Anyone who follows the news knows that our urban youth face huge challenges. Many of them come from broken homes. Their neighborhoods are unsafe. The only sense of belonging comes from street gangs. The schools fail to educate them. These young people, their worldviews constricted by what they see in front of them, cannot imagine a better way. But there is, and it starts with summer camp.

Let me tell you a story. When 15-year-old Ray came to a camp ministry in Branson, Missouri, called Kids Across America, his counselor, Richard Marks, described him as disobedient and rebellious. “If I told him to go right, he would go left,” Richard says. “If I told him to go up, he went down. Ray was determined then to be a knucklehead. I had to discipline him several times, but I could tell he was hungry for something.”

Indeed. For more than 30 years, Kids Across America has been responding to that hunger, which only Jesus can satisfy, in kids like Ray, who otherwise would be left by the spiritual wayside.

Continue reading BreakPoint –  How Christian Camps are Changing Kids’ Lives →

If you happen to watch a Major League Baseball game on TV tonight, you’ll notice something unusual about the players’ uniforms. Every major leaguer will be wearing the number 42.

That’s because 69 years ago today, Brooklyn Dodgers great Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier.

It’s almost impossible for us today to imagine what Robinson endured as the big leagues’ first black ballplayer. But his ordeal is captured brilliantly in the biopic film “42,” which came out just a few years ago.

As good as the film is, it all but omits the most significant factor in Jackie Robinson’s ability to turn the other cheek; to endure almost unbearable insults and physical attacks on the field without lashing out himself. That factor was Robinson’s strong Christian faith.

Continue reading BreakPoint –  What was the Secret of Jackie Robinson’s Greatness? →

The first week of April saw a social-media-driven panic sweep across the campus of Indiana University. Starting around 9:15pm, students started tweeting about a sinister character prowling about campus seeking whom he might devour.

One student tweeted, “[IU] students be careful, there’s someone walking around in [KKK] gear with a whip.” Another complained about the school’s failure to “make students feel safe.”

A residence hall advisor then fired off an email saying, “There has been a person reported walking around campus in a KKK outfit holding a whip . . .  I would recommend staying indoors if you’re alone.”

Continue reading BreakPoint – Why Modern Culture Often Misunderstands Christianity →

If you’re a parent like I am, chances are that during at least one late-night homework assignment you heard those frustrating words: “I’m just not smart enough to do this!”

It’s not hard to see how students, not to mention parents and even teachers, get this fatalistic notion about what it means to be intelligent. So much of what we call education—from classes centered on memorization, regurgitation of facts and passing tests, to forcing kids to sit still at desks for hours—favors a certain kind of student while leaving others floundering.

For example, IQ, or “intelligence quotient,” is a single number used to express how well individuals perform on a series of questions and puzzles. If you score higher than 140, you’re allegedly an Einsteinian genius. If you score lower than 75—well.

But a 2012 study of more than 100,000 people—the largest to date—suggested that IQ alone is a poor indicator of overall intelligence. Instead, abilities like short-term memory, reasoning, and verbal agility—all governed by separate brain “circuits”—together comprise that illusive quality we call “being smart.”

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Rethinking Smart: Intelligence is Not a Number →

In Rock and Roll lore, February 3, 1959, is known as “The Day the Music Died.” On that day, a small airplane carrying Buddy Holly, J.P. Richardson, better known as the “Big Bopper,” and Richie Valens of “La Bamba” fame crashed, killing all three of the men as well as the pilot.

Among the people who took the news hard was a teenager in Billings, Montana, named Chan Romero. Romero and Valens had some important things in common: They were both seventeen years old and they shared a Latino heritage.

This, in addition to Romero’s musical talent, caused many people to view Romero as Valens’ successor. It didn’t turn out that way, but as Romero would tell you, his life turned out very well, indeed.

Shortly after Valens’ death, a recording of Romero’s music made it into the hands of Valens’ manager, Bob Keane. Keane liked what he heard and saw, and invited Romero to move out to Los Angeles where he signed him onto Valens’ old label.

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Contentment and the Hippy Hippy Shake: A Rock and Roller Who Loves Jesus →

Nearly nine years ago, Chuck Colson told BreakPoint listeners about a company in Virginia that “for as little as $4500,” would place your loved one’s ashes in a “bio-degradable urn” and bury these ashes alongside a tree.

What made the company’s offering more than just another expensive burial plot was what happened afterwards. The ad said, “As the urn decomposes, you ‘will become one’ with your ‘personal’ tree.” As Chuck noted at the time, “since up to 15 family members can be ‘become one’ with a particular tree, the concept of a ‘family tree’ will take on a whole new meaning.”

While the idea appealed to a certain post-Christian, Gaia-worshipping sensibility, $4,500 was a lot of money. So a company trying to raise money on Kickstarter is now offering to do it for less than $500.

