About the Webmaster
15th March 2013
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In the late 1980’s I was a college grad working with churches on an island called “La Isla del Tigre”. My roommate and I had just finished explaining Christianity to a Honduran couple from one of the villages. We were unprepared for their response. “We have heard that before, but it never made a difference on this island.” And with that comment, a passion was born..
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This passion was rooted in my studies in religion and sociology at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Much of my course work had focused on modern Western critiques of Christianity. The principled arguments of Feuerbach, Freud and Nietzsche were powerful. I could not refute them. But my experience of Christianity through Intervarsity Christian Fellowship on the campus kept me grounded and growing in my faith. Though I could not justify it intellectually, I knew that the story of Christianity was true. It was making a difference in so many people’s lives.
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This tension became clearer, not only in the response of the Honduran couple, but in experiences after that time in Southern African and the United States. I struggled while at Fuller Seminary with a way to speak Christianity with intellectual integrity. Given the TV evangelist scandals of the 80s, the genocides of the 1990s in the wake of the East African revival, and the child sex abuse scandals among Catholic Priests up to the present day the task would be a challenge. As a pastor in Mozambique, South Carolina and Los Angeles I confronted an institutional Christianity that left so many stern, insecure and unloving Christians unchanged and while having a minimal impact upon the communities in which they found themselves. As a father, I worked with my wife to help our two sons develop a faith that is clearly expressed in their character and in their relationships with others. Again and again that persistent question surfaced: “What difference does Christianity make?”
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Wirkungsgeschichte is dedicated to an embodied response to that couple as well as to post-modern Western culture. It says, “Christianity does make a difference. Let me show you what I mean!”
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