(ENI) NEW YORK -- Nearly 40 U.S. Christian leaders from traditional and Evangelical churches have joined in urging President George W. Bush to renew efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, saying that ending the conflict needs to be an "urgent priority" for the United States.
LOUISVILLE -- A retired Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) missionary and her daughter were killed in a carjacking Saturday, Jan. 27, in Kenya.
Lois Anderson, former PC(USA) missionary in Africa, and her daughter, Zelda White, were shot in a village just a few miles outside the capital city of Nairobi, according to Doug Welch, the PC(USA)'s area coordinator for Africa.
The mecca of southern Presbyterianism has been shaken, as the Montreat Presbyterian Church (MPC) has voted its desire to leave the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). At a congregational meeting held on Sunday, January 21, the congregation voted 311 to 27 (with three abstentions) to request the Presbytery of Western North Carolina (PWNC) to dismiss them with property to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church.
Editor's Note: All Presbyterians were horrified to hear of the deaths of longtime missionary (now retired) Lois Anderson and her daughter, Zelda White, after a carjacking in Kenya in January. (See the news report in the OUTLOOK issue of Feb. 19 and on this Web site under "Recent News Articles".) Lois' husband, William B. Anderson, has written a first-person account of that day, and its aftermath.
Dr. Bruce Manning Metzger, New Testament professor emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary and one of the preeminent American New Testament critics and biblical translators of the twentieth century, died February 13, 2007 at the University Medical Center at Princeton, at the age of 93.
Fereshteh Dibaj and her husband Reza Montazemi, a Christian couple in Iran, were released from an Iranian jail last October after spending 10 days in detention.
The charges against them are still unclear, but it is likely to do with their religious affiliation. They belong to Iran's little-known Christian population, a minority that constitutes less than one percent of the country's 70 million inhabitants.
According to Amnesty, Reza's mother, who owns the house in which they live, was reportedly ordered to sign a document two days before the couple was arrested, promising that no more Christian meetings for worship, prayer or Bible study would be held there.
It should come as no surprise that Tehran's religious authorities are concerned about the Christian community.
Here's a whiff of reality.
Half of all the communications that Rhett Smith receives on his cell phone are text messages.
Smith -- who's in charge of the college ministry at Bel Air Church in the Los Angeles area -- no longer posts much information on his church's Web site, because he knows that many young adults won't bother to look there.
Instead, Smith relies heavily on MySpace.com and other social networking sites to communicate with students -- they're already there, so he's created his own MySpace page. But increasingly he's seen folks migrating from MySpace to Facebook.com -- "Facebook has really exploded," Smith said -- so now he's there too. He understands: social networking, at whatever the hot place of the month, is the way to get out the word.
LOUISVILLE -- Sharing joys, concerns, hopes, and prayers was the focus of a letter sent January 19 by the members of a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) delegation in the Middle East at that time. General Assembly Council (GAC) Chair Allison Seed, General Assembly Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick and GAC Executive Director Linda Bryant Valentine were visiting Lebanon, Israel, and Palestinian territories in an effort to show their continued support for the region's Christians and to get a first-hand look at the area's dynamics.
I (Tomas Spath) preached a sermon not too long ago in which I admitted I cannot speak with certain members of my family. When I open my mouth, I get either a loud verbal "NO!!!" or the silent treatment.
To my surprise, as the congregation left that Sunday morning approximately 85% of the congregants admitted that they too had a similar problem with their siblings or parents.
I shared this experience with my retired pastor father who was preaching at an interim post and he decided to do the same. He admitted from the pulpit that he was having difficulty maintaining a conversation with certain members of his family. To his surprise, about 85% of the congregants in his church also admitted the same!
ORLANDO -- Saying the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is close to "utter ruin" and possibly extinction, the New Wineskins Association of Churches https://www.newwineconvo.com/ on February 8 laid the groundwork for a group of congregations to leave the denomination together, probably to join the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC). https://www.epc.org
A vote on whether to leave likely will be taken the evening of Feb. 9.
ORLANDO -- The New Wineskins Association of Churches https://www.newwineconvo.com/ has voted unanimously to ask the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC) https://www.epc.org/ to create a new, non-geographic presbytery to which congregations that want to leave the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) could be dismissed.
The EPC's General Assembly is expected to vote in June to create the presbytery.
I have just returned from the Middle East. While there, we were thrilled to visit with Reformed Christians in Lebanon--the place of the first Presbyterian Church international mission endeavor--and to see the vitality and strength of the ministry there. We celebrated churches alive in worship, children learning the Christian faith, seminarians being trained for ministry, and a church reaching out to all those who suffer in a war-torn country.
[Ramallah] A loud siren wails in the main street of Ramallah as the ambulance races to the nearby hospital. The casualty inside the vehicle is a teenage Palestinian who received two bullets to his chest during clashes among rival armed militia.
In a separate incident, a number of disgruntled armed young men showered the Daraghmeh store with scores of bullets in Ramallah's commercial district. The fire engulfed the store's interior, resulting in losses totaling $450,000.
At the entrance of a well-established restaurant in the city, a big sign reads "No hand guns allowed on the premises."
