On New Year’s Day people often write annual resolutions and promise to make positive changes in their lives. Obviously it is impossible to be productive as individuals or a church in the months ahead without careful planning.
For mainline Protestant denominations, it is not good news.
In 1991, Loren Mead wrote “The Once and Future Church,” a book about the future of ministry.
Here I will confess, if that’s the appropriate word, I myself am a lapsed Presbyterian. It’s the diction that did it, finally, the worn-thin, shabby, church-poor words, so overused they connote to me a poverty of spirit, not the richness of it.
— E.L. Doctorow, The Waterworks
Louisville, KY.
Doing ministry in a time of “shifting sands” has become the reality of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A).
WASHINGTON (Ekklesia)
The number of organizations engaged in religious lobbying or religion-related advocacy in Washington, D.C., has increased fivefold in the past four decades, from fewer than 40 in 1970 to more than 200 today.
2011. Good, bad or otherwise? For Presbyterians, 2011 was either the year of the breakthrough or the year of the collapse, either the year of clarifying or the year of confusing, either the year of ending the war or declaring war. It all depends on your perspective.
HAVANA (PNS) The U.S. blockade of Cuba is a fundamentally theological issue because, in choosing isolation over reconciliation, the U.S. has chosen to serve mammon rather than God, Cuban Presbyterian theologian Reinerio Arce told Cuban and U.S. religious leaders here Dec. 1.
MATANZAS, Cuba (PNS) The liturgical dancers circle each other at a distance, then move closer together, then join in an intimate pas-de-deux.
“We Bought A Zoo” will be a crowd-pleaser. It’s charming, it’s sentimental, it’s hopeful, it has plenty of star power, and it’s based on a heartwarming true story. A little unevenness can be readily excused.
It’s easy to like “War Horse.” Characteristically of Steven Spielberg films, cute children and precocious teenagers play a large part.
I remember reading this book when it first appeared in print, during the height of the Cold War.
Motion capture is the name of the technology utilized by director Steven Spielberg.
At the turn of the 20th century, there were a couple of brilliant minds developing what would become the established science of psychotherapy: Carl Jung in Switzerland and Sigmund Freud in Austria.
A Presbyterian pastor seeking to work alone on sermons outside the office she kept in the church building was parked in a corner of an outdoor Starbucks courtyard in the Washington, D.C., area.
It’s been a while since a mainline movie was rated NC-17. And this one carries that rating for very good reason.
OK, it’s both weird and non-linear. To the point of impressionistic, what with its long introduction/foreshadowing with the classical music and the things falling out of the sky and freeze-frame images, collaged as if on a cinematic canvas.
This series is really enjoyable to watch. Robert Downey, Jr. makes a credible and athletic Mr. Holmes, a master of disguise and observer of nearly everything.
Yes, it’s a re-make. The original Swedish film was such a sensation that the English translation of the book caught on, then the two sequels, and now we make an English-language version of the Swedish film, still utilizing the cold remoteness of winter in Scandinavia, even occasionally showing newspaper clippings in Swedish, but everybody speaks English, whether or not with a Swedish accent.
(General Assembly Mission Council) Work crews in Haiti clear rubble from a home outside of Léogâne. Less than a decade old, Church of All Nations, a church plant out of the Korean immigrant context, has not only taken root but is already bearing fruit.
Editor’s Note: Gradye Parsons, stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and Linda Bryant Valentine, executive director of the General Assembly Mission Council, both have signed this statement of the Interfaith Commission of the National Council of Churches regarding the decision of the Lowe's home improvement chain to pull its advertising from the television program "All-American Muslim."
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (General Assembly Mission Council) Four new church developments and two presbyteries will receive mission program grants from Evangelism and Church Growth of the General Assembly Mission Council (GAMC).
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