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Every year, we celebrate a dying and rising God who fulfills the hopes of ages past.

If you’ve ever attended a liturgical church during Holy Week, you’ve likely recited the Apostles’ Creed—a confession that affirms the climactic events of Jesus’ life.

At the heart of this confession, between the phrases “was crucified, died, and was buried” and “on the third day he rose again from the dead,” you’ll find the mysterious (and some might say pesky) phrase “he descended into Hell.”

Although it’s largely overlooked in evangelical churches, dwarfed by the giants of Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday, Holy Saturday in the liturgical calendar commemorates the day when Jesus’ body laid dead in the grave. But it also honors the “Harrowing of Hell”—an idea that traces back to a handful of verses in the New Testament referring to Jesus’ debated descent into the netherworld.

After all, one verse reads, “What does ‘he ascended’ mean except that he also descended to the lower, earthly regions?” (Eph. 4:9). For “After being made alive, [Christ] went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits—to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built” (1 Pet. 3:18–20). Later, Peter adds, “For this is why the gospel was preached even to those who are dead, that though judged in the flesh the way people are, they might live in the spirit the way God does” (1 Pet. 4:6, ESV).

That these (and other) verses imply that Christ descended into hell is an interpretation discarded by a number of respected Christian thinkers including Wayne Grudem and John Piper, who argues there’s ...

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Even if Elevation’s Easter invites don’t spotlight the Crucifixion, it remains central to their worship.

I still remember the crunchy, dissonant chords coming through the speakers of my music history classroom and the repetition of the phrase, “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

We were studying Charles Ives’s modern American art song about the founder of the Salvation Army—“General William Booth Enters into Heaven”—and even as I tried to navigate the cacophonous chords and angular vocal lines in my score, I found the language and themes familiar and meaningful.

But the clarinet player sitting next to me had a different reaction. He leaned over and whispered, “Gross.”

Those of us who have grown up in the church singing songs like “There Is a Fountain,” “Nothing but the Blood,” and “The Wonderful Cross” are used to singing about blood. Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection are the center of our faith, and the blood spilled from the body of God incarnate is a symbol and physical reality for those who believe.

So when Elevation Church opted to avoid words or phrases like blood of Jesus in promotional materials for this year’s Easter services, a chorus of online voices accused the megachurch and its pastor, Steven Furtick, of watering down the gospel.

“We’re not going to use the words Calvary, resurrection, or the phrase the blood of Jesus. We won’t use language that will immediately make someone feel like an outsider,” said Nicki Shearer, Elevation’s digital content creator, in an interview with Pro Church Tools.

“If you talk to someone who doesn’t know Christ, they are never going to use the word resurrection … Jesus came back to life again after dying for us. I’d rather ...

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Ephraim Radner’s “narrow” concern for protecting the mundane goods of earthly life isn’t so narrow after all.

Around 15 years ago, as part of my first or second job out of college, I was sent to serve as the token young person at a lunch hosted by some boutique Washington think tank. The topic of conversation was the “good life” and how best to secure it in a rapidly changing world. Most attendees were in their twilight years, temperamentally and politically conservative, and, to my recollection, mildly appalled when I volunteered that many of my peers might not be convinced of the very premise: that there exists a single good life—oriented around God and virtue—to be sketched and secured.

Ephraim Radner’s Mortal Goods: Reimagining Christian Political Duty has no such doubts about the existence of the good life. But he too breaks from the classical notion my lunch companions had in mind, rejecting the modern Christian West’s association of the good and the life that pursues it with the immaterial, especially the “development of virtue and knowledge of God.”

Radner’s vision is more mundane. The good life of the Christian, he says, consists of receiving from God the mortal goods that are “our bodies, families, work, friendships, sorrows, and delights” and the church, and then surrendering them back to God in life and death. “Tending these goods is our vocation, our ‘service’ or ‘offering’ to God,” Radner contends, and it is also the proper aim of Christian politics, “no more and no less.” The ability to send these basic components of existence back to God in worship and forward to our children in peace should be the “benchmark for Christian political engagement,” Radner advises.

This argument is framed with a ...

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Few Protestant traditions continue the footwashing that Jesus did at the Last Supper. Some want a revival of the practice.

Americans get cold feet when it comes to footwashing, experts say.

Maundy Thursday is a Holy Week service marking the Last Supper. In some faith traditions, that service has included footwashing from the example in John 13, where Jesus washes his disciples’ feet during the supper and says, “Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you” (v. 14).

According to interviews with theologians and pastors, footwashing is now a rare practice even in churches that consider it a part of Maundy Thursday or regular worship. There do not appear to be recent surveys of how often US churches participate in the ritual. A 2009 survey found a decline in footwashing in one Anabaptist denomination, despite the tradition’s high view of the practice.

Most evangelical traditions have historically embraced John 13 as an example of sacrificial love rather than as a specific commandment for a worship ritual. That approach was clear in a widely discussed Super Bowl ad this year from the He Gets Us campaign featuring footwashing. Other traditions like Pentecostalism that do include footwashing in church services don’t practice it very often.