As ammunition is readily available through black market middlemen, the sounds of bullets are heard frequently across the city. In a Pavlovian response, the citizens of Ramallah run into hiding as soon as the bullets start flying, their daily life controlled by the will of the gunmen.
A church moving into a golf club and conference center?!
That was my reaction when the invitation came to attend the dedication of the new facility of the First Presbyterian Church, Honolulu, Hawaii. It probably is no surprise to anyone that I jumped at the chance to go and check out how the Presbyterians were faring in the fiftieth state. What I found were vibrant, growing churches engaged in creative ministry and witness.
LOUISVILLE -- Reading the Book of Order of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) can be dry work -- although, amazingly, some folks love to do it.
But the discussion the Form of Government Task Force https://www.pcusa.org/formofgovernment/index.htm is having about how to rewrite the Book of Order gives reflections -- like glimmers on the water -- of ways in which a denomination's rules really do make a difference in the daily lives of churches.
At its meeting here Jan. 11-13, the task force talked, for example, about what happens when a former or retired pastor stays in the community near the church where that pastor had served.
Editor's note: This year marks the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown in Virginia.
Off the coast of North Carolina lies Roanoke Island, whose Northern tip is the site of England's failed colony in the 1580's. Other than the sound of surf breaking against the shore, all is silence. You feel a palpable sense of loss.
Four hundred years ago, three ships -- the Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery -- launched out of the Thames River from London toward the English Channel. The 105 passengers were men and boys; the women would come in later voyages. Five months later, on May 14, 1607, they founded Jamestown, England's first permanent colony. The site was a peninsula 40 miles up the James River in what is now Virginia.
Two dominant faiths stand side-by-side in our nation. Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson originated a public faith our presidents salute in their speeches, imploring God's blessing on the U.S. Jefferson called this national Deity the "Creator" and "Nature's God" in the Declaration of Independence. Orthodox Christianity ranks as the second popular faith alive nationally. God revealed Himself in Christ Jesus. Jefferson refused to use Christian imagery or language in the Declaration of Independence. He and the majority of Founding Fathers kept separate these two faiths.
(RNS) Fourteen members of an advisory group to the Atlanta-based Carter Center have resigned in protest over former President Jimmy Carter's recent book and statements on the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate.
Donald G. Campbell, director of the Congregational Ministries Division of the General Assembly Council in Louisville, Ky., 1999-2006, has been named as the interim executive presbyter of Mission Presbytery, with offices in San Antonio, Texas.
When the New Wineskins Association of Churches meets again in Orlando in February, some of these evangelicals may be ready to leave the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) on the spot, others probably not.
So the New Wineskins leadership is planning to offer alternatives: a roadmap for those who think the PC(USA) has abandoned orthodoxy, including a proposal for PC(USA) congregations to leave the denomination and take their property with them.
(RNS) More than 1,000 houses of worship will receive grants from the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund to help recover from 2005 hurricane damage on the Gulf Coast.
Fund spokesman Bill Pierce said the number of applications far exceeded expectations. Officials originally expected between 500 and 700 applications.
compiled by faithinpubliclife.org
As news reports are abuzz with speculation about the State of the Union address -- what agenda items will make the cut and what tone President Bush will strike -- Christian leaders are challenging the President to address the most pressing moral concerns of our time: bringing our troops home from Iraq, eradicating poverty, abolishing torture without exception, creation care and comprehensive immigration reform.
Ben Lacy Rose, moderator of the 111th General Assembly of the PC US (1971-1972) died in Richmond, Va, November 13 at Westminster Canterbury retirement community two days after Veterans Day. He lived a long, active, and productive life as a pastor, military chaplain, professor of homiletics, editor, and author, supported by his spouse Ann Thompson Rose, who died in 2005.
Rose was born in Fayetteville N.C., in 1914, heir to a long history of Roses whose line extends back to Scotland of the 1730's, to Orange County, N.C., and Fayetteville where he was born in 1914. He attended Davidson College in N.C., Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Va., where he took his BD (1938), Th. M. (1950) and the Th. D. (1955). He served as chaplain in the United States army in World War II and was awarded a Bronze Star and Legion of Merit Medal. In 1974 he retired from the Army Reserve with a rank of colonel, one of those veterans of honorable service marked on Nov. 11.
c. 2006 Religion News Service
Conservative Episcopalians' steady exodus from the Episcopal Church accelerated Dec. 17 as eight Virginia congregations -- including two large, historic parishes -- voted to leave the national body.
The Diocese of Virginia has lost 12 congregations and about 18 percent of its average Sunday worship attendance in recent battles over homosexuality and the authority of Scripture, according to figures provided by the diocese.
"People ask me, 'Rick, are you right wing or left wing?' I tell them, I'm for the whole bird!"
That statement, one of a plethora of sound bites spoken by pastor and author Rick Warren, embodied both the theme and spirit of "Race Against Time," the 2006 Global Summit on AIDS at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Cal., this past Nov. 29 -- Dec. 1. The conference drew the attention of many, due in part to the invitation Warren extended to potential Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. This act of inclusivity drew both the attention of the secular world and criticism from the religious right.
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