Birmingham (PNS)
Representatives of Christian Churches Together (CCT) — a fellowship of 36 denominations and six national organizations representing a large spectrum of Christians — has issued the first known formal clergy response to Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
NEW YORK (CWS) If 2010 was the year of large-scale disasters — including the devastating Haiti earthquake and wide-spread floods in Pakistan — 2011 is likely to be the year when issues of hunger become increasingly significant on the global stage, international humanitarian organization Church World Service (CWS) says in a New Year’s assessment.
VATICAN CITY (RNS) After a lengthy appeals process, the Vatican has ruled that nine Boston-area Catholic parishes should be closed despite protests from parishioners.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (RNS) A coalition of more than 50 Christian, Jewish, and Muslim leaders sent an open letter to Congress urging a “time of soul searching” and national dialogue about “violent and vitriolic political rhetoric.”
BANGALORE, India (ENI) Pakistani churches say they’re frustrated by the government’s refusal to amend a controversial blasphemy law that makes it a capital crime to insult Islam or the Prophet Muhammad.
If interim ministers are supposed to help congregations recover from sudden loss of a pastor, why does it take so long to find the interim?
SAN DIEGO (ABP) A U.S. federal appeals court has ruled that a four-story-tall cross atop an oceanside promontory in the exclusive San Diego suburb of LaJolla is unconstitutional as currently configured.
WARSAW (ENInews) – Poland's largest Roman Catholic publishing house has defended its decision to issue a controversial book, which accuses Poles of profiting from the Holocaust by betraying Jews to the Nazis and stealing their possessions.
GENEVA (ENInews) – U.S. troop withdrawals notwithstanding, Iraqi Christians continue to flee because their safety cannot be guaranteed, and there is little hope their lives will improve soon, six Iraqi church leaders said Feb. 18 during the meeting of the World Council of Churches Central Committee.
GENEVA (ENInews) – The World Council of Churches (WCC) Central Committee on Feb. 17 took a hard look at whether it can adapt quickly enough to rapidly changing ecumenical and interreligious realities. If it cannot, one delegate noted, fixation on governance and institutional survival may "suck the life out of the ecumenical movement."
Re., the vote to delete G-6.0106b from the Book of Order: “This vote will determine whether as a church we will continue..
Presbyteries are voting on many amendments. I’m writing about Amendment ‘A’ which would delete G-6.0106b from our Book of Order. For almost fifteen years this paragraph has clarified that we Presbyterians believe what the Christian church has always believed, namely, that God’s intention for us humans is “to live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman (W-4.9001), or [in] chastity in singleness.”
(In December 1961, two students from the Belgian Congo studying at Union Seminary in Richmond, Va., attended the three-week pilot project called Christmas International House (CIH) at the Westminster Fellowship House at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, S.C., where I was Presbyterian Campus Minister.
Many of you have read and are discussing the letter from the 45 pastors of mostly larger churches of a more conservative inclination. In the letter they claim that “to say the PCUSA is deathly ill is not editorializing,” and then proceed to propose a remedy for the church’s ills.
ORLANDO, Fla. (Presbyterian News Service) – Institutional questions around polity and governance are secondary to questions around identity and mission, two middle governing body executives who are polity experts told the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Middle Governing Body Commission at its second meeting here Feb. 3-5.
SAN ANSELMO, Calif. – In a surprise announcement at its Feb. 8 meeting here, San Francisco Theological Seminary’s Board of Trustees said it is closing the seminary’s Southern California campus in Pasadena by June 30.
ALBUQUERQUE – In his younger years, Rick Ufford-Chase had a rocky relationship with the Apostle Paul. He bristled at some of what Paul had to say, finding him racist, sexist and opposed to gays and lesbians. “Mostly, I gave up,” preferring not to argue with those who saw Paul differently because, “frankly, I didn’t want to fight about it,” Ufford-Chase said recently.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. –Attendees from the five partner denominations of the Association of Presbyterian Church Educators annual event dined together here Feb. 3 and discussed diversity, media consumption, use of technology and their churches’ recent handling of cultural issues.
A minister from Boston did not violate the Book of Order of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) or her ordination vows when she married two women from her congregation, the General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission (GAPJC) has ruled. The wedding took place in Massachusetts – one of a handful of states that has legalized same-gender marriages.
The pastors who on Feb. 2 issued a controversial letter declaring the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) saying the denomination is “deathly ill” and needs to be “radically transformed” have now issued a letter of clarification.
(rNS) — Americans who are “very religious” are more likely to practice healthy behaviors than those who are less religious, a Gallup survey shows.
The parsonage (or manse) allowance may soon disappear from ministers’ tax breaks, and the financial implications for clergy will be huge. Church legal expert Richard Hammar reports in the January 2011, edition of Church Law and Tax Report that a California court case threatens to eliminate the parsonage exemption tax break that dates to 1954.
NEW YORK (ENI) — The 19-story granite building on Manhattan’s upper west side, often referred to as the “God Box,” is 50 years old. New York’s Interchurch Center, one of the most visible symbols of Christian ecumenism in the United States, is marking its 50th anniversary as the modern ecumenical movement for Christian unity is celebrating its 100th.
VATICAN CITY (RNS) — Pope Benedict XVI denounced the “vile and murderous” New Year's Day killing of 21 Coptic Christians in Alexandria, Egypt, but was rebuked by Egypt’s top Muslim cleric for an “unacceptable interference in Egypt's affairs.”
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