Word: pastoral
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...daughter of a Protestant pastor who settled in the East German state of Brandenburg, Merkel excelled at math and science and originally pursued a career as a physicist. But growing up where she did, she discovered early on that there were limits to what she would be permitted to do. "In East Germany," she says, "we always ran into boundaries before we were able to discover our own personal boundaries...
...Sunday last fall, Bill Hybels, founder and senior pastor at the Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago's northwest suburbs, was preaching on the logic and power of Jesus' words "Love thine enemy." As is his custom, Hybels was working a small semicircle of easels arrayed behind his lectern, reinforcing key phrases. Hybels' preaching is economical, precise of tone and gesture. Again by custom, he was dressed in black, which accentuated his pale complexion, blue eyes and hair, once Dutch-boy blond but now white. Indeed, if there is a whiter preacher currently running a megachurch, that man must glow...
Willow Creek is a paradigmatic religious success story. In 1974, Hybels was a youth pastor whose meetings outdrew the church he worked for by a factor of three. In '75, he and several friends founded Willow, aiming at people with little Christian affiliation, informally dubbed "unchurched Harry and Mary." The congregation boomed - the word megachurch was reputedly coined to describe it - and Hybels became the poster boy for the new movement of exurban big-box churches...
...however, that changed. Hybels was leaving on vacation when Willow's only African-American pastor, Alvin Bibbs, passed him a book titled Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, by a then obscure academic named Michael Emerson. The book's polls showed that Evangelicals tended to "believe that their faith ought to be a powerful impetus for bringing people together across race." Yet they had fewer minority acquaintances than non-Evangelicals. Most regarded racial inequality as either illusory or the wages of personal sin, rather than as a societal flaw. This and other buried assumptions...
...definitely see him being in ministry," says Steve Chen, Lin's mentor and the pastor of the Mountain View, Calif., church the Lin family attends. "But right now, God has gifted him in a specific way, and he's going to go after it hard." If Lin leads Harvard to the tournament, he'll be off to a pretty holy start. Consider it his first miracle...