Do Black Lives Still Matter?
If the Ontario government mandates vaccine passports, they would not just be betraying our fundamental freedoms—they would be betraying their own words about systemic racism.
During the George Floyd protests last year, Canadian politicians said they believe black lives matter.
Since then, however—Justin Trudeau and the Liberal government have introduced vaccine passports for federal workers that marginalize black lives.
And now Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, is considering vaccine passports for Ontario. If Doug Ford mandates vaccine passports, he would also be marginalizing and segregating black people.
Do black lives still matter? Justin Trudeau has already affirmed that everything he said about systemic racism last year was a lie.
Doug Ford, however, has an opportunity to answer that question differently. Is everything he said about systemic racism last year a lie? Does he really oppose policies that create racial disparities? Is he really an ally to marginalized groups in Ontario? Do black lives still matter to Doug Ford?
A survey from earlier this summer reveals that black Canadians are the most unwilling group in Canada to get the vaccine. Particularly, black Ontarians make up nearly 60% of the black Canadians sampled in the survey.
The report from the survey says:
“At the time of this survey, a 20-point gap existed among those who received at least one vaccine between White Canadians (65%) and Black Canadians (45%).”
Some of the unvaccinated black Canadians include me, many of my relatives, and many of my friends. We are not “anti-vaxxers”, we’re just informed and responsible Ontarians practising our freedom of conscience. Many of us are immigrants who moved to this great nation because Canada promised to protect our fundamental freedoms.
Today, however, we’re being coerced and pressured into acting against our conscience. Many of us, including me—have decided we will not get the vaccine, at all costs. So many black people are prepared to be segregated and marginalized—again.
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Top 50 Stories on The Aquila Report for 2023: 41-50
In keeping with the journalistic tradition of looking back at the recent past, we present the top 50 stories of the year that were read on The Aquila Report site based on the number of hits. We will present the 50 stories in groups of 10 to run on five lists on consecutive days. Here are numbers 41-50.
In 2023 The Aquila Report (TAR) posted over 3,000 stories. At the end of each year we feature the top 50 stories that were read.
TAR posts 8 new stories each day, on a variety of subjects – all of which we trust are of interest to our readers. As a web magazine TAR is an aggregator of news and information that we believe will provide articles that will inform the church of current trends and movements within the church and culture.
In keeping with the journalistic tradition of looking back at the recent past, we present the top 50 stories of the year that were read on The Aquila Report site based on the number of hits. We will present the 50 stories in groups of 10 to run on five lists on consecutive days. Here are numbers 41-50:Targeting Transgenderism: Two Overtures to the PCA 50th GA
In my opinion, the BCO is not the main issue. The issue is not simply women in the pulpit, nor the sexual mutilation of children, nor even the legitimacy of homosexuality (in some form or another). The issue is transgenderism. The issue is men and women giving in to sinful impulses that cross the lines that God drew in creation when he created male and female and assigned them their roles in the world he created.
Why Some Evangelicals Are Embracing Racism
Sin is sin, on the right or the left. Kinism is just as evil as critical race theory. So Kinists are not our allies. They’re just as opposed to Biblical views on race as critical race theorists.
A Confession Rejected and a Denomination Undone
For Southern Baptists, adopting a revised and expanded version of the New Hampshire Confession of Faith was not an act of division but a means of ensuring unity. As Mullins explained, he believed it would “clarify the atmosphere and remove the causes of misunderstanding, friction, and apprehension.” The differences between Northern and Southern Baptist Conventions over the past 100 years can be explained many ways—but they cannot be explained apart from the question of confessionalism and the need for doctrinal fidelity.
Officials Charge Retired CRC Pastor In 1975 Cold Case Murder Of Delco 8-Year-Old
Gretchen Harrington, 8-years-old, disappeared on Aug. 15, 1975, while on a walk from her Marple Township home to a Bible school less than a mile away. Stollsteimer said that, at that time, Zandstra served as a reverend at Trinity Christian Reformed Church, one of two churches that Harrington regularly attended. As she walked to Bible camp alone, Zandstra pulled alongside her in a vehicle and offered her a ride, Stollsteimer said.
