Civil Liberty

Should consumers who worry about the origins of their clothing, coffee, and chocolate focus on a more spiritual item: the Bible? Chances are good that your favorite Bible was printed in China. The over-whelming majority of Bibles sold are printed there, said Mark Bertrand of Bible Design Blog. He said: “A lot of people have misgivings about that. Some of it is, ‘Oh, our Bibles are printed in Communist China.’ Others are concerned about the economic situation, about what conditions these Bibles were produced under.”

The Chinese government’s restriction of Bible distribution is also troubling, said ChinaAid’s Bob Fu. “When brothers and sisters are being persecuted and arrested for their beliefs based on the same Bible, what does it mean to purchase an exported copy that says Made in China?”

China’s only legal printer of Bibles, Amity Printing Company, published its first Bible in cooperation with the United Bible Societies in 1987. Since then, more than half of the 100 million Bibles printed every year have been printed in China (50 million in 2019), making China the world’s biggest Bible publisher.

Printing Bibles is more difficult than printing other types of books, and requires a certain amount of expertise. That’s because of the specialized printing requirements for a complex book such as the Bible. Bibles require thin paper that cannot be fed into standard printing equipment, leather covers, stitched binding, color pages and special inserts such as maps. Most printers outside China do not have the range of facilities to manufacture the same Bibles.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Maybe Westerners seeing “Made in China” on their Bibles, can be a reminder to pray for those who made these Bibles. 2) God can use any instrument he chooses to spread his Word, even unbelieving, communist China (Isa. 55:11).

The December 20, 2020 issue of The New Yorker harshly criticized the numerous Christian churches that don’t take the pandemic seriously and refuse to follow basic safety precautions. No statistics are available on how many churches comply and how many defy lockdown protocols, but the magazine did say:

In 2020, many churches realized that the best way they could love their neighbors was to temporarily shut their doors. Early in the pandemic, the National Association of Evangelicals and Christianity Today issued a statement calling on churches to close “out of a deep sense of responsibility for others.”

The article went into detail into the history of Christian compassion during past deadly pandemics. They referenced Rodney Stark and his book The Rise of Christianity:

Rudimentary nursing, in the form of providing food and water, likely led to dramatically better survival rates among Christians and those they cared for, which would have seemed nothing short of miraculous amid so much suffering and death. Starks argues that differing mortality rates would lead to further conversion opportunities. He points out that “the Christian way appeared to work.”

However, the current behavior of the defiant churches will inevitably hurt the faith:

The pandemic in 2020 has held a mirror to Christianity, just as the epidemics of antiquity did, but today’s reflection carries the potential to repulse rather than attract. ... Churches will have to reckon … with how much their collective witness––the term Christians use to describe their ability to point to Jesus in their lives––may have been diminished.

Possible Preaching Angle:

There is an obvious tension between government regulation and freedom of religion, between loving our neighbors and the politicization of aspects of the pandemic. Every church is responsible before God to consider how best to worship God corporately, how to keep our vulnerable members protected, all the while being mindful of our appearance before a watching world.

Paul Louis Metzger writes:

My greatest living hero is Dr. John M. Perkins, an African American evangelical Christian and civil rights leader nearly beaten to death in Mississippi in 1970 for his work defending the rights of poor blacks. ... One evening in Portland, Oregon, I was driving the now-elderly Dr. Perkins to a benefit dinner. He was to serve as the keynote speaker at the dinner, which was raising money for an inner-city community development ministry that brought jobs and housing to ex-offenders and youth.

As we drove along--fittingly on a street called Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard--I asked Dr. Perkins what it was like for him now in Mississippi. Dr. Perkins replied matter-of-factly, “I'm kind of a hero now in Mississippi. It seems that every time the state newspapers write something about reconciliation, they quote me. It's as if I created the word. But when I think about how many homes my fame has built for the poor in Mississippi, I realize that my fame hasn't built any homes for the poor. So, I don't put no stock in my fame.”

For the last dozen years, in the basement of a university library in Waco, Texas, a small team of audio engineers has been busy trying to save black gospel music.

An engineer delicately removes a scuffed vinyl record from its tattered sleeve. He then cleans the disc and drops the needle on the turntable. Exhilarating music rises, filling the small room with voices not heard in half a century. Once the song has come to an end, the audio file is loaded into a digital archive at Baylor University.

