JE - PEOPLE-FILES
- Amanda Jenkins - Jack Jenkins - Cal Jernigan - Brad Jersak - Kevin Jessup - Skye Jethani - Russell Jeung-
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==amanda jenkins======
Christian Devotional Books: 10 Faith-Based Daily Companions
God's Goodness for the Chosen by Amanda Jenkins: Amanda Jenkins has teamed up with her husband Dallas Jenkins, director and founder of the hit Christian TV show The Chosen, on a powerful devotional guidebook! This interactive eight-lesson Bible study follows each new episode of Season 4 of The Chosen. The book's lessons cover Scripture-based themes seen on the show - like overcoming grief, releasing pain and trusting in the fullness of God's plan. The study helps remind readers that even amid uncertainty, God can turn difficulties into joy and use hardships as a rich soil to grow goodness and hope. (MSN 7/2/24) READ MORE>>>>>
God's Goodness for the Chosen by Amanda Jenkins: Amanda Jenkins has teamed up with her husband Dallas Jenkins, director and founder of the hit Christian TV show The Chosen, on a powerful devotional guidebook! This interactive eight-lesson Bible study follows each new episode of Season 4 of The Chosen. The book's lessons cover Scripture-based themes seen on the show - like overcoming grief, releasing pain and trusting in the fullness of God's plan. The study helps remind readers that even amid uncertainty, God can turn difficulties into joy and use hardships as a rich soil to grow goodness and hope. (MSN 7/2/24) READ MORE>>>>>
==jack jenkins======
Oct 21, 2022: Religion News: Best In Religion Journalism: Religion News Association Presents Its Annual Awards
Among the highlights:
Other big winners included Jack Jenkins of Religion News Service for Excellence in Religion Reporting at Large Newspapers and Wire Services, Peggy Fletcher Stack of the Salt Lake Tribune for Excellence in Religion Reporting at Small-to-Mid-sized Newspapers and PJ Grisar of The Forward for Excellence in Religion Feature Writing.
Among the highlights:
Other big winners included Jack Jenkins of Religion News Service for Excellence in Religion Reporting at Large Newspapers and Wire Services, Peggy Fletcher Stack of the Salt Lake Tribune for Excellence in Religion Reporting at Small-to-Mid-sized Newspapers and PJ Grisar of The Forward for Excellence in Religion Feature Writing.
==cal jernigan======
April 20, 2023: Roys Report: IL Megachurch Pastor Who Resigned Amid Scandal Launches Online Ministry
Meanwhile, Mike Baker helped Caleb get a fresh start and a new job at Arizona megachurch Central Christian Church (CCC). According to CCC Pastor Cal Jernigan, the elder Baker told him that someone had made an accusation against Caleb Baker, but that it was unfounded.
Meanwhile, Mike Baker helped Caleb get a fresh start and a new job at Arizona megachurch Central Christian Church (CCC). According to CCC Pastor Cal Jernigan, the elder Baker told him that someone had made an accusation against Caleb Baker, but that it was unfounded.
March 3, 2023: Christian Post: Eastview Christian Church pastor resigns after son is fired from Central Christian Church for adultery
Mike Baker, the longtime senior pastor of Eastview Christian Church in Illinois, has resigned from the megachurch weeks after his son, Caleb Baker, was fired from his job as a pastor at Central Christian Church after he was caught in an extramarital affair with another church staffer.
“Caleb Baker, our lead student pastor and associate preaching pastor has been involved in an extramarital relationship for the past six months. And it involved a woman on our staff,” Cal Jernigan, lead pastor of Central Christian Church in Phoenix, Arizona, told his congregation near the end of his sermon at the megachurch on Feb. 19.
Mike Baker, the longtime senior pastor of Eastview Christian Church in Illinois, has resigned from the megachurch weeks after his son, Caleb Baker, was fired from his job as a pastor at Central Christian Church after he was caught in an extramarital affair with another church staffer.
“Caleb Baker, our lead student pastor and associate preaching pastor has been involved in an extramarital relationship for the past six months. And it involved a woman on our staff,” Cal Jernigan, lead pastor of Central Christian Church in Phoenix, Arizona, told his congregation near the end of his sermon at the megachurch on Feb. 19.
