Tag Archives: society

Mainline churches shrink. Will advertisements help?

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Mainline Protestant denominations continue their free-fall, as highlighted in a US News & World Report piece that explores their adventures in advertising.

“The under-35 generation thinks church is a judgmental, hypocritical, insular place,” says Jamie Dunham, chief planning officer for Bohan Advertising & Marketing, the firm that designed the United Methodist campaign.

The idea of trying to advertise your way out of that problem was promptly savaged by Kevin Hendricks at the popular Church Marketing Sucks blog, who noted:

If that’s the case, I’m not sure an advertising campaign is the answer…. The problems in the church today can’t be fixed with an ad campaign. Marketing (not an ad campaign, but marketing in the big picture sense) can help to address those problems, but you can’t re-brand your way out of trouble.

Probably not.

Disturbing find in Bridgeport highlights links between occult and crime

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Narcotics officers in Bridgeport have made a gruesome discovery which highlights the link between crime and the occult. Traffickers in Mexico and other places are said to commonly perform grotesque rituals to obtain supernatural protection for their business but we don’t expect to see such things in these parts.

Members of the Tactical Narcotics Team expected to find the normal tools of drug dealers when they executed a search-and-seizure warrant at [address omitted - ed.] early Tuesday morning.

What they found even surprised them.

“There was blood all over the basement walls,” said Sgt. William Bailey, of the Tactical Narcotics Team. “We found what appears to be a human skull with an alligator head on top of it and possibly a sheep or goat’s head underneath.”

There were beads on the wall along with strange handwriting, kind of like what you would expect to see in a satanic horror movie. There were candles burning in glass and knives and animal horns nearby.

“I never saw anything like this before,” said Bailey. “We called in the detective bureau.”

The suspected human skull will be sent to the Chief States Medical Examiner’s Office to determine not only if it is a human skull, but whose skull it was.

Read more here. Continue to pray for Bridgeport and pray against the drug trade in our State.

The rush to get “de-baptized”

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Chuck Colson talks about the latest trend among the apostate, or wanna-be apostates out there: getting a certificate of “de-baptism.”

There’s a bizarre trend going on in Great Britain. Former church members are getting “de-baptized.” As Time magazine reports, “More than 100,000 former Christians have downloaded ‘certificates of de-baptism’ in a bid to publicly renounce the faith.”

Now, there have always been people who have walked away from their faith. But what’s behind this public display? And why are so many downloading an apostasy certificate?

Read more here.

What’s behind Catholic Diocese lawsuit against the State?

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In today’s Courant, Dave Altimari has a good background piece explaining the Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport’s lawsuit against the State of Connecticut.

In March, more than 4,000 Catholics descended on the Capitol to protest Bill 1098, which proposed having lay councils of seven to 13 people oversee the finances of local parishes, relegating Catholic pastors and bishops to an advisory role.

Church officials were sharply critical of the bill and organized the rally and, on their website, asked parishioners to contact their local legislators to protest the plan.

The bill was eventually withdrawn amid questions about its constitutionality.

But the issue did not end there. About a month later, church officials received a letter from the Office of State Ethics informing them that they were the “subject of an Office of State Ethics evaluation” to ascertain whether the diocese had violated state statutes by failing to register as a lobbyist before the rally.

In the letter, Thomas K. Jones, an ethics enforcement officer, said that the evaluation was only preliminary and did not necessarily mean that a formal complaint would be filed against the church.

Jones said that the diocese was being investigated for possible violations of three state statutes — failing to register as a lobbyist, failing to submit all appropriate lobbyist filings and failing to follow all applicable registration procedures.

We’re alarmed by the State action and can’t see why the Catholic Church or any church body would need to register as a lobbyist before urging its constituents to act as… well, citizens!