We Are Already Defeated
Young seminarians are being steeped—in seminary—in an expressive individualism that is contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ and that will, if it’s not nipped right in the bud, lead actual people into hell.
Why The Gospel Centered Movement Failed
Fast forward to 2020; there’s no need to recap everything but you’ve got Covid, BLM, mask and vaccine mandates, etc – you remember, you were there. Anyway, here we have a key moment in time when the practical instructions of the Bible, God’s laws, become absolutely essential to how the church should respond. Startled and harassed bodies of believers across the world, under pressure to conform on all sides, actually needed to know what to do. They needed to know this in detail, with clarity and with conviction. And because of the lack of attention paid to God’s law, this gospel-centered movement didn’t have a great answer.
Covenant Presbytery Denies Appeal of Jonesboro 7 Finding No Errors in Session Trial
It is a most remarkable providence; if one reads the protest against Presbytery’s action to preserve the church plant, the signers represent the elders from Covenant Presbytery’s wealthiest and most influential churches and committees. Yet the speech of a largely unknown, retired former Arkansas church planter was powerfully used by God to change the course of the debate, save the little church plant from dissolution, and preserve a witness for Himself in Jonesboro.
3 Wrong Reasons to Leave Your Local Church — and 5 Right Reasons to Stay
It’s been commonly said that we don’t choose the people who sit next to us in the pew, but God does. Love requires, in response to the gospel, that we invest in the lives of those who are often most difficult and unattractive to us. It’s one of the saddest things to witness someone throw away their entire local church family for selfish reasons. Is our love sincere and absent of hypocrisy? This is an important question when it comes to church membership.
Retraction Refused: The PCA’s Magazine Stands By Its Claims in David Cassidy’s “Prayer and Work in the Face of Violence”
If this were an isolated occurrence it would be one thing; regrettably, this does not seem to be the case. If one were to summarize the crisis of evangelicalism in America today, he could probably do so best by saying that its internal struggles arise because its institutions do not represent the vast majority of its people, and that their actions do not put into practice the beliefs or preferred actions of those people.
A Political View of the PCA Jubilee General Assembly
Another critical issue was related to the use of the term “pastor” as being reserved for ordained teaching elders. It seems that the modern evangelical church tends to label everyone contributing service to the Lord’s work as pastor. From nonordained youth “pastors” to nonordained music “pastors,” it has become a very generic term. This has contributed to much confusion in the wider church.
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Cessmaticism: The Strange Hybrid of Contemporary Christian Worship
The more these Dionysian-dominant songs are sung, the more they tend to choke out older and classical hymnody. Unless the pastors have a strong sense of what music communicates, they will be led by the same appetitive pull that passion-centred music has on all. They will see how much the congregants enjoy such songs; they will interpret this enjoyment as “connecting meaningfully” with the music, and notice how the visceral response is absent in some of the more Apollonian classic hymns.
We began this series by making the claim that Pentecostalism has quietly (or not so quietly) colonised Protestant worship, even in those churches and groups that explicitly reject Pentecostal theology. We have described the distinctives of Pentecostal worship, not in terms of its views regarding the operation of the charismatic gifts, but in terms of its focus on intensity, spontaneity, and its distinctive “praise-and-worship” theology of worship. It now remains to make the case that these approaches are widely shared and practiced in non-charismatic, or cessationist circles.
