By Laura Walton

This is a response to Christian Harvey’s article about the Omnibus Crime Bill that was recently passed in the House of Commons. Check

out the article here.

The new “tough on crime” bill is challenging. It is meant to grab the attention of voters who are misinformed about the crime rate and create buzz that the government is getting tough. However, I do think we need to be careful not to dismiss incarceration altogether. We need to do our utmost to protect victims of crime and those who are negatively impacted through no choice of their own but by those who make poor life choices.

Crime is declining in many ways but studies show that it is increasing in areas such as elder abuse, domestic violence and child pornography. These types of crimes attack the vulnerable. I agree completely it is smart to invest in prevention rather than incarceration but there still has to be consequences for those who commit crimes and to protect those who are victims of crime. There are criminals who have committed heinous acts and will never be rehabilitated. As Christians we do believe in redemption but as one who studied criminology I also know that there are some people that are so morally, emotionally and socially damaged that they cannot safely live in an outside community. To expose communities to this danger is morally wrong. We cannot ignore that those who are sociopathic in nature may never be able to integrate safely. We need to incarcerate those who are true threats while also creating programs for those who are candidates for rehabilitation and support. Read more…

christian News, Social Issues, Stories and Articles Justice, Youth Ministry

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By Christian Harvey

This review has spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the movie, then go see it then come back and read this.  You have been warned, now you can’t get mad.

Harry Potter?  Too much commitment, I mean those books are long and there has to be about twenty of them.

Twilight?  If I read them I would have had to pick a team, and how do you do such a thing when they are both so dreamy?!

But the Hunger Games, there was something about them they drew me in and before I knew it I had read all three of them and was having deep arguments with youth in my youth group about the minutia of Panem and it’s districts.

It had its problems, I mean seriously, a teenage boy and girl think it is their last night together on earth and they spend the night cuddling?  These should be used as the textbooks for the abstinence movement.  But over all I loved them, so last week, at the age of 31, I experienced the same excitement as the tweens that surrounded me while waiting for the movie of the first book to start.  I was not disappointed.

Sure they made decisions I didn’t agree with.  I wish they had included the scene where District 11 sent Katniss the bread.  Peeta and Katniss were in pretty good shape after the games, where in the book they were almost dead and so on.  But what I loved was that the focus of the movie was not the love triangle between Katniss, Peeta and Gale, but rather the social commentary on our infatuation with violence, our cultural obsession with being entertained by the misery and destruction of others via reality TV.  The fact that the comfortable “capital” is wealthy because of the poverty of the “Districts”. Read more…

christian Media, Movies, News, Pop Culture, Resources, Stories and Articles Christian Harvey, Culture, Justice, pop culture, The Hunger Games

By Andrew Stephens-Rennie

This is a response to Christian Harvey’s article about the Omnibus Crime Bill that was recently passed in the House of Commons.  generic cialisies-and-articles/locking-up-the-poor/”>Check out the article here.

What time do I have, really? What time do I have to think about things like politics and crime?

Sometimes I catch myself thinking these things, and wonder how such a bill might affect me, my work, and the people with and amongst whom I serve.

And yet if I stop to think about it, I know that many political decisions affect my community.

They might affect my neighbours here in East Vancouver. They might affect the lives of the young people and youth leaders I serve.

So If I were to stop and think about the omnibus crime bill. And if I were to respond to Christian’s post, I guess I might be stirred to some sort of action. Read more…

christian News, Social Issues, Stories and Articles Andrew Stephens-Rennie, Justice, Youth Ministry

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By Judy Steers

This is a response to Christian Harvey’s article about the Omnibus Crime Bill that was recently passed in the House of Commons.  Check out the article here

Lots of people are talking about this issue!  Thanks for this article Christian.  It’s good to see it talked about from a faith perspective.

