April 8, 2008

Worship is over and I am standing in the doorway shaking hands. In front of me is a couple I do not recall seeing before. I say, “Good morning! I’m Martin Copenhaver.” By my manner and my tone of voice you might think that I am greeting long-lost friends, rather than introducing myself to these people for the first time. The woman of the couple responds, “Good to meet you. We are Jill and Bob Townsend.”

Trinity United Church of Christ on the South Side of Chicago has received a great deal of media attention because one of its members is presidential candidate Barack Obama. The head pastor of the 8,000-member church is Otis Moss III, 36, a graduate of Yale Divinity School, who recently took over the day-to-day leadership of the church from Jeremiah Wright. Moss is the son of Otis Moss Jr., longtime pastor of Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland, who served with Martin Luther King Jr.

While attending a conference in Hong Kong I spent a free afternoon looking for signs of the vibrant Asian Christianity that we’ve heard so much about recently. If writers such as Philip Jenkins (The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity) and David Aikman (Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity Is Changing the Global Balance of Power) are to be trusted, China holds the future of Christianity.

The Austrian picture The Counterfeiters, which won this year’s Academy Award for best foreign film, dramatizes yet another little-known story of the Holocaust. In “Operation Bernhard” the Nazis assembled a select band of prisoners at Sachsenhausen concentration camp and put them to work producing counterfeit versions of the English pound note and the American dollar bill. The prisoners were rewarded with food and clothes and soft beds to sleep in.

Diablo Cody won an Academy Award for her screenplay for Juno, and it’s true that the film bubbles along on the strength of the snappy, frank commentary that Juno (Ellen Page) offers on the travails of being pregnant at 16.