Bishop Lori stated on the Bridgeport Diocese website,

“The Diocese is not a registered lobbyist and does not devote itself primarily to legislative or political matters,” Bishop Lori continued. “Nonetheless, from time to time, the Diocese’s religious mission compels me and the pastors within the Diocese to take stands, consistent with our religious beliefs, on legislation that concerns the moral issues of the day, and to urge our parishioners to act on the basis of Church teachings. We communicate these messages to our parishioners through the Diocese’s website, in newsletters, at Mass and other religious services, and through a variety of other means.”

That’s very well stated in our opinion. Nothing could be more natural than a religious organization providing religious guidance to its adherents who pose moral and ethical questions to the religious organization.

Must churches keep silent on anything the State defines as political?  The history of the 20th century shows that such a policy is a major building block of any tyrannical system.

Resources related to this story:

Complaint against the State of Connecticut, May 29, 2009 (PDF)

Pastoral Letter from Bishop Lori (PDF)

The myth of “doing it for the children”

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The alarmingly clear-thinking Mark Steyn wants us to wake up, and fast, skewering us for becoming Europeans:

Every Democrat running for election tells you they want to do this or that “for the children.” If America really wanted to do something “for the children,” it could try not to make the same mistake as most of the rest of the Western world and avoid bequeathing the next generation a leviathan of bloated bureaucracy and unsustainable entitlements that turns the entire nation into a giant Ponzi scheme. That’s the real “war on children” (to use another Democrat catchphrase)—and every time you bulk up the budget you make it less and less likely they’ll win it.

Conservatives often talk about “small government,” which, in a sense, is framing the issue in leftist terms: they’re for big government. But small government gives you big freedoms—and big government leaves you with very little freedom. The bailout and the stimulus and the budget and the trillion-dollar deficits are not merely massive transfers from the most dynamic and productive sector to the least dynamic and productive. When governments annex a huge chunk of the economy, they also annex a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher—and you make it very difficult ever to change back. Americans face a choice: They can rediscover the animating principles of the American idea—of limited government, a self-reliant citizenry, and the opportunities to exploit your talents to the fullest—or they can join most of the rest of the Western world in terminal decline.

This is a speech well worth reading in its entirety.

When you vandalize a church, make sure you get the right one!

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I actually couldn’t help laughing when I read about this – and I’m a pastor! In the fight to defend traditional values this story pretty much tells you how we got to where we are today.

After unknown persons, probably upset about California banning homosexual marriage, spray-painted swastikas on a San Francisco Catholic Church, the pastor was upset. But not for the reason you might think. From KCBS, out West, comes this gem:

Vandals may have marked up the wrong church Saturday night in an apparent revolt against Proposition 8 supporters.

Black spray-painted swastikas marred the front of Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in San Francisco’s Castro district. Though the church itself is gay friendly, the proposed ban on gay marriage had support from prominent Catholics up to and including Pope Benedict.

Pastor Steve Meriweather told KCBS his parishioners actually share the vandals’ sentiment against Prop 8. “I think it’s unfortunate that they selected our community to attack,” said Meriweather, “because it’s the wrong one.”

If only they had asked the good pastor first he might have directed them to a church more worthy of being vandalized!

Photo credit: Facade of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York by David Shankbone

One man, one woman – unless that offends you, of course!

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The Church’s failure to compete in the spheres of vocabulary and language has brought our society to the place where it is about to get hit by a train.  It’s time for Christians to ask for, even insist upon, several things.  The Church needs to: (1) reclaim the true biblical concept of tolerance; (2) reclaim the vocabulary of civil rights; (3) explain biblical teaching on family issues; and (4) refuse to be browbeaten by comical, trendoid explanations of biblical concepts – as if the Church and Israel before it have been wrong or confused about homosexuality for 4,000 years.  American Christians must (preferably before tomorrow morning) cease to be intimidated by the possibility that someone may claim they are motivated by “hate.”

