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The latest messages, interviews, and updates from Forefront Church based in Brooklyn, NY, but accessible from anywhere. Learn more at www.forefrontnyc.com. Forefront Church is a fully inclusive, affirming-of-everyone-community based on the deeds of Christ not the religion and bureaucracy that followed. Our vision is to build a just and generous expression of the Christian faith. We are more interested in good questions than good answers.
Episodes
Tuesday Apr 02, 2024
Forefront Conversations with Amir Marshi & Marah Sarji
Tuesday Apr 02, 2024
Tuesday Apr 02, 2024
For many Americans, the concept of Palestine is nebulous at best and highly misconstrued at worst. Those raised in Evangelical circles were taught that Israel was a long-established nation favored by God and that Zionism was a morally right idea. However, many people are unaware that Israel was not established as a nation until after World War II and that Zionism, which is an anti-Semitic political philosophy more than anything else, has been fueled by colonialism and capitalism for over 100 years leading to suppression, eviction, and genocide of countless Palestinian lives. Sadly, the 32,000+ deaths in Gaza since the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2024 is not a new injustice, but just a new chapter in the oppression of a people whose homeland was partitioned against their will thanks to a UN resolution decades ago.
In this episode, two Palestinian Christians and PhD students, Amir Marshi and Marah Sarji, bring voice to the Palestinian experience that has been drowned out and ignored in a time and country that sees almost unchallenged and unquestioned support for Israel.
ABOUT AMIR
Amir Marshi is a Palestinian PhD student, organizer, researcher, and writer hailing from the city of Nazareth. His previous engagements encompass work on Palestinian history, settler colonial state violence, and the incarceration of Palestinian children in Jerusalem. He has written on the impact of the Apartheid wall and colonial settlements in and around Jerusalem on the geopolitical and social fabric of Palestinians in Jerusalem, contributing as an author for the Jerusalem Story website. His focus also extends to student movements and public pedagogy in Palestine. Amir co-founded the Edward Said Forum for Palestinian students in the Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts Department at Tel Aviv University, as well as the Souq Stories project—a multi-sited photographic exhibition spotlighting historic Palestinian open markets. He earned his MA from the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2023 and is currently pursuing his PhD in History and Anthropology at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. His current work is centered on the colonial history of Christian Zionism on the one hand, and on the other, the political history of the Arab Church in Palestine-Syria and the North American Arab diaspora.
ABOUT MARAH
Marah Sarji is a PhD student in theology. Born and raised in Nazareth, she became passionate for justice and peace in Palestine. She received her bachelors in sociology, anthropology and business administration, and her masters in sociology and anthropology, both from Tel Aviv University. During her studies, Marah became active among Kufiya and Saleeb, a movement of young Palestinian Christians seeking to reconcile faith and identity following colonization and Western theological influences in Palestinian Christianity.
Marah’s research focuses on the life experiences of struggle and steadfastness of women in Palestine, their faith in God and belief in divine sovereignty. Her research interests also include womanist theology, Palestinian liberation theology, anthropology of theology, coloniality and decolonization.
For more background information on Palestine and what has fueled the conflict, check out the following books:
Sunday Mar 31, 2024
Disruption | Lent – Life and Death
Sunday Mar 31, 2024
Sunday Mar 31, 2024
Rev. Venida celebrates the Good News of Easter Sunday with a message highlighting the power given to us through the resurrection. Through this gift, we can freely embrace our own mortality, and recognize the freedom we have been granted to pursue abundant life through the life-giving love of Jesus.
Sunday Mar 24, 2024
Disruption | When It All Comes Undone
Sunday Mar 24, 2024
Sunday Mar 24, 2024
Palm Sunday is not a celebration. Palm Sunday is the shattering of hope and watching one's worst fears come to pass. How do we reconcile hope in the midst of our grief, our pain, and the shattering of our own expectations?
Sunday Mar 17, 2024
Disruption | Radical Unraveling of Vocation
Sunday Mar 17, 2024
Sunday Mar 17, 2024
It's Drag Sunday with the sensational Flamy Grant! Flamy leads the music and shares her journey that led to her own Radical Unraveling of Vocation. It's a day of celebration like no other!
Sunday Mar 10, 2024
Disruption | Seeking Understanding When Everything Has Fallen Apart
Sunday Mar 10, 2024
Sunday Mar 10, 2024
Rev. Venida shares a message on the story of Job as we continue the Disruption sermon series. Everything Job holds dear — his property, his family, his wealth, his physical health — has been taken from him. Reduced to suffering and misery, Job laments his circumstances and tries to make sense of what has happened to him. How do we also seek to make meaning of our pain?
Sunday Mar 03, 2024
Disruption | Christian Zionism & Palestine
Sunday Mar 03, 2024
Sunday Mar 03, 2024
Kai (they/them) speaks about Israel-Palestine, an issue that feels overwhelming to lots of folks: What is the Christian stake in all of this? They will walk us through a historical and theological context that outlines Christian responsibility in the current oppression of and genocide against Palestinians.
Thursday Feb 29, 2024
Forefront Conversations with Mari Joerstad
Thursday Feb 29, 2024
Thursday Feb 29, 2024
These days when people think about their relationships with land, it's often under the context of landownership: buying it, selling it, farming it, exploiting it. According to Dr. Mari Joerstad, the Israelites of the Old Testament would be horrified by our attitudes towards and interactions with the Earth. For Old Testament societies, owning and selling private land was just not a concept or practice like it is today. Dr. Joerstad talks to us about what the language in the Hebrew Bible says to us about the relationship that Israel had to the land and, in turn, to God and how that extended to the concept of being accountable to the land. We also get into a discussion about how contemporary concepts of landownership are so tied into identity of societies that it leads to armed conflict. Joining this conversation is Amanda Clevinger, the leader of Forefront's Faith & Climate Change small group.
ABOUT MARI
Dr. Joerstad is a biblical scholar, whose research focuses on ecology, land, migration and belonging in the Hebrew Bible. She received her BA from the University of Toronto, a Master of Religion from the Toronto School of Theology (Wycliffe College), and a PhD from Duke University, where she studied with Ellen Davis. A revised version of her dissertation, entitled The Hebrew Bible and Environmental Ethics: Humans, Nonhumans, and the Living Landscape, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. She has also published articles in journals like The Journal of Biblical Literature, Horizons in Biblical Theology, and The Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture. More recently, she has been a Research Associate at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, where she has provided support for the grant Facing the Anthropocene, lead by Norman Wirzba and Jedediah Purdy, and funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.
Sunday Feb 25, 2024
Disruption | When The Unimaginable Has Happened
Sunday Feb 25, 2024
Sunday Feb 25, 2024
What happens when the unimaginable has happened? Where is God? What happens when our plans, our world falls apart? Join us as we learn from the experience of the Disciples when their lives were disrupted.
Sunday Feb 18, 2024
Disruption | Discovering a New Path
Sunday Feb 18, 2024
Sunday Feb 18, 2024
In Pastor Mak's final sermon as a member of the Forefront staff, she shares her testimony of her 5 years at Forefront and how this church has impacted her life in tremendous ways. She contemplates the meaning of having a "calling", interrogates the concept of having to "do it all", and shares her hopes for the future.
Sunday Feb 11, 2024
Disruption | When Humans Disrupt God’s Plans for Justice
Sunday Feb 11, 2024
Sunday Feb 11, 2024
What happens when humans disrupt God’s plan for justice? What should be our collective response when we do? Rev. Venida continues our Disruption Sermon Series sharing the good news that God can give us the strength to recreate God’s plans in our own lives with new vision and intention that propel us forward to bring change and liberation to those suffering.