In 2005, Robert Darden, a journalism professor at Baylor, wrote in an article in The New York Times, that innumerable black gospel records, particularly from the “Golden Age” of the mid-1940s to the mid-70s, were at risk of being lost, whether because of damage or neglect. He wrote, “It would be more than a cultural disaster to forever lose this music. It would be a sin.”

Darden estimated that around 75 percent of all gospel vinyl released during the Golden Age was no longer available. One of the rare songs that Darden helped recover was “Old Ship of Zion,” recorded in the early 1970s by the Mighty Wonders. Darden recalls the first time he heard it: “Our engineer played it for me in the studio, and we both broke into tears. I just want to make sure that every gospel song, the music that all American music comes from, is saved.”

Reverend Clay Evans, a Baptist pastor in Chicago who has worked as a civil rights leader and gospel recording artist, has powerful memories of the Golden Age. He says:

Gospel music motivated us. Music gave us hope. Hope that we needed to continue to overcome. Hope that we were on the right trail to overcome the racism that existed. Hope that God was with us in the struggle. We face the same issues today, and we still need encouragement.

Evans sees parallels between today’s struggles for social justice and the civil rights struggles of the past. “It’s good for children to know what we’ve been through. Then they can be encouraged to make it through, too.”

Click here to listen to ”Mighty Wonders – Old Ship of Zion”

Possible Preaching Angles: Black History Month; Church History; Worship music – It is so important to preserve the rich heritage of black gospel music. In this way, we will never forget the cultural context of gospel music and the vital contribution it made to church worship music.

Derek Lam is a courageous young Christian leader living in Hong Kong. In an article he wrote for The New York Times about the suppression of human rights for Christians in China. Lam wrote:

Since I was 16 years old, I have wanted to be a pastor. I was raised in a Christian family in Hong Kong that urged me to live by biblical principles … [Those biblical principles] have also informed my democratic activism for the past six years—and it is for that reason that I am likely to be jailed next month and that I will be barred from ever becoming a pastor.

Lam provides examples of what he calls "an unprecedented erosion of religious freedom in Hong Kong, especially for Christians"—believers forced to worship in underground churches, the government tearing down church buildings. The only way to avoid trouble, Lam says, is for churches to stay quiet and small or to bow down to the current leader of China—Xi Jinping.

But Lam boldly declares, "I won't make Jesus bow down to Xi Jinping. He concludes:

Although there is nothing I would love more than to become a pastor and preach the gospel in Hong Kong, I will never do so if it means making Jesus subservient to Xi Jinping. Instead, I will continue to fight for religious freedom in Hong Kong, even if I have to do it from behind bars. What I ask of you is to keep Hong Kong in your prayers as we seek to find light amid the sea of darkness descending upon us.

Ali is a young man with little money and no wife. This is all the incentive he needs to take the ninety-minute bus ride from his village to Baghdad. As soon as he arrives, the 21-year-old Iraqi heads straight to Abu Abdullah's. There it costs him only $1.50 for 15 minutes alone with a woman.

The room is a cell with a curtain for a door, and Ali complains that Abu Abdullah's women should bathe more often. But Ali sees the easy and inexpensive access to sexual favors as a big improvement over the days when Saddam Hussein was in power. The dictator strictly controlled vices such as prostitution, alcohol, and drugs. The fall of the regime gave rise to every kind of depravity. In addition to brothels, Iraqis have their choice of adult cinemas, where 70 cents buys an all-day ticket, and the audience hoots in protest if a nonpornographic trailer interrupts the action.

Referring to all the newly available immoral activities, Ali grins and says, "Now we have freedom."

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said:

Church and state would not be such a difficult subject if religion were, as the Court apparently thinks it to be, some purely personal avocation that can be indulged entirely in secret, like pornography, in the privacy of one's room.

For most believers it is not that, and has never been. Religious men and women of almost all denominations have felt it necessary to acknowledge and beseech the blessing of God as a people, and not just as individuals, because they believe in the "protection of divine Providence," as the Declaration of Independence put it, not just for individuals but for societies.

The dilemma for society is how to preserve personal and family values in a nation of diverse tastes. Tensions exist in any free society. But the freedom we enjoy rests on a foundation of individual liberty and shared moral values. Even as the shifting structure of the family and other social changes disrupt old patterns, we must reassert our values through individual and community action. People of all political persuasions--conservatives, moderates and liberals alike--need to dedicate themselves once again to preserving the moral foundation of our society.