Ahmaud Arbery and tragedy in Brunswick, Georgia.

Coastal Georgia’s Perfect Storm

Hurricane season is especially busy in coastal Georgia. As a native of Brunswick, Georgia, I remember evacuating the city on several occasions with my family growing up. Residents of Brunswick, a small town of moss-laden, tree-lined streets normally spend this season watching Doppler radars. But for the past several months, they have watched police and news reports.

Like the rest of America, they were quarantined. But they became increasingly unsettled at stories of a young black man reportedly getting chased down and shot in his own neighborhood while jogging down the street. Little did Brunswick residents know, they were tracking the perfect storm.

The Fatal Run

Jogging isn’t supposed to get you killed. On February 23rd, Ahmaud Arbery became a heartbreaking, fatal exception as he jogged through his own neighborhood. Ahmaud Arbery was gunned down on a street intended to be a safe space for him. As he ran through the neighborhood that morning, he likely never thought he’d be fighting for his life in broad daylight.

The First Narrative

As a lawyer with close ties to Brunswick, I wanted to help. My brother, who coached Arbery in high school, reached out to me about the shooting and inquired about next steps. Together, we helped coordinate local efforts to galvanize Brunswick’s citizens to help discover the truth surrounding the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery. And what we started to discover was troubling.

For starters, initial news reports highlighted Arbery’s past (unrelated) felony convictions, while subjectively reporting the facts covered in the incident report.

What if Martha Stewart, another felon, suffered the same fate? Would the story also discuss her record at ...

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Parenting children requires a rich understanding of God’s nature.

Mothers today face an onslaught of mixed messages about how best to parent in the 21st century. Podcasts, blogs, and books on mommy-ing abound, but many of them indulge regularly in shallow parenting advice and fallacies about excessive self-care or “me-time.”

In the midst of the coronavirus quarantine, moms on social media often advise diametrically opposed strategies: Take regular mental health breaks while your children gorge on Netflix, or schedule out every minute of children’s at-home education so they don’t fall behind in productivity. The message seems to be either “love yourself first” or “pour all your energy into your children’s future.”

Neither side answers the more important question: How do we mother like Jesus Christ during this particular cultural moment? In the words of an overused adage, “What would Jesus do?”

In Motherhood: A Confession, Natalie Carnes, associate professor of theology at Baylor University, attempts to answer this question by sharing her personal experience of raising three daughters. She follows the structure and style of Augustine’s autobiography, Confessions, and elevates the conversation about motherhood from the self-centered to the spiritual without ever losing touch with the beauty of the ordinary. Part memoir and part theological study, Motherhood: A Confession explores “how motherhood, infancy, and children disclose what it means to be human in relation to the divine.”

Carnes’s core argument is that mothering imitates God. We birth forth disciples, hand down tradition, and grow our children into the church. By knowing the maternal attributes of God, we better mother our own children, and we also ...

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The group’s latest album offers a timely message for this global moment.

Is a pandemic the best time or the worst time to release an album of children’s music based on the Psalms? Musicians Flo Paris Oakes, Sandra McCracken, and Katy Bowser Hutson hope that All Creatures, the fourth album from their musical collective Rain for Roots, reaches the world at just the right time and offers hope in the midst of a storm. The album explores the emotional range of Israel’s original songbook and points listeners to God’s glory made manifest in creation.

The three Nashville musicians talked with Megan Fowler about their project, which just released.

The three previous Rain for Roots albums have focused on Bible stories, parables, and Advent. What was the inspiration for All Creatures?

McCracken: We started out talking about Psalms, and then all these images of creation were so present in the themes that were coming up. So we started paying attention to that. A secondary theme that emerged was songs, loosely based on Psalms, but then creation and the creatures that we saw calling us into worship. It’s not strictly a praise album, but a praise album by way of the Psalms, by way of the owls and birds.

Hutson: When you say it that way, Sandra, the two themes that kind of run through are, one, there’s so much of seeing how God reveals who he is in the natural world; and two, yes, there’s so much beautiful praise, but there’s also lament and fear. I like that the Psalms are such a great way to display, to young ones in particular, that all of the range of emotions are okay to bring before the face of God.

Oakes: And that God is with us, not just in this spiritual realm, but in our humanity. God is with us in every bit of the physical world.

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How the pandemic concentrated pressures on small churches—and how the body of Christ is stepping up to help, one $3,000 grant at a time.