I was annoyed when I saw a clip of the pro-homosexual marriage video in which Jack Black appears as Jesus, castigating Christians by reminding them that shellfish, like gay sex, is an abomination in the Bible.  Is this really the best that supporters of gay marriage can do?  And have Christians become so utterly crippled in biblical knowledge and their ability to articulate it that hearing the phrase “God hates shrimp” paralyzes them?

Some time ago Christianity Today ran an excellent article by Edith Humphrey, a seminary professor, who explained for the confused what the Bible teaches: God is opposed to homosexuality.  This shouldn’t come as a newsflash, but in our day we have many who are deceiving themselves or are being deceived.  In her article, “What God Hath Not Joined,” Ms. Humphrey explains:

Leviticus 18:22 says bluntly: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.” Some within the church argue that such prohibitions concern only cultic practices in ancient Israel and so are no longer binding on Christians. But some Levitical proscriptions concern immoral behavior, not simply ritual uncleanness. We need to ask, How does the general pattern of the Scriptures direct us to understand this prohibition?

The answer is that homoerotic behavior contradicts God’s purpose for all his creatures. It is not in the same category as the cultic or cultural prohibitions regarding non-kosher foods and the twining together of two types of thread. Like the prohibition of incest (Lev. 18:6-18), the prohibition of homoerotic acts addresses every age.

As the New Testament epistles show, the early church did not discard what the Hebrew Bible said about sexual ethics. When Corinthian Christians thought that their spiritual sophistication gave them license to sin, Paul challenged them (1 Cor. 6:9ff.): “Do you not know that evildoers will not inherit God’s kingdom?” Then he offered as examples those who steal, get drunk, scorn what is holy, pursue sexual immorality, and practice two modes of male homoerotic behavior.

Some argue that we cannot understand Paul’s reference to these two behaviors (malakoi and arsenokoitai, as in and ) in terms of homoeroticism. But arsenokoitai is in fact a compound word derived from the Greek version of Leviticus 20:13 for those men “who lie with a male.” Malakoi means literally “soft ones” and in Greek writings frequently identified the passive homoerotic partner. It is a mistake to limit the term’s meaning, as do some, to masturbation, or as the NRSV does, to male prostitution.

The Genesis narratives, because they are stories, and the Levitical passages, because they are part of a code given to Israel in particular, must be considered in light of the whole biblical narrative. When we do this, the lists of immoral behavior in and show that the early Christian communities held firm to Old Testament views of sexual immorality…

Of course.  But it’s worth thinking about these things in a little more depth than what we get in sound bites, which are more often than not pure sophistry.  It’s important we do so because the press is not going to let up, and is forever seeking to teach people of good will that the Bible can be read to support gay marriage.

This week, Newsweek’s Lisa Miller sticks her finger in the eye of everyone who has read the Bible, saying:

Biblical literalists will disagree, but the Bible is a living document, powerful for more than 2,000 years because its truths speak to us even as we change through history. In that light, Scripture gives us no good reason why gays and lesbians should not be (civilly and religiously) married—and a number of excellent reasons why they should.

Is this for real?  The Jesus who said “go and sin no more” now wants two girls to marry each other?

Christians need to respond to this drivel every time it appears in print, for when we let these things go unanswered, others over time may accept them by default.

Albert Mohler, never afraid of a fight, takes Newsweek to task:

Disappointingly, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham offers an editorial note that broadens Newsweek’s responsibility for this atrocity of an article and reveals even more of the agenda: “No matter what one thinks about gay rights –- for, against or somewhere in between –- this conservative resort to biblical authority is the worst kind of fundamentalism,” Meacham writes. “Given the history of the making of the Scriptures and the millennia of critical attention scholars and others have given to the stories and injunctions that come to us in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, to argue that something is so because it is in the Bible is more than intellectually bankrupt –- it is unserious, and unworthy of the great Judeo-Christian tradition.”

Well, that statement sets the issue clearly before us. He insists that “to argue that something is so because it is in the Bible is more than intellectually bankrupt.” No serious student of the Bible can deny the challenge of responsible biblical interpretation