One of the scary things about this kind of legislation is that it is based on fear-mongering and, last time I checked, that kind of responding out of fear is not grounded in any kind of appropriate theology.   People of faith do not act or make choices based on fear.   To punish other people’s errors by excluding them has never been a gospel (or appropriate social) value.  Yes, jail sentences are an appropriate response to some crimes.  But not the ones that the legislation is proposing to resolve.  Also, to make people fearful of jail as a way of stopping them from acting out sounds like a plan doomed to fail.
Read more…

christian News, Social Issues, Stories and Articles Justice, Youth Ministry

By Christian Harvey

This is the first in a dialogue by all the members of the Youth Initiatives Team on the Omnibus Crime Bill that was recently passed in the House of Commons.  We would love for you to join the conversation,

so please let us know what you think.

I know most of us don’t have a lot of time for politics.  We vote once every four years, if we are available that day, and just generally accept that stuff is messed up.  But something is happening right now that is huge, and I really think that we can’t be quiet.  It is the new ‘Tough on Crime’ bill that was recently passed in the House of Commons.  This bill concerns me in a bucket load of ways: Read more…

christian News, Social Issues, Stories and Articles Christian Harvey, Culture, Justice

cheapest viagra canadaight=”350″ />By: Christian Harvey

My son just turned two years old, and he always wants to be helpful. He loves unloading the dishwasher (though it results in a lot of dropped dishes), sweeping (which is a hazard to everyone) and stirring (which results in food everywhere). The other day he decided he wanted to help me. He noticed that my book was not with me in the washroom, and through observation had come to the conclusion that I always have a book in the washroom, so he decided to bring it and give it to me. This is very considerate, except for the fact that I was in the shower. So while rinsing the shampoo out of my hair I hear “Here Daddy!” I tell him “just a second” so that I can get the soap out of my eyes, but I hear a weird sound; the water is hitting something. I look down and there is my son holding my book so I can take it, he doesn’t even notice the pages wilting under the water. He really had great intentions, he wanted to be helpful, but instead he ruined my book.
Read more…

christian Ministry, Missions, News, Social Issues, Stories and Articles Christian, Christian Harvey, Kony 2012, Short-Term Missions

What is the church?

Check out this video from a youth group in Southwestern Ontario asking what church is, and what it isn’t.

andrew Andrew's Blog, News

Rattling around in my brain last night were words from the second chapter of St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians:

Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Chris

t Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.

And I wondered, sitting around the table with friends over a shared meal, what, if anything, this whole Kony campaign had to do with the way of Jesus. Read more…

andrew Andrew's Blog, Missions, Movies, News Invisible Children, Kony 2012

Yesterday, almost as soon as I hit ‘publish’ on my purchase viagranglican.ca/stories-and-articles/news/invisible-children-joseph-kony-complexity/”>previous post, I had the sense that I would need to write a follow-up. The thing is, I know that it’s really easy to rail against a group or an organisation, to write someone or something off. Maybe we don’t agree with their mandate, their approach. We all have biases. We all have different ways of understanding the world.

I know that I have mine. And as someone who serves with Word Made Flesh – a global movement dedicated to serving Jesus amongst the most vulnerable of the world’s poor – I have to take my share of responsibility for my role in both dialogue and response.

Yet, I am convinced that each of us is called by God to engage the world, to participate in it, and if we subscribe to Jesus’ words in Matthew 25, there is something important about the way in which we treat those who have been pushed to the margins.

But it’s not about fixing people. We are not saviours, and we desperately need to get that through our heads.  Read more…

andrew Andrew's Blog, Missions, Movies, News Invisible Children, Kony 2012, Missions

Many of you have probably heard the hype by now. I’ve seen links to the cleverly markete

d Kony 2012 video come through my feed from multiple unrelated sources. It’s come from men and women, young and old, and mostly white. If you haven’t yet seen it, my guess is that you’ll see it pretty soon.

I bring it up for a number of reasons – not least of which is because the issues raised by this video are intimately connected to our attitudes and approach to short-term missions.

Here’s why: Hype, a false sense of empowerment and simplistic answers can obscure the truth of the situation. Read more…

andrew Andrew's Blog, Missions, Movies, News Invisible Children, Kony 2012, Missions