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The Crime Without a Face

Three days after the horrific murders in Atlanta, we still haven’t seen the faces of four of the six women of Asian descent gunned down by Robert Aaron Long. As someone who covered crime for many years as a print journalist, I remember the scramble to locate photos and bios of victims in the immediate aftermath of a multiple murder or mass-casualty event. Journalists are incredibly resourceful in tracking down this information, but all the firepower of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other esteemed news outlets hasn’t managed to bring the faces of these

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The Trump Prophets Repent, All Hell Breaks Loose

The day after the Capitol riot, a prominent charismatic prophet named Jeremiah Johnson repented for prophesying that President Donald Trump would be re-elected in 2020. The response was immediate and devastating, according to a Facebook post from Johnson: “Over the last 72 hours, I have received multiple death threats and thousands upon thousands of emails from Christians saying the nastiest and most vulgar things I have ever heard toward my family and ministry. I have been labeled a coward, sellout, a traitor to the Holy Spirit, and cussed out at least 500 times. We have lost ministry partners every hour

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Name It and Claim It or Go Home

While the Capitol riot was still unfolding on January 6, with Trump supporters scaling walls, smashing windows, beating up police officers, and threatening reporters’ lives, some white friends contacted me privately, asking if I was sure that “every single one of them [the rioters] is white,” as I reported in a Facebook post and on this blog. I responded that I had been watching the insurrection for 90 minutes and had not seen a single Black person who wasn’t a journalist, police officer, or member of Congress. And I posed a question in return: If it turns out that one

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Repentance Is Not a Bargaining Chip

I’m starting to think my American Pentecostal-charismatic brethren have completely lost it. Our movement was birthed among the poor in Los Angeles in 1906 when the Holy Spirit visited a tiny gathering of what a local newspaper derided as “Negro washerwomen.” Led by a one-eyed Black preacher named William J. Seymour, the little church that came to be known as the Azusa Street Mission erupted into a worldwide movement that now counts more than 600 million adherents. Seymour was a follower of Jesus Christ such as we seldom see today. He had no interest in praise from men, and to

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Time to Exit the Cult of Trump

Here is the good news: God is moving in people’s hearts. I have personally witnessed and heard of many people who’ve repented of their involvement in our national sin of racism. These weren’t folks who climbed on a stage to make some big public pronouncement, just everyday Christians who humbled their hearts and were moved by the Holy Spirit to confess their sins one to another. I hope this is an encouragement to the African-American Christians who’ve cried out to the Lord for justice for many years and have seen so little fruit. I pray it is also a salve

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Just Give Me Jesus…I Mean Right-Wing Politics

A couple friends sent me a link to The Return prayer gathering in Washington a week and a half ago. I tuned in on September 26, attracted by the event’s billing as a national call to repentance. Repentance is always good, right? Same with prayer. How can you go wrong with prayer? Rabbi Jonathan Cahn, a Messianic Jew, was already on the stage at the National Mall when I got online. I respect Cahn, author of The Harbinger and The Paradigm, two bestselling books that have circulated widely in Pentecostal-charismatic circles. I listened to his ardent prayer for this nation,

My Experience With Racism

My experience with racism is embarrassing, because I was the perpetrator. I was about eight years old. Just a kid growing up in the Midwest in the early 1970s. My dad had invited a Black man and his family to dinner at our home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He served with this man in Vietnam, and that’s all I know. This gentleman came to our house with his wife and two girls. Today, I wonder what was going through his mind. That was a risky venture for sure. White people so often blow past all of the sensitivities, focused instead