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What The Bible Says - Good Samaritan's Penny Pulpit by Pastor Ed Rice

What The Bible Says - Good Samaritan's Penny Pulpit by Pastor Ed Rice

Spiritual care is essential as stressors among law enforcement rise.Sitting in the front row of a supervisor training in 2016, Stamford Police Sgt. Sean Boeger raised his hand every time the instructor asked who had dealt with a particular experience, including homicides, fatal accidents, and child deaths.During his nearly 30 years as a police officer, 48-year-old Boeger had helped with body recovery efforts at Ground Zero after 9/11. When 20 children were killed by a lone shooter in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, just 40 miles from Stamford, Boeger volunteered to help the small Newtown police department. He covered midnight shifts as officers took time to recover.The instructor at the training triggered something in Boeger. Until that class, he had never dwelt much on the effect of witnessing so much trauma. Driving home that evening, he also thought back to another incident, when he responded to a report of a small child falling out of an eighth-story window.“I felt overwhelmed, kind of panic-stricken,” he recalled of that evening. “I think I was more in shock from the stuff I’d never contemplated and the trauma impact it had on me. Because you don’t stop to think about it.”So Boeger did something he had never contemplated previously: He sought help from John Revell, a chaplain who had recently been spending time with his department.“I don’t know what’s going on with me, but I feel like I need to talk to you,” Boeger recalls telling Revell, whom he calls “the Rev.” Revell invited him over, interrupting his family dinnertime, and the two spent an hour or so talking. It opened the door to a longer-term relationship, and an eventual appreciation for the Rev’s consistent presence around ...Continue reading...

Around 100 people professed faith in Jesus at worship services held in wildfire-ravaged Hawaii last week, the culmination of Harvest Christian Fellowship's "Hope for Lahaina"? outreach efforts to share the hope of Christ with a community devastated by the deadliest wildfire in the United States in over a century.?

Māori Christians in New Zealand bristle at newly translated portions of the Bible that use the names of local deities.Last year, Bible Society New Zealand (BSNZ) released a 109-page booklet with 10 Bible passages published in a contemporary Māori translation for the first time. The version used the names of atua Māori, or Māori gods and deities, in place of words like heaven, earth, land, and sea. Genesis 1:1, for example, says that in the beginning, God made Rangi-nui (Sky Father) and Papatūānuku (Earth Mother) instead of rangi and whenua respectively.The changes, meant to appeal to younger Māori, stirred debate. While some readers praised the changes (“The terms are more relatable,” wrote one respondent in a BSNZ survey), many, including Māori theologians and church leaders, decried the use of atua Māori in the Scriptures as “twisted” and “blasphemous.”The aim of publishing He Tīmatanga (A Beginning) was not to present a final translation but to offer a draft for feedback, said Clare Knowles, translation coordinator at BSNZ. Publishing these passages was part of an effort that began in 2008 to “retranslate the entire Bible into Māori [in] today’s language.”While Māori speakers in New Zealand have a Bible translation in their language, it was last revised in 1952. The most recent edition in 2012 mainly focused on reformatting the text with updated paragraphs, spelling, and punctuation, but the content has largely remained the same since missionaries first translated the Bible into Māori in the 19th century.“Imagine if the only English translation we had was the King James Version. … This is a bit like the situation with Te Paipera Tapu, the Māori Bible,” Knowles wrote in an article promoting He Tīmatanga.In New Zealand, about 8 percent of the population speak Māori, ...Continue reading...

From 1978 to 2008, he fought for legal recognition and freedom to worship for the Anabaptist denomination. Nguyen Quang Trung spent 30 years trying to get the Mennonite church recognized and registered by the government of Vietnam so that believers could meet and worship legally. When he finally succeeded, he celebrated the triumph with the words of the apostle Paul: “If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord” (Rom. 14:8).Nguyen, a pastor and two-time president of Hội Thánh Mennonite Việt Nam (Vietnam Mennonite Church), died on March 23 at age 84. He was known for his “patient persistence” and “tireless efforts to promote and legally confirm a Mennonite presence in Vietnam,” Gerry Keener, former head of Eastern Mennonite Missions, told Anabaptist World.Nguyen was born in Gia Dinh, an industrial area outside Saigon. His mother died when he was five. His father was a committed Christian who raised him in the Evangelical Church of Vietnam, part of the Christian and Missionary Alliance.In his 20s, Nguyen found himself drawn to the Mennonites, spending a lot of time in a reading room established by the Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions and Charities. He took classes on English and the Bible and learned the Anabaptist teachings about nonviolence.“The same Spirit that empowered Jesus also empowers us to love enemies,” the missionaries taught Nguyen, “to forgive rather than to seek revenge, to practice right relationships, to rely on the community of faith to settle disputes, and to resist evil without violence.”Nguyen embraced the idea that Christians should “follow Christ in the way of peace” and practice “nonresistance,” even if they faced persecution and death.The ...Continue reading...

The popular series about Jesus is now available in 50 languages with plans for 550 more.The film was familiar but the language was new for Come and See CEO Stan Jantz.As he sat in a theater in Warsaw, he looked around the room and saw people laughing and crying in the same places he had laughed and cried when he watched The Chosen, the popular streaming series that tells the story of Jesus through the eyes of the disciples. That was the moment of truth for Jantz. The real test for a translation—going beyond accuracy alone—is whether it connects with human hearts.“Translation also has to be beautiful,” Jantz told CT. “It’s an art as much as it is a science.”Come and See has dubbed or subtitled The Chosen into 50 languages so far. The group has plans to do the same for 550 more languages.No TV show has ever been translated into that many languages. Few shows are dubbed more than a handful of times, even in an era where viewership of translated programs has dramatically increased, thanks to streaming services’ global business plans. Netflix can dub shows into about three dozen languages but mostly works in French, German, Polish, Italian, Turkish, Castilian Spanish, Latin American Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese. Some very popular shows are remade in another language, like Suits, which has Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian versions.Baywatch, starring David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson, has been translated 34 times. That was the record, until Come and See started turning out dubbed versions of The Chosen. There’s not a lot of profit in dubbing, so for-profit efforts will only go so far. A nonprofit like Come and See can do more.The group wants to reach 1 billion people with the show, so The Chosen can connect people to Jesus and bring them to faith. Come and ...Continue reading...