Wilberforce News

I tell our international mentees about the student who goes to the doctor, coughing, feverish, blowing his nose, generally miserable. After examining him, the doctor announces, “You have a broken arm. I will put a cast on your arm for the next six weeks until it heals.” Who grants this doctor permission to practice medicine? And, yet, many of the doctors of our civilization and society, cloistered in academia’s hallowed ivory towers, misdiagnose our social maladies and offer failed remedies. The current and perhaps the most destructive misdiagnosis is systemic racism, which maintains that disparities between racial groups are caused by malignant racism that festers not only in human hearts but in the structures and institutions of society.

The horrid murder of a black man—a human being with full God-given dignity and responsibilities to glorify His Creator and to protect His world while also producing goods and services that serve his neighbor— by a white policeman on May 25 has unleashed what a neighbor called “demonic forces.” Thousands of youth (of all races, not just blacks) are rampaging and looting and burning and destroying at will as I write.

Human beings were created to utilize our productive capacities in order to design products and services that lovingly serve our neighbors. Unless we understand that, many societies will continue to produce little wealth and, instead, wallow in poverty.

Recently, Academy executive director Dr. Bob Osburn was invited to participate in a symposium, led by Dr. Mitch Pearlstein, founder of the Center of the American Experiment, on personal responsibility in education. Enjoy the entire symposium (and the 40-some authors), or go to pages 40-41 to read Dr. Osburn’s thoughts on this topic.

Demand-sharing fuels corruption and a host of distorted behaviors that result in widespread poverty. Until demand-sharing ends, poverty will remain pervasive throughout much of the world. There are at least five reasons that demand-sharing is dangerous.

The American-born Prosperity Gospel is ravaging, consuming, clear-cutting Africa and elsewhere. American prosperity preachers like Kenneth Copeland, Joel Osteen, Paula White, T D. Jakes, Benny Hinn, and a host of others bask in immense wealth at the expense of millions of lower and middle-income folks here. But, in Africa hundreds of millions of dirt-poor folks are being harmed by this successfully exported heresy.

The Wall Street Journal  this past week called it the “new war against Africa’s Christians.”  My friend, Dr. Musa Filibus, Archbishop of Nigeria’s 2-million strong Lutheran church and current president of the Lutheran World Federation, has been pleading for several years: “Christians are dying here at the hands of Muslim extremists, and the world does not care!”  

The story of a young student at the University of Michigan, converted to faith in Jesus Christ amidst late 1960s revolutionary mayhem.

I suggest church leaders should teach Christians that they are citizens of two kingdoms, with dual loyalties.  Thus, we must carefully balance music that exalts the Savior and His goodness to our nation.  This is an especially important issue for most of my students who come from nations where the long-term influence of Christianity has been absent or muted at best (e.g., India and China).  How do they faithfully cherish their citizenship in God’s Kingdom while citizens of nations without a Christian heritage?