Dear Church, Don’t Give Up the Fight
The Church are people worth fighting for, otherwise, Christ died for nothing.
What's up with Church?
Author: Elizabeth
To avoid stranger danger on our journey. Here’s a little about where I’ve been and where I hope to go.
My name is Elizabeth Forshee, but friends call me Beth.
A born and raised Texan, I grew up in the Piney Woods of East Texas where heat and humidity suffocate everything but the mosquitos and love bugs. As a little girl I went from wanting to be a veterinarian to journalist. One summer I made my siblings (Yes, I am the bossy elder.) design, write and contribute jokes, games and articles to our first family magazine just for fun. My desire to write and the fact that the Holy Scriptures entered my life and wrecked my heart for anything other than God, I got my BA from Baylor in you guessed it; journalism. A lot of good that did when I married my husband and we launched our newlywed selves into full-time ministry. All was not lost. Ministry for me meant leaving for China as soon as possible, or rather six years on God’s time card. Working for a missions agency in communications and alongside my youth director husband in Colorado, we paid our debts to society, a.k.a. Baylor, and packed our six 50 lbs.-bags, one-year old son and set off for the land of Terra Cotta Warriors and the Silk Road. Dreams do come true. And so do hard times. The great thing about being young and in ones’ twenties is stamina. There is a lot more of it to get one through language school, culture stress, an international adoption overseas, visa paperwork, working several ministry roles all while making a new country a new home; until you have to return to the old one. That’s when you realize home is a facade. After serving seven years in China God took our Asia path and redirected us to a strange country called Michigan—for this southern girl I was positive were moving to the Arctic tundra and two winters later I am convinced that’s where I’ve landed. Now in the midwest I am relearning culture, language and the general system of American life. I’m wandering through society with a different lens, trying to make sense of the roads in which God leads us and the pit stops along the way. I’m seeing we are in a world that’s opened globally in countless ways, yet guarded. All the while, wondering how God fits into the greater scheme of it all, how he will redeem what’s been lost, heal the broken, and bring us wanders home.
What's up with Church?
What’s in your Church Compartment?
Part 2: Disillusionment with Church Oh no. I can guess what you are thinking. “Here she goes. Another woman on a mission for women’s rights in the church.” Well, rest assured, that is not the story I have to tell. I am not a feminist. I am not a “Christian feminist,” (a term I’ve recently learned while acclimating back to American life; a merely western term), and that’s not because I don’t care, I do…
The Pilgrim Life What's up with Church?
I Thought It Was Chocolate: Disillusionment with Church
Church is a mixed bag of nuts for me. My experience with the church started as a life-giving portal where I thought I’d be loved and protected, but eventually led me toward hurt and further ensuing me toward a passive-aggressive relationship with her. It makes complete sense to me that a large group of Christians today don’t like going to church or have left the church. The stories are similar; someone in the church hurt…
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I’ve never spent much time considering walls, fences, barriers of any sort. To be quite honest, unless you are in the business of fence building or ranching I don’t know who does? Most of us would say we rarely take notice of a fence or wall in our daily lives. So why bother writing about them? This summer our family wandered over to South Africa to visit friends and former China teammates–a long-awaited reunion. As…
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Voluntary Displacement
Our pilgrim-ness is our sameness, it is the bridge that connects us.
