When Jeff rose from his seat and stood at the podium, I could feel the nerves in my stomach. Far from speaking to a joint session of Congress or delivering a keynote speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Jeff was instead speaking to the Holland, Michigan City Council. Yet what he was going to share during public comment represented the work and passion that 11 of us had invested over the course of two months. So on the night of June 20, 2018, when Jeff stood and began to address the eight voting members of council, along with several clerks […]

This article originally appeared in Public Justice Review, a publication by the Center for Public Justice (CPJ), and is part of the recent “What is Public Justice” series. During my PhD studies in the 1960s, most of the courses and seminars that I took were in social-political philosophy. We read and discussed many writings on justice, but I don’t recall anyone ever using the phrase “public justice.” Nor did that phrase ever show up when in 1973 a group of us gathered to issue the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concerns. Issues of justice were certainly on our minds at that […]

This article originally appeared in Shared Justice, an initiative of the Center for Public Justice (CPJ). Shared Justice is an online publication and community for Christian twenty and thirty somethings interested in the intersection of faith, politics, and justice. Apostle Angeloyd Fenrick was offered over one million dollars for the apartment building that she currently owns in Ward 8 of Southeast D.C, but she refused to sell. Why? Because this isn’t just any apartment building. This building is the home of Columbia Learning International Ministries (CLIM), a faith-based, Christ-centered non-profit organization located in DC that provides housing, case management services, and […]

That is the distinctive of the Black church. We have historically welcomed everyone, but we never hesitate to preach the word of God with respect to sin. And we know that God’s grace is sufficient for all sinners. So welcoming all but speaking the truth of our sacred beliefs has never been a contradiction. For us, God’s welcoming grace is sufficient to draw us all to the altar, to repentance.

This article originally appeared in Public Justice Review, a publication by the Center for Public Justice (CPJ). Shared Justice is an initiative of CPJ, and this article is part of a series that explores Christian political formation in a pluralistic society. Every April, hundreds of high school students, representing all US states and a few territories, converge on a large conference center on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. to prove their worth as citizens. They are winners of an intense group competition that starts for many teams in their congressional districts and weaves its way through state contests that determine the D.C.-bound […]