The Ethiopian Church Journal Blog

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make oura joy complete. This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from allb sin. If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our

By Mitiku Adisu Emergence of a set of problems often point to a deeper problem. There was, for example, a debt ceiling confrontation that went on for weeks between US political parties and the President. Each knew what needed to be done to resolve the problem but none were prepared to do the right thing. Instead each blamed and maligned the other side - and history - to get a sizable segment of the public behind them. Each side engaged in a deadly fight for what is right in their own eyes. It is all about self-interest (pride, greed, hate-mongering) couched in ever creative patriotic, legal, religious, and refined phrases. We bet you know what that is called? S-I-N. SIN. And just last week there were riots and looting in Britain where children as young as ten were observed taking part. With economic downturn and the Cameron government slashing funding to social services, it is not surprising that poor neighborhoods are relatively hit hard and hence the locus of the incident. Wha

GOD IS HOLY Source: Revival Addresses by R.A. Torrey, 1856-1928  God is holy. How the Bible in every page brings that out! How it labors with all its types, sacrifices, ceremonies, explicit teaching, to impress upon men and women that God is holy. Take the supreme expression of it in I John i. 5, “God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.” In the Scripture lesson tonight I read a passage from Isaiah in which he gives us a bit of his own biography. He was, perhaps, the best man of his time, but when he got one glimpse of God in His holiness, when he saw even the seraphim (the burning ones, glowing in their own holiness) covering their faces and their feet in the presence of the infinitely Holy Jehovah, he was overwhelmed, and cried, “Woe is me, for I am undone, because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips, for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts.” Men and women of London, if there should burst upon this audience to-night a re

credit: hsinvisiblechildren.org Adopted girl's death prompts neglect investigation in Sedro Woolley | Source: nwcn.com SEDRO WOOLLEY, Wash. – An investigation into possible neglect is under way after an adopted 13-year-old girl died at a home in Skagit County. Hana Grace Williams, who was adopted from Ethiopia in 2008, was found dead on May 12 in the yard of her home. The Skagit County Medical Examiner’s Office said she died of hypothermia. A source close to the investigation said Hana was 30 pounds lighter than when she arrived from Ethiopia. The Washington state Department of Social and Health Services says all eight of her siblings have been removed from the home. The prosecutor’s office said it is still waiting for more information before making a decision on charges. Hana’s parents could not be reached for comment Sunday. The END. Requiem Not under foreign skies Nor under foreign wings protected - I shared all this with my own people There, where mi

Being the People of God Interview with Dr. Girma Bekele - Final   You raise liberation theology. Perhaps you had in mind the argument for God’s “preferential treatment for the poor.” The same God who dealt compassionately with Hagar, however, was also compassionate to Abram. Should we not be wary of overemphasizing God’s charity to those on the margins and not also to those at the center blighted by sin no less? Not just structural sin and liberation but also personal sin and conversion? Don’t you see how theologians often are found romanticizing the poor. God’s mission is intrinsic to his being as a compassionate God and the God of the god-forsaken. The Bible declares: “For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of

By RA Torrey, 1856-1928 [Revival Addresses] You and I some day must meet this holy God. The prophet Amos cries, “Prepare to meet thy God!’ (Amos 4, 12). Every man and woman here must some day meet God. The rich man must meet God! The beggar must meet God! The scholar must meet God! The illiterate man must meet God! The nobleman must meet God! The king must meet God! The emperor must meet God! Every one must meet God! The supreme question of life, then, is this: Are you ready to meet God? None of us can tell how soon it may be that we shall meet God. The king of Spain, as the bulletins flashed across the wires to-night, has been very near meeting his God to-day. Some of us may meet Him within the next twenty-four hours; more within the year; many more within five years; and within forty years almost every man and woman in this audience will have met God. Are you ready? If not, I implore you to get ready before leaving this hall tonight.   How can we meet God with joy and not with dism

 A Christian Vision of Beauty "A Christian understanding of beauty runs directly into the wisdom of the age by suggesting that the beautiful is simultaneously the good and the true and the real . This goes all the way back to the conversation of the ancients—especially to Plato, who understood the good, the beautiful, the true, and the real as being essentially reducible to the same thing. If there is one good, then that good must also be the true, which must also be the real, which must also be the beautiful. So the good, the beautiful, the true, and the real— the four great historical transcendentals—are unified in the One. For Plato, however, the One has no name... Augustine, the great theologian of the Patristic Era, identified the One as the one true and living God. Taking Plato’s metaphysical speculations into the very heart of the gospel, Augustine suggested that Christians uniquely understand that the good, the beautiful, the true, and the real are indeed one, becau