==brad jersak======
Rene Lafaut
Brad Jersak’s book called, Can You Hear Me? (Copyright Permissions granted) Gives a working model on how the imagination works and is very helpful in taking healthy control of it. He views the imagination as an interior screen that we use to project images on. We can project good images with the help of God. Or bad images with the help of the devil. On the contrary, we can conceive a mixture of the two when we have a divided hearts. Initially, we hold the power over what we project or imagine. But if we give ourselves over to darkness in an area, then what is imagined takes on bad energy and can hurt others, self, and be very unwelcome by God. The more we believe in the bad constructs of our imaginations, the more they will lock in our expectations, desires and judgments. They will create an unhealthy faulty reality in our interior lives. Once the structures are created via our imaginations they make their presence felt in our hearts and minds as powerful forces for good or evil. But we can sense the pursuit of the Good Shepherd and His call on our lives. We can begin to see some of the created structures as unwelcome and begin to petition God to dismantle them from within our lives. Because we often don’t know how to pray, repent, and renew our minds correctly we can feel stuck in this area. So how do we clean up our imaginations and what they make us do? In conclusion, we in part get healthy imaginations through confessing to God the sins we create through them. Next, we repent in prayer from these sins with God’s help. Then we begin to renew our thoughts, beliefs, expectations, and attitudes in conversations with God, His Word, and close sisters and brothers in Jesus. When we imagine good stuff God joyfully enters into the process. When we imagine evil stuff the devil enters into the power of our imaginations. And he robs us of the joys the imagination was intended to be. --Rene Lafaut; Christian Learning; Have You Ever Overlooked Cleaning Up a Dirty Mind? 1/20/21
==kevin jessup======
Jan 23, 2023: New Republic: The Rise of Spirit Warriors on the Christian Right
A final point on the politics of Spirit Warrior Christianity: It is an easy fit for those who wish to dismantle democracy and entrench minority rule. Election denialism and other conspiracies find a comfortable home in the paranoid mindset of spiritual warfare in a demon-haunted world. An organizer of the Jericho March that preceded the attack on the Capitol of January 6, Robert Weaver, stated that God wanted Americans to march around “the spiritual walls of this country.” The Reverend Kevin Jessup, who spoke at the event, said, “This battle cry is a Christian call to all Christian men … as we prepare for a strategic gathering of men in this hour to dispel the Kingdom of Darkness.” Father Greg Bramlage, who conducted an exorcism on stage, told the crowd, “We are in a spiritual battle, this cannot be solved by human means” and prayed that “no demonic bondage, door, entity, portal, astral projection, or disembodied spirit may enter this space.” Bishop Leon Benjamin, senior pastor of Richmond, Virginia’s New Life Harvest Church, said, “The demons we kill now, our children will not have to fight these devils. These are our devils, and we will kill them now.” NAR leadership networks served as key mobilizers.
A final point on the politics of Spirit Warrior Christianity: It is an easy fit for those who wish to dismantle democracy and entrench minority rule. Election denialism and other conspiracies find a comfortable home in the paranoid mindset of spiritual warfare in a demon-haunted world. An organizer of the Jericho March that preceded the attack on the Capitol of January 6, Robert Weaver, stated that God wanted Americans to march around “the spiritual walls of this country.” The Reverend Kevin Jessup, who spoke at the event, said, “This battle cry is a Christian call to all Christian men … as we prepare for a strategic gathering of men in this hour to dispel the Kingdom of Darkness.” Father Greg Bramlage, who conducted an exorcism on stage, told the crowd, “We are in a spiritual battle, this cannot be solved by human means” and prayed that “no demonic bondage, door, entity, portal, astral projection, or disembodied spirit may enter this space.” Bishop Leon Benjamin, senior pastor of Richmond, Virginia’s New Life Harvest Church, said, “The demons we kill now, our children will not have to fight these devils. These are our devils, and we will kill them now.” NAR leadership networks served as key mobilizers.
==skye jethani======
Skye Jethani (MDiv, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is an award-winning author, former pastor, and speaker. He is cohost of the popular Holy Post podcast, with over 600,000 downloads per month. Jethani has written numerous books, including the What If Jesus Was Serious? series, and served for more than a decade in numerous editorial and executive roles at Christianity Today. He also writes a daily devotional called With God Daily.
"The “church” is the community of God’s redeemed and empowered people. The church institution and its leaders exists to equip God’s people. God’s people do not exist to equip the institution. Ministry is not what we do within the church institution, but what we do to manifest the reign of Christ in the world".
--Skye Jethani
--Skye Jethani
The first clue that Jesus’s map of heaven is different from ours is found in the word itself. The Hebrew word for “heaven” in the Old Testament is shamayim, and the Greek word in the New Testament is ouranos. Both words are plural and are usually accompanied by a definite article. Therefore, they should more accurately be translated into English as “the heavens.” This means, according to the Bible, heaven is not a single place or a proper name, and we should not speak about heaven as a singular location the way we speak about London, Wrigley Field, or even something as vast as the Pacific Ocean.
The ancient cultures that shaped the Bible, and to which Jesus belonged, understood “the heavens” to be a vast realm surrounding the earth. First, they spoke of the heavens when referring to the sky or atmosphere. When Jesus said “the birds of the air,” the actual language he used was “the birds of the heavens” (Matt. 6:26). The heavens are also where the celestial bodies abide—the sun, moon, and stars. Modern people distinguish between the atmosphere and outer space, but ancient cultures did not. Therefore, the heavens were simply everything in the air and above the earth.
