President Cornelius recently attended the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington D.C. In this short video he shares about how the life and words of Rwandan President Paul Kagame greatly impacted him. He leaves us with an encouragement regarding the power of forgiveness and how it contributes to the building and flourishing of our communities.

In the Fijian language, the word for enemies is meca, as in “dou lomani ira na kemudou meca,” which is Jesus’s command to “love your enemies” (Matt 5:44). This essay is my deep dive into what this means, what it feels like, and how it is deployed in the climate crisis. It’s always an exciting moment when one of our participants in the Christian Climate Observers Program (CCOP) gets to meet a US senator at a UN Climate Summit. How often does one have such high-level access to talk about climate change? How often do you meet a politician who cares? The US congressional delegation usually comes in at the start of the second week of the COP. They are greeted by the US Special Envoy on Climate, John Kerry. They come prepared with their talking points, including that one tweetable soundbite. For Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) that statement was: “The number one enemy to solving the climate crisis is the fossil fuel industry but the number two enemy is despondency.” Despite the buzz around Schatz’s quote, I however could only receive it uneasily. This, I felt, was one of the worst things the senator could have said at COP28. Read More.

Hear the story of how Prof. Philomena Njeri Mwaura and a committee of like-minded men and women convinced the government to make one-third of the Parliament female. 

Greetings from Dr. Grace May, Director of the Women’s Institute…

This is unimaginably high-level influence.  Al Ghais himself shows up on December 10 to help advance his agenda.  He conducts a “Special Day—OPEC and the Youth.”  It’s a fireside chat.   According to Reuters, “roughly a dozen young people attended.”  Four of them were CCOPers. In the wake of that agenda, Al Ghais encounters pushback.  There’s protest out in the hallway—thank you, 350.org—but inside there are respectful questions and challenges—about Carbon Capture and Sequestration, about the false narrative that OPEC is spinning.  Our CCOPers know what they were talking about.  Al Ghais leaves.  The PR guy remains.  He is apparently frustrated—but that is because his plans have been frustrated.  What Reuters called a “charm offensive” has failed.  No one has ever likely stood up to them before in such an intimate setting.  No one has ever been given a chance to engage their falsehoods before in a dialogue setting. Read More.

I understand that the U.A.E. is rich in fossil fuels.  So is Canada, the United States, Mexico, and many of the other countries represented today in this room.  Faith communities must take up the prophetic task of promoting the love, harmony, and obedience behind Net Zero.  In the Appalachian region of the United States, there are many church buildings that have been built by the coal companies.  In the Athabasca region of northern Alberta in Canada, there are many churches dependent on offerings from families employed by the oil companies.  The same is true for churches around Houston, TX.  It is hard for a preacher to step into the pulpit with a commitment to the gospel and a commitment to the fossil fuel companies.  The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and our Apostle Paul had something in common: when they both entered the city they were disgusted, outraged, deeply troubled by the idolatry they encountered.  Today, may we also have eyes to see the idolatry that has sprung up around our use of fossil fuels. Read more

At the roots of Capitalism and Communism are theologies and practices of Land Rights - for good or ill!!!  In the last decades 1.4 billion have been dispossessed of their land twice…

This year however, I’ve been tipped off about discovery, and am proactively planning it into my experience of COP28. This year, I intend to: 1) discover that you and I and every living creature who cares about our planet has enemies; 2) discover that “loving your enemies” introduces us to a new type of Christian love, a kind we never learned in the Sunday Schools of our dominant culture; and 3) test the validity of Martin Luther King’s assertion: “if you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption.” Planet Earth could use a little redemption. The climate movement could use a new type of power. Our enemies seem to be winning. Read More.

Thanks for journeying with me and for your support that made my trip to Kenya possible.  Answered prayers lined each day from preaching the day after I arrived to my final visit with a Kenyan leader hours before taking off from Nairobi…

In the end, the conscience-stricken David brings the subject of enmity back around. “May the Lord judge between you and me,' he yells at Saul from a safe distance, 'And may the Lord avenge the wrongs you have done to me, but my hand will not touch you.… May the Lord be our judge and decide between us. May he consider my cause and uphold it; may he vindicate me by delivering me from your hand.”

Have you heard of the new technology that can actually turn waste carbon dioxide and hydrogen gases into commercial-grade methanol? …

There’s a part of Jesus’s story in Luke 19—there’s some debate over whether it qualifies as a parable—that is about human solidarity. It begins in what we might call the ‘here and now’ with a certain rich man clothed in finery and eating the best food. A beggar named Lazarus, covered in sores, sits right outside his house.

For the sake of this paper I’ll mention only three capacities that, in my experience, evangelicalism has denied the creation care plant over the last two decades, namely: 1) a capacity for integration with the environmental justice movement, 2) a capacity to confront Christian nationalism and political conflation, and 3) a capacity to evolve that next step theologically: we abandoned Dominionism for the concept of faithful “stewardship”—thank God for Francis Schaeffer and Cal DeWitt—but now we need to develop a new, but biblical, anthropology of our creatureliness and interconnectedness. What I mean by “capacity” is: they didn’t let us go there. Evangelicalism didn’t let us go there. Read More.

On a recent trip back to China with my family for the first time in four years, I couldn’t help noticing the changes around me, in technology, infrastructure, and renewable energy development, to name a few….

Jacob was fleeing the wrath of his brother Esau and the disappointment of his father Isaac, when he 'stopped for the night because the sun had set' (v.10). The 'certain place' he had reached was named Luz, which according to the name apparently refers to an almond grove. In a fact that never failed to amaze us Sunday School kids as much as the glorious ladder did: Jacob took a stone and used it as a pillow!

WCIU, since its inception, has always sought to provide training to women and men on the ground and, as it were, in the trenches. Dr. Ralph D. Winter’s vision was to make training for engagement relevant, dynamic, and accessible. This emphasis continues to drive the vision and mission of the institution….