Philadelphia pastor Kevin Cropper’s heart sank last month when he saw a message asking for food among the prayer requests emailed to his church.

“It was a request for something tangible, and we didn’t have it,” Cropper said.

His congregation, Ark of Safety Christian Church, had canceled its weekly food distribution since it ran out of donations when it stopped gathering in March. “It makes you feel bad because isn’t that what our mission is? We want to be able to help in this type of crisis, but we need the resources to do it.”

That’s the problem with being a small, inner-city black church during a pandemic. Black adults are more than twice as likely as whites or Hispanic Americans to know someone who has been hospitalized or died due to COVID-19. Their communities are afraid, grieving, and suffering from the virus themselves; and they are far less likely to have the staff, budgets, or space to help as much as they feel called.

“We are in the city. We don’t have acres, we stay close to each other, and it’s very easy to spread the virus,” said Kato Hart Jr., pastor of Hold the Light Ministries, a Church of God in Christ (COGIC) congregation in Detroit.

American counties with a higher-than-average proportion of black residents now account for half of coronavirus cases and 60 percent of deaths. Even in a church of 50, word keeps spreading of which members have lost relatives to the virus: aunties, uncles, grandparents. Hart has lost fellow brothers in ministry, citing a letter from denominational leadership saying 30 COGIC bishops have fallen to COVID-19—including a dozen in Michigan alone.

“We’re in a fight, and we need help. These megachurches, ...

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(UPDATED) The St. Louis pastor spoke up about the difficulties faced by leaders and critiqued “celebrity culture” in ministry.

Darrin Patrick, a megachurch pastor, author, and speaker, has died.

Patrick was a teaching pastor at Seacoast Church, a multi-site megachurch based in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, and the founding pastor of the Journey Church in St. Louis, where he lived.

In a Friday evening update, Seacoast Church stated: “Darrin was target shooting with a friend at the time of his death. An official cause of death has not been released but it appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound. No foul play is suspected.”

Patrick’s unexpected death came as a shock to friends and colleagues. Robby Gallaty, pastor of Long Hollow Baptist, in Hendersonville, Tennessee, said that Patrick was scheduled to speak at his church next weekend.

“I just talked to him Tuesday and Wednesday,” said Gallaty. “This is the second close friend I have lost in a year.”

Gallaty first met Patrick in 2015 and had invited him to speak the following year at a men’s ministry event at Long Hollow. Just before the event, he said, Patrick called and said he was leaving the ministry.

At the time, Patrick had been a rising star among Reformed evangelical circles and was serving as vice-president of the Acts 29 church planting network. He was fired from Journey for what church elders called misconduct including “inappropriate meetings, conversations, and phone calls with two women” and an abuse of power.

Despite Patrick’s fall from ministry, the two stayed friends. Patrick admitted his faults and got counseling. He went through a restoration process that lasted 26 months, according to a 2019 blog interview posted at Christianity Today. He returned to the ministry as a preacher but not as a senior pastor of a church. ...

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How politicians and leaders on both the Left and Right fail to adequately aid mothers.

Every election cycle, women’s issues are a flashpoint in the public square. This year is no exception: Candidates on both sides are debating abortion, equal pay, family leave, and maternal mortality.

These political clashes often hinge on deeply held views about who women are, how they’re wired, and what they need. One of the most salient aspects of female identity is our maternal nature—the inclination (broadly speaking) to foster enduring ties with our offspring. Gender essentialism is fraught with land mines and dangerous generalities, and not all women experience the maternal pull. Nonetheless, most of us would agree that women’s biology is in fact distinctive, and the innate potential to bear children and bond with them not only carries great weight for the family but also shapes our commonwealth.

The political Left and Right mishandle these maternal instincts in different ways. For hard-line progressives, female “nature” is a social construct to embrace or escape—it doesn’t serve a normative purpose. We see this view play out legislatively. Liberal Democrats rightly pride themselves on defending family-friendly policies. But they concurrently promote pro-abortion policies that treat a woman’s bond with her child as entirely voluntary and even arbitrary—severed here, supported there. “To Planned Parenthood, an undesired life is no life at all,” writes Russell Moore in National Review.

Those on the Right have a nearly inverse enigma. Both center-right and far-right Republicans tend to value a woman’s distinct maternal nature and the children who come with it. But that helping hand comes up short in other arenas, as mothers are too often left to ...

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