The way it works is that you first select what kind of tree you want your loved one or pet to be in the afterlife: beech, ash, ginkgo, or pine. You then place their cremated ashes in their biodegradable “bio-urn,” and, in turn, place the bio-urn in their new “Incube,” a high-tech planter’s pot.

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Should Christians Cremate or Bury Their Dead? →

“When you talk about Christians restoring the culture,” I’m sometimes asked, “do you mean that we should take over the laws and run society? Because, you know, that’s been tried before, and it didn’t go so well.”

I can understand the confusion. One source of the confusion is that there are some Christians who do propose something like this. Some of them are following the theological ideas of R. J. Rushdoony, who is considered to be a founder of what is known as Christian reconstructionism. Others, just use language like “taking back America” or “conquering the seven mountains of culture.” They seem to imply a sort of Christian takeover of the key segments of culture.

Another source for the confusion is eschatology, or competing visions about the end times. And yet another source would be mainstream media outlets, particularly those on the far left, who are constantly worrying about Christians conspiring to impose a theocracy—typically through a candidate they do not like. (I only wish they had more trouble finding sound bites to support their conspiracy theories).

Continue reading BreakPoint –  What Does it Mean for Christians to Take Back the Culture? →

In his book, “Darwin’s Doubt,” Dr. Stephen Meyer quotes Chinese paleontologist J. Y. Chen: “In China,” Chen says, “we can criticize Darwin, but not the government; in America, you can criticize the government, but not Darwin.”

A couple of Chinese researchers recently found this out the hard way when they published a paper on the workings of the human hand in the science journal PLOS ONE. Their title was innocuous enough: “Biomechanical Characteristics of Hand Coordination in Grasping Activities of Daily Living.”

But a sentence in the abstract got these authors in a world of trouble: “…the biomechanical characteristic of tendinous connective architecture…” they wrote, “is the proper design by the Creator to perform a multitude of daily tasks in a comfortable way.”

What? The creator mentioned in a scientific journal?

“As a scientist,” protested one PLOS ONE editor, “I feel outraged by the publication of a [manuscript] making explicit reference to creationism.”

Continue reading BreakPoint – When Science Becomes a God: Creationism Vs. Darwinism →

This past Easter weekend, two events in Pakistan served as reminders of the precarious position of Christians living in societies with Muslims majorities.

The first was, of course, the bombing of a park in Lahore, the ancient capital of Pakistan’s largest province, Punjab. On the afternoon of Easter Sunday, while members of Pakistan’s increasingly beleaguered Christian minority celebrated the holiday, a suicide bomber detonated his device, killing at least 70 people and wounding at least 300 more.

Shortly after the attack, a faction of the Pakistani Taliban named Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, which in truly Orwellian fashion means “Assembly of the Free,” claimed responsibility, admitting brazenly that the attack was “aimed at killing members of Pakistan’s Christian minority gathered at the park to celebrate Easter Sunday.”

Since Christians are less than two percent of Pakistan’s estimated 190 million people, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the attack killed Muslims as well as Christians. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was outraged and after visiting victims in hospital, declared that, “Our resolve as a nation and as a government is getting stronger and the cowardly enemy is trying for soft targets.”

While I don’t doubt the Prime Minister’s sincerity, he really has his work cut out for him. As the Canadian Broadcasting Company put it, the jihadist market in Pakistan is “saturated.” And as recent events in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, demonstrate, there’s no shortage of Pakistani’s eager to victimize its Christian minority.

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Faith Can be Fatal: Pakistani Christians in the Crosshairs →

I remember when I first heard Chuck Colson, on a BreakPoint commentary years ago, make a distinction between religious liberty and freedom of worship. “Freedom of worship,” a phrase being used more and more Chuck warned, is the freedom to believe what you want in the privacy of your own mind, and maybe inside the doors of your house of worship. But what the founders had in mind was much more robust—the freedom to carry our deeply held beliefs into the public square and allow them to shape our lives.

As I admitted to him later, I thought Chuck was making much ado about nothing with that distinction. But as we’ve clearly seen in how the government has argued for the HHS Mandate and the way the courts have ruled against wedding-related business owners, Chuck was absolutely right.

This week’s incident, however, threatens even that neutered, watered-down version of freedom of worship.

As we talked about yesterday on BreakPoint, Georgia Governor Nathan Deal vetoed HB757, saying the bill “doesn’t reflect the character of our state or the character of our people.” Deal, despite his insistence otherwise, was the latest governor to cave to the well-orchestrated pressure from the NFL, Disney, Salesforce, and the LGBT lobby.

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Georgia’s Governor Deal Caves to Big Businesses: What We Must Learn about Religious Freedom →

You’re on the wrong side of history.” “Not fully affirming LGBT rights is unloving.” “Jesus loved everyone; why do you hate gays and lesbians?”