“Other than Maundy Thursday service, the practice is few and far between,” said Lisa Stephenson, a theologian at Lee University who has done research on footwashing, especially among Pentecostal churches.

Eastminster Presbyterian Church in Columbia, South Carolina, does footwashing in church every few years.

It can be a “a visible sign of an invisible grace,” said Ben Sloan, the pastor of missions at Eastminster. But he added with a laugh, ...

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Everything is different because Jesus rose again. But do we live as if we understand he is alive?

In the summer of 2022, I visited the charming Alpine town of Oberammergau, Germany. I wandered its leafy streets lined with mural-painted houses, their balconies overflowing with flower boxes.

After indulging in ice cream and shopping for the town’s famed woodcarvings, I settled in my seat for a five-and-a-half-hour performance of Jesus’ final week on earth. Since 1634, Oberammergau has put on a Passion play involving almost all its residents, first staged in thanksgiving for the end of a bubonic plague outbreak. Normally the performances take place in the first year of a new decade (2000, 2010, etc.), but the new plague of COVID-19 delayed 2020’s play by two years.

Scores of buses were depositing tourists from many foreign countries. Looking around, I saw groups from China, Japan, and Korea, in addition to many Europeans and Americans. That summer, almost half a million people would travel to secular Germany to sit through this presentation of Jesus’ passion, spoken and sung in a language that few in the crowd could understand.

What attracted them? I wondered. At one point, more than a thousand actors filled the stage, shouting in guttural German, “Kreuzige ihn!” (Crucify him!) The audience fell silent as Pilate’s soldiers tortured and mocked their prisoner.

Some in my tour group criticized the play for shortchanging the Resurrection; after all, only 3 of the libretto’s 132 pages focused on that seminal event. Yet the ratio reflects the Gospels’ accounts, which give far more attention to the ordeal of trials and crucifixion than to the triumphant conclusion. The criticism, however, raised a question: Would a tradition such as Oberammergau’s ...

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More than 100 years ago, Latin America’s most secular country abolished Christian holidays. Local church leaders have struggled to reclaim them since.

This week, millions of Latin Americans are attending worship services observing Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday.

In Uruguay, they are going to the rodeo.

While their Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking neighbors mark the death and resurrection of Christ, locals from the country of 3.3 million are celebrating Semana Criolla (“Creole Week”), a series of festivals honoring the country’s gaucho heritage. Many come to watch Uruguay’s national sport, jineteada, where riders attempt to stay on the back of untamed horses. Few of the activities, which also include traditional music and dancing, acknowledge the Christianity calendar, except when it comes to eating asado criollo.

Vendors sell the country’s local barbeque throughout the week, except on Thursday and Friday, a nod to the country’s Catholic heritage.

“It’s one of our many idiosyncrasies,” said Karina T., an anthropologist from Montevideo. (CT is only identifying her by her last initial because of sensitivity concerns about her ministry to Muslims.) “If you ask somebody why they eat fish on those days, they will probably say that it is something their grandparents did. Only a few will say something about religion. They don’t even know.”

This ignorance is somewhat intentional.

Uruguay was one of the first countries in the Western Hemisphere to constitutionally separate church and state, and nowhere is secularism more apparent than in the nation’s rebrand of Christian holidays. In 1919, the government legally changed December 25 to the Fiesta de la Familia and Holy Week to the Semana del Turismo (“Tourism Week”), during which time the capital city holds Semana Criolla. ...

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What Jesus’ midnight prayer in the garden tells us about cosmic conflict in the supernatural realm.

“Father, if it is your will, please heal your servant; yet not our will, but yours be done.” As a child, I recall hearing this kind of prayer and feeling deeply puzzled. If it is your will? I thought. Why wouldn’t it be God’s will to heal his servant?

Such prayers are not theologically incorrect—they echo the words of Christ himself and, rightly understood, believers ought to pray likewise. But wrongly understood, such prayers can be deeply confusing and troubling.

Imagine a young girl hearing people pray those words for her mother suffering with terminal cancer. What is she to think? Why wouldn’t God want to heal mommy—does he want her to suffer and die? Doesn’t God love mommy and me?

Even the most spiritually mature adults can struggle with the purpose and effect of their prayers—particularly when God seems absent or silent in their hour of greatest need, despite how faithfully and fervently they pray. If God is perfectly good, all-powerful, and knows our needs before we ask (as Jesus himself taught in Matthew 6:8), how could our prayers make any difference in God’s action? Wouldn’t God already know, will, and do whatever is preferable regardless of whether or how we pray?

These are not easy questions to answer, and they bring up sticky theological quandaries, such as how God’s sovereignty and human free will could possibly coexist. On this issue, Christians land on various parts of a spectrum, seeing it as some form of divine determinism, an optimistic vision of human partnership with God, or something else. Some see prayer primarily as a personal devotional practice that does not influence divine action, while others assume that unanswered prayers reflect ...

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She won a Grammy for “We Sing Praises,” collaborated with her brother Andraé on “Jesus Is the Answer,” and worked with everyone from Billy Graham to Michael Jackson.

