I Wish I Didn’t Know Who George Floyd Was

By Michael Stalcup
I wish I didn’t know who George Floyd was,
had never heard his name or seen his face
displayed on screens or blazoned on brick walls,
unbreathing monuments to life erased.

History Makers: Fred Shuttlesworth

By Lauren Grubaugh Thomas
The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth was a pastor and civil rights leader whose conviction and courage consistently led him to the frontlines of the struggle for justice. As someone who pushed his peers to greater risk-taking, Shuttlesworth’s leadership was crucial in elevating the cause for racial justice to the national conversation.

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