The constant refrains directed at proponents of one-man, one-woman marriage warn that to oppose so-called same-sex “marriage” is to be relegated to history’s ideological dustbin along with those who resisted civil rights for African-Americans or the vote for women.

And over the last few years, more and more self-identifying evangelical voices have joined the chorus. Like Rev. Danny Cortez, whose church was expelled from the Southern Baptist Convention, told the Huffington Post, “I believed for years,” Cortez said, “that marriage should only be between one man and one woman. But as I began relationships with LGBT persons, I saw that my beliefs had been destructive and not in line with the teachings of Jesus Christ.”

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Maundy Thursday and the Marriage Battle →

In Ezekiel 5, the prophet laments that not only had Jerusalem become wicked and idolatrous—she had become an embarrassment to even her pagan, Baal-worshiping neighbors.

Well, professing Christians today may find themselves in a similarly embarrassing spot. When it comes to marriage and family, the nation is doing poorly. But it turns out one group is doing worse than the whole: Christians who don’t go to church.

First, some background. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2015 the U.S. marriage rate had fallen to an all-time low of 6.74 per 1,000 people and is expected to keep dropping.

That’s bad news for kids, increasing numbers of whom are being raised in single-parent households and by unmarried couples. As W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project, notes, “marriage provides a unique level of emotional security and stability” for kids.

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Marriage and Nominal Christianity: A Match Made, Well, Not in Heaven →

Americans have a thing for the exotic, no matter how costly it may prove to other people. For instance, the Florida Everglades are home to, among other species, Nile crocodiles, green anacondas, and most famously, tens of thousands of Burmese pythons.

As words like “Nile” and “Burmese” suggest, none of these species are native to Florida or even to this continent. Their presence in the Everglades, and the damage they’re causing to that fragile ecosystem is the result of people indulging their desire for exotic pets and then dumping them when they become inconvenient.

As bad as this sort of self-indulgence is when we’re talking reptiles, it’s infinitely worse when the exotic commodity is people.

Continue reading BreakPoint – Making (Exotic) Babies: Human Life, Made to Order →

Forty years ago, Time magazine declared 1976 to be “The Year of the Evangelical.” The occasion was the candidacy of then-former governor Jimmy Carter who introduced many Americans to a phrase they had never heard before: “born-again Christian.”

This year, Evangelicals are in the news again, and again, for mostly political reasons. It’s difficult to avoid the plethora of stories about how “Evangelicals” are voting and what it all means.

This broadcast is about none of this. Instead I want to talk about the word “Evangelical” in the context where it makes the most sense: what people believe. In the process we may learn things we probably didn’t know but should.

Writing for Christianity Today, “BreakPoint This Week” co-host Ed Stetzer and Leith Anderson of the National Association of Evangelicals sought to define what the term “Evangelical” means, especially in this election year.

Most surveys, especially political ones, depend on self-identification. If a person calls herself an Evangelical, then she is counted as one. Others use denominational affiliation as a proxy. Neither of these gives us an accurate estimate: They either include people who probably shouldn’t be included or miss people who should be included.

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Evangelicals and Politics: So What is an Evangelical, Anyway? →

Editor’s note: Fox News is reporting this morning that Secretary of State John Kerry will declare today that ISIS is committing genocide against Christians and other religious minorities.

In the mid-1940s, Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer born and raised in Poland, coined a name for what prior to the 20th century had been unthinkable. He combined the Greek word for “family,” “tribe,” or “race,” and the Latin word for “killing,” to describe events like the Nazi extermination campaign against his fellow Jews, Stalin’s starvation of millions of Ukrainians, and the Turkish cleansing of their Armenian and Assyrian subjects. The word: genocide.

Lemkin defined genocide as more than the “mass killings of all members of a nation.” Genocide, he suggested, was a “coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”

So in addition to physical attacks, genocide could also include “the disintegration of the political and social institutions” and attempts to suppress things like the culture, language, and of course, the religion of the targeted group.

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Congress Finally Acknowledges Genocide in Middle East →

If you’re a mom or a dad like me, your dearest hope is that your children will grow up to know and love God. To be followers of Jesus Christ, live out His call on their lives in a way that brings God glory.

But you also know that your kids live in a world that is, to put it mildly, no longer conducive to Christian faith. Distractions, temptations, outright spiritual assaults await them—whether at school, on their smart phone, or from their peers.

You do all the “ordinary” things. And ordinary is not a bad word. You pray with your kids. You take them to church and youth group. But these are not ordinary times. So please, let me suggest something extraordinary you can do for your child.

For 14 years, I along with other Christian leaders have committed part of my summers to teach at Summit Ministries. There’s no other ministry that does a better job training young Christians in Christian worldview and apologetics, and preparing them to live out their faith in this culture.

That’s why I tell everyone, if you have a son or daughter ages 16 through 22, send them to a Summit Ministries conference this summer.

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Summit Conference: A Way for Young People to Receive Truth and Build Relationships →