“The heavens” also carried another important meaning in the ancient world. It referred to the dwelling place of God. The heavens are the invisible, intangible realm occupied by the Lord and his hosts. When this meaning is intended, our English Bibles will often ignore the plural Hebrew or Greek word and use the singular instead. For example, Isaiah 66:1 is translated as “This is what the Lord says: ‘Heaven is my throne.’” When modern people read this verse with our mental map, it conjures images of God occupying a celestial city far away from the earth. But in Hebrew the verse says, “The heavens are my throne.” The Lord is saying that he occupies the air/sky/atmosphere immediately surrounding us. Unfortunately, most of our translations of the Bible do not help us grasp this more immediate and accessible vision of God’s heavenly presence.
The reason is simple. Our modern scientific knowledge has influenced how we translate these ancient texts. We want to differentiate the natural realm of the atmosphere from the supernatural realm of the spirits. Therefore, our English Bibles will say birds, clouds, thunder, or rain occupy “the air” but that God and his angels occupy “heaven,” when all of these verses actually use the same plural word—“the heavens.” By imposing our mental map of heaven onto the Bible, we obscure or erase the mental map of the biblical writers and of Jesus himself. Instead, we come to believe that heaven is a distant place accessible only after death and that God could not possibly be as near as the air filling our lungs.
The implications of this, as Dallas Willard notes, are a warped understanding of God, his kingdom, and the message of Jesus. “The damage done to our practical faith in Christ and in his government-at-hand by confusing heaven with a place in distant outer space, or even beyond space, is incalculable. Of course, God is there too. But instead of heaven and God also being always present with us, as Jesus shows them to be, we invariably take them to be located far away and, most likely, at a much later time—not here and not now.”
READ MORE: Acts 2:42–47; Ephesians 2:11–22
Content taken from What If Jesus Was Serious about Heaven? by Skye Jethani, ©2023. Used by permission of Brazos Press.
The ancient cultures that shaped the Bible, and to which Jesus belonged, understood “the heavens” to be a vast realm surrounding the earth. First, they spoke of the heavens when referring to the sky or atmosphere. When Jesus said “the birds of the air,” the actual language he used was “the birds of the heavens” (Matt. 6:26). The heavens are also where the celestial bodies abide—the sun, moon, and stars. Modern people distinguish between the atmosphere and outer space, but ancient cultures did not. Therefore, the heavens were simply everything in the air and above the earth.
“The heavens” also carried another important meaning in the ancient world. It referred to the dwelling place of God. The heavens are the invisible, intangible realm occupied by the Lord and his hosts. When this meaning is intended, our English Bibles will often ignore the plural Hebrew or Greek word and use the singular instead. For example, Isaiah 66:1 is translated as “This is what the Lord says: ‘Heaven is my throne.’” When modern people read this verse with our mental map, it conjures images of God occupying a celestial city far away from the earth. But in Hebrew the verse says, “The heavens are my throne.” The Lord is saying that he occupies the air/sky/atmosphere immediately surrounding us. Unfortunately, most of our translations of the Bible do not help us grasp this more immediate and accessible vision of God’s heavenly presence.
The reason is simple. Our modern scientific knowledge has influenced how we translate these ancient texts. We want to differentiate the natural realm of the atmosphere from the supernatural realm of the spirits. Therefore, our English Bibles will say birds, clouds, thunder, or rain occupy “the air” but that God and his angels occupy “heaven,” when all of these verses actually use the same plural word—“the heavens.” By imposing our mental map of heaven onto the Bible, we obscure or erase the mental map of the biblical writers and of Jesus himself. Instead, we come to believe that heaven is a distant place accessible only after death and that God could not possibly be as near as the air filling our lungs.
The implications of this, as Dallas Willard notes, are a warped understanding of God, his kingdom, and the message of Jesus. “The damage done to our practical faith in Christ and in his government-at-hand by confusing heaven with a place in distant outer space, or even beyond space, is incalculable. Of course, God is there too. But instead of heaven and God also being always present with us, as Jesus shows them to be, we invariably take them to be located far away and, most likely, at a much later time—not here and not now.”
READ MORE: Acts 2:42–47; Ephesians 2:11–22
Content taken from What If Jesus Was Serious about Heaven? by Skye Jethani, ©2023. Used by permission of Brazos Press.
==russell jeung======
'Threat to democracy' or media phantom? Christian nationalism debate takes violent turn
Russell Jeung, a co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate and speaker on the Evangelicals for Harris call, told AP that the group doesn’t “agree with everything that Harris stands for” and that evangelicals can “hold the party accountable by being involved.” Others on the call noted they would use their vote to pressure Harris on issues where they disagreed, with Latina evangelical activist Sandra Maria Van Opstal saying she’d push the potential Harris administration “to do better on Palestine-Israel and do better on immigration.”
(Seattle Times 9/19/24) READ MORE>>>>>
Russell Jeung, a co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate and speaker on the Evangelicals for Harris call, told AP that the group doesn’t “agree with everything that Harris stands for” and that evangelicals can “hold the party accountable by being involved.” Others on the call noted they would use their vote to pressure Harris on issues where they disagreed, with Latina evangelical activist Sandra Maria Van Opstal saying she’d push the potential Harris administration “to do better on Palestine-Israel and do better on immigration.”
(Seattle Times 9/19/24) READ MORE>>>>>
