Who is Ronald MacMillan, MacKenzie Scott, and Metropolitan Epiphanius and why should we care?
REVword readers enjoy engaging with interesting, less widely known individuals.
Ronald MacMillan
People like Dr. Professor Ronald MacMillan.
I’ll bet your favourite meal at your favourite restaurant that you’ve never heard of him before you read this post.
Professor McMillan has enjoyed contrasting careers as a bible smuggler in Cold War Eastern Europe, a pastor in Bristol, England, a journalist in Hong Kong, a trainer of underground preachers in China, a professor of theo
logy in Pakistan, President of an International Speech Tuition Agency, and a Global Analyst for the NGO sector. He has 40 years experience of ministering among persecuted Christians on five continents as a teacher, author and strategist and leading teams for impact.
How’s that for size?
Professor MacMillan thinks it’s important to provide global templates for understanding.
Even at the risk of the exercise inevitably running the gauntlet of oversimplification.
The Global Church
He says, “Here comes our monster – a characterization of the essential and defining dilemmas facing the global suffering church.”
There are five and they take us around the planet.
- How do you church when there is no place to hide? That’s China, and North Korea.
- How do you do church when most everyone wants to leave? That’s the Middle East.
- How do you do church when your neighbour wants to kill you? That’s sub-Saharan Africa.
- How do you do church when your government has changed the culture you no longer feel welcome in the place of your birth? That’s India.
- How do you do church when you have to pay a cartel to keep worshipping? That’s Latin America.
I’ll follow up with links for the last two when they are published and if nothing else, the information helps us understand and pray for the realities of Christian faith today.
MacKenzie Scott
Scott is the 20th wealthiest person in the world. Or was.
Her fortune is shrinking, but it’s by design.
Scott is married to a high school science teacher.
She was married to Jeff Bezos for 25 years. Scott received 4% of the value of Amazon in their divorce settlement, about $35-38 billion.
Immediately after the settlement was finalized, she signed the Giving Pledge to donate at least half of her wealth in her lifetime. To date, she has given away approximately $26 billion.
And she is worth $30 billion, depending on Amazon’s share value. .
She was inspired by this quote from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life:
“The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better… Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
In a world where one person has 1,000 billion dollars and one billion people have less than one thousand dollars, Scott is a rarity. And we need more like her.
You don’t need a lot of money to be generous. In fact, the most generous sector, per capita, is the one in which people have the least wealth.
Metropolitan Epiphanius
Metropolitan Epiphanius is the Primate of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU).
NOTE: This body is distinct from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), which is tied to the Russian Orthodox Church, which is a political tool of the Russian government. Social media will tell you that Ukraine persecutes Christians because of this. Not true.
He has been an outspoken defender of Ukraine. In the early hours of June 15th, Russia rocketed one of the holiest sites in the Christian world – the Dormition Cathedral of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra.
Epiphanius characterized the strike on the Lavra as “yet another Russian crime against humanity, against history and against Christianity. What more must the Kremlin’s antichrist do before the world realises that decisive action is needed to bring an end to Russia’s terror against Ukraine and against the very principles of peace?”
Did you find these people interesting? Who do you think is interesting but is not well known? Please join the conversation and post a comment below.
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