In the first place, there is little doubt that what is prized as “intensity” in Pentecostal circles is fairly well accepted as a laudable goal in cessationist evangelical circles. The move towards intensity is seen in many a non-charismatic church’s method of singing one song after another, in rapid succession, only the occasional musician’s deejay vocals over the bridge intro. The practice of singing five, six, or more songs one after the other, apart from causing some of the elderly to just eventually sit down during the songs out of sheer pain and frustration, is closer to the “flow-like” worship of Praise and Worship theology than like a thoughtful response to God’s Word. The choice of songs also appears suspiciously like the Praise and Worship, Five-Stage theology of the charismatics. Beginning with upbeat, thanksgiving songs, reaching a crescendo of triumphalism, and then gliding down into the zone of breathy, ‘deep’ songs of intimacy just before the offering or sermon.
A second mark of the takeover of worship by charismatics is that non-charismatic evangelicals are drawn to rather uncritically embrace the music of charismatic songwriters. Of course, several of the modern hymns written by those in openly charismatic circles (such as Sovereign Grace) or “cautious-but-open” circles qualify as decent or even good hymns, having both theologically sturdy lyrics and readily likeable and singable melodies. There is little wonder that many of our churches sing them, for their lyrics are often without cliches, and their music answers to 21st-century musical sensibilities.The problem is not the contemporary nature of these songs. It does not matter if a song was written in 221, 1021, or 2021, as long as it is true, good, and beautiful. The problem is not even the charismatic commitments or associations of the songwriters. Enough beautiful hymns were written by people whose theology we do not all share, for example Charles Wesley, Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, Paul Gerhardt, or Frederick Faber.
The problem is far more that that on the spectrum of Apollonian to Dionysian sentiment, they probably lean closer to the Dionysian side, at least musically.
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The Thrilling Reversal of Christmas
Why is Scripture filled with one thrilling reversal after the next? So that God would not share his glory with another. So that, through the cataracts of our own sin and the fog of a fallen world, we would see him and recognize him as the one who made us in his own image for his glory and run to him in faith, singing with Mary, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior” (Luke 1:46-47).
In 1983, elite distance runners from around the world met in Australia to compete in a weeklong, 544-mile ultramarathon from Sydney to Melbourne. The racers were lean and mean professional athletes, decked from head to toe in the most expensive gear by Nike, Asics, & Puma; all except for Cliff Young, a 61-year-old shepherd in his overalls and work boots. He’d even removed his dentures for the race because he said, “they rattled.” When the gun sounded, the runners leapt from the line and quickly left Cliff far behind as he shuffled along. At the end of the first day, the pack was miles ahead when the runners stopped to get a few hours of sleep.
But nobody told Cliff he was supposed to stop and rest. So, while the other racers slept, Cliff ran through the night. You see, Cliff was a poor shepherd who couldn’t afford a horse or all-terrain vehicle. When storms rolled in on his 2,000-acre farm and his sheep needed to be gathered in, he would herd them on foot, running for days on end. Nobody knew that when the race began, but everyone knew it when the race ended, because, after five days of continuous running, Cliff shuffled across the finish line in 1st place, shattering the previous course record by two days. It was a stunning upset, a thrilling reversal, that made the world stop and stare and wonder.
Thrilling reversal is what Christmas is all about. God insists on showcasing his power through weakness and his wisdom through foolishness so that we would stop and stare, wonder and worship. Thrilling reversal is the theme of Mary’s Magnificat in Luke 1:46-55, in which we see that God moves in mysterious ways so that we would give him all glory.
After learning from the angel Gabriel that she would conceive in her virgin womb by the power of the Holy Spirit and bear the Son of God, Mary flew to her cousin Elizabeth, who was also unexpectedly expecting. And as Mary drew near carrying the embryonic little Lord Jesus, John, the prenatal prophet, leaped in Elizabeth’s womb, and Elizabeth sang a song of joy, humility, and faith. So, Mary responded with a song of her own, stitching together patches of Old Testament passages, relishing in God’s reversals:
“He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his offspring forever.” (Luke 1:51–55)
Just before Jacob blessed Joseph’s sons, he crossed his hands, bestowing (contrary to custom) the greater honor upon the younger instead of the older.
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