Dr Paul Allen

A church elder was shot as his daughters were kidnapped in northwest Nigeria on Friday (Sept. 18), days after a pastor and three other Christians in a north-central state were killed earlier this month. Morning Star News reports that Hassana and Hussaina Garba, teenaged Christian twin sisters, were kidnapped from their home beside their Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA) worship building in Kwakware village, Kankara County in northwest Nigeria’s Katsina state, sources said. The kidnappers shot their father, ECWA elder Ibrahim Garba, in the stomach in the 10:30 p.m. assault, and sources said he was receiving hospital treatment. Kidnappings by various criminal elements have become rampant in Katsina state the past few years, with the high number committed by predominantly Muslim Fulanis prompting Gov. Aminu Masari to warn last year that the tribe risks being targeted by vigilantes. Kwakware area resident Charles Yahaya said kidnapping has long been a problem in Katsina state but has i...

The exhortation to “abide” has been frequently misunderstood, as though it were a special, mystical, and indefinable experience. But Jesus makes clear that it actually involves a number of concrete realities. First, union with our Lord depends on His grace . Of course we are actively and personally united to Christ by faith ( John 14:12 ). But faith itself is rooted in the activity of God. It is the Father who, as the divine Gardener, has grafted us into Christ. It is Christ, by His Word, who has cleansed us to fit us for union with Himself (15:3). All is sovereign, all is of grace. Second, union with Christ means being obedient to Him . Abiding involves our response to the teaching of Jesus: “If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you …” ( John 15:7a ). Paul echoes this idea in Colossians 3:16 , where he writes, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly,” a statement closely related to his parallel exhortation in Ephesians 5:18 : “be filled with the Spirit.” In a nutshell...

What a wonderful promise to recently emancipated slaves travelling through a wilderness, that they would live permanently and safely in their own fertile country; see Lev. 26:5! The word ‘dwell’ or abide, when used in the Bible, has at its root the idea of remaining permanently in a place, see Gen. 29:19, while its antonym (opposite) is to sojourn, as in Genesis 12:10, where we read that Abram had it in mind to stay for a short time only in Egypt. This promise of dwelling follows the Lord’s earlier declaration that, ‘I established also my covenant with them, to give them the land of Canaan … in which they were sojourners’, Exod. 6:4 JND . Former sojourners were to be dwellers! However, this and the other promises connected with it were conditional, as the Lord had said, ‘if ye walk in my statutes, and keep my commandments, and do them’, Lev. 26:3, ‘I will give you rain … peace … and make you fruitful’, vv. 4, 6, 9, and ‘I will … establish my covenant with you, v. 9. (In fact, the...

In the last few tragic days, I received the following comment in my twitter feed from an Australian journalist. AIDS researchers and a Catholic nun among #MH17 victims. If you believe in a god, this would seriously be testing your faith. I replied, Well, most of all, and sadly, it tests your faith in humanity who do these things to each other. The journalist was kind enough to ‘favourite’ my tweet as her reply. I think she recognised that before we rush to blame God , we should direct our blame on those directly responsible for such evil: the terrorist who fired the rocket launcher; the persons who supplied the hardware and training to fire it. More broadly in recent days, it is not God who burned down Mosul ’s church, but the ISIS militants. It is not God who butchered a hundred villagers in Damboa , Nigeria, with RPGs and machine guns, but Boko Haram . That’s where the clear and immediate moral responsibility lies: with the human evildoers. However, once we’v...

The number of very large churches continues to increase, as our graphic dramatically illustrates. And within that group, the biggest churches continue to get bigger. In the past I’ve written about everything from sanctuary sizes (very few new ones over 5,000) to  the first megachurch (start with Pentecost when “about 3,000” were converted, per Acts 2:41) to global megachurches ( Korea and Nigeria are currently leading). But what about the people who attend really big churches? Fellow researcher Scott Thumma and I surveyed some 25,000 of them, with some fascinating discoveries: Nearly two-thirds of attenders have been at these churches 5 years or less. Many attenders come from other churches, but nearly a quarter haven’t been in any church for a long time before coming to a megachurch. New people almost always come to the megachurch because family, friends or coworkers invited them. Fifty-five percent of megachurch attenders volunteer at the church in some way (a ...

Image via Wikipedia The world population will reach seven billion later this year, with increases in the number of people in Africa off-setting birth rate drops elsewhere, according to a new French study published Thursday. Looking much further ahead, the National Institute for Demographic Studies ( INED ) predicts a continuing rise in the overall population figures until the total stabilizes somewhere between nine and 10 billion worldwide by the end of the century. From six billion people, the figure estimated in 1999, the gap between the global birth and death rates has swiftly brought the total figure towards the next billion in just 12 years. INED expects it to take a further 14 years to reach eight billion people before the figures start stabilizing, according to the study which pulls together research carried out by the United Nations , the World Bank and several major national institutes. In historical terms the growth in the global population has been soaring since the...