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| The Divided Kingdom, à Church of Latter Day Saints. |
Legacies
of Division
It has been a busy month – the Wenger
Mennonites, Sam Mullet’s guilty sentence for in-faith hate crimes and an
informative roundtable with AIMM representatives and church leaders from Burkina
Faso and Congo / Zaire. What do all
three of these events have in common?
They all deal directly with the Mennonite culture’s legacy of division.
This morning (being Sunday, 23 Sept), I lay
in bed listening to Minnesota Public Radio (MPR)’s broadcast of Krista
Tippett’s interview with Focus on the Family president Jim Daly and Gabe Lyons,
founder of “Q,” an Emergent Evangelical group.
Tippett focuses on three topics –
namely the efforts by Daly and Lyons to create a new, impactful and yet more
caring and human face of Evangelicalism, on their outreach to gays,
pro-Choicers and Muslims (the perceived traditional enemies of Focus on the
Family and faithful Evangelicals everywhere) and the controversy this new
leadership has generated between generations within the American Evangelical
movement. (For instance, Daly indicates
that 65% of Evangelicals under the age of 35 support the concept of gay
marriage – currently an almost violently divisive issue in Minnesota’s current
electoral cycle.)