Sandra Crouch, the twin sister and collaborator of gospel music legend Andraé Crouch, died earlier this month after an illness, her publicist said.

Crouch, 81, who died on March 17, will be honored with a musical tribute and funeral at New Christ Memorial Church in San Fernando, California, set for April 16–17, according to an announcement.

She died in a California hospital after having complications from treatment for a noncancerous lesion in her brain.

Though her brother’s name is more widely known, Crouch was influential in both ministry and music—within and beyond the gospel genre.

She cowrote “Jesus Is the Answer” with her brother—a 1970s hit on both Black gospel and white gospel radio stations. In the 1980s, she composed, produced, and sang the lead on “We Sing Praises,” for which she won a Grammy in 1984 for best soul gospel performance by a female, helping keep Light Records out of bankruptcy.

The label has continued to feature many other gospel acts, including The Winans, Walter Hawkins and the Hawkins Family, and Commissioned, as noted by jazz and folk singer-songwriter Dara Starr Tucker in a social media post paying tribute to Sandra Crouch.

If you grew up with gospel music in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, then this label itself is iconic for you,” said Tucker, who added that Crouch also played tambourine on hits of the Jackson 5. “For those reasons and so many more Sandra Crouch was a hugely influential figure in the world of gospel music.”

At the time of her death, Crouch was senior pastor of New Christ Memorial, after her twin brother took the controversial step in 1998 of ordaining her as copastor of the Pentecostal church started ...

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Billions know the Roman governor’s name. But he didn’t know the very son of God standing before him.

I am in the apparently small category of men unconcerned with the Roman Empire. I could probably describe key events in the reigns of three to five of its rulers, but not much more. And when it comes to recalling this kind of detail, I suspect I’m not alone. All but a handful of these ancient leaders have vanished from the public imagination. They struggled, fought, murdered, and schemed their way to supremacy only to be forgotten.

The same is true of American presidents, despite their greater proximity. I know the exceptionally good and bad, but others who held the highest office in the land do not register. Such are the vicissitudes of history. In our vanity, we humans want to etch our names in the record—only for the next generation to arrive well stocked with erasers.

But Pontius Pilate, the first-century governor of the Roman province of Judea, did succeed in being memorable. At Easter, unruly young boys will bound into churches decked in homemade Roman military garb playing the role of Pilate. He’s a central character in the dramatic reenactments of every Holy Week.

He is mentioned in the Nicene Creed, a central confession of our faith. The name Pontius Pilate has been recited countless times, Sunday after Sunday over the last millennia and half since that creed’s ratification, giving him one of the most recognizable names in the world. The creed refers to his role in the death of Jesus with characteristic brevity: “he was crucified under Pontius Pilate.” The words have been said by billions, but who was this provincial governor, and what does he have to teach us about the perils of significance?

Pilate was from the upper crust of Roman society. He’d been ...

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As Moscow and Kyiv trade insinuations over concert hall killing claimed by ISIS affiliate, Christian leaders focus on compassion and forgiveness instead of blame.

Russian evangelicals used Sunday sermons to condemn a terrorist attack that killed more than 130 people at a Moscow concert hall.

As Russia’s Baptist union prayed for “God’s mercy and protection,” its Pentecostal union conveyed its “bitterness and sorrow.” Vitaly Vlasenko, general secretary of the Russian Evangelical Alliance, called it a “painful shock” that could unleash “unbridled revenge” against terrorism.

But many in Russia are wondering: Who are the terrorists?

The attack on Friday that killed at least 137 people at the 6,200-seat Crocus City Hall was claimed by the ISIS affiliate in Afghanistan’s Khorasan Province (ISIS-K), which seeks an Islamic caliphate in Central Asia. Its statement emphasized it was targeting Christians and came in the “natural framework” of its war against the enemies of Islam.

Earlier this month, the US embassy in Moscow had issued a warning to avoid large gatherings. American officials stated they shared their intelligence with Russia. On March 7, Russia said it thwarted an attack on a synagogue, and a few days prior, security services killed six ISIS-K terrorists during a shootout in the nation’s Muslim Caucasus region.

The group was also linked to the 2017 St. Petersburg metro bombing that killed 15.

ISIS-K was formed by extremists seeking a more violent path than the Pakistani Taliban in 2015, the same year Russia formally intervened in Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad. A Sunni group, ISIS and its affiliates oppose Assad’s Alawite faith as heretical and considers Shiite Muslims as apostate.

In January, ISIS-K killed 95 Iranians in Kerman at a memorial service for Qasem Soleimani, leader of the ...

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Hosanna AME Church
2418 Castleton Road
Darlington, MD 21034
About Us:

The mission of our church is to minister to the spiritual, intellectual, physical, emotional, and environmental needs of all people by spreading the good news of Christ's redeeming gospel through the preached word and outreach ministries and activities. Christ has called us to seek and to save all those who will believe and call on the name of Jesus and accept Him as Savior and Lord!

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Lasted updated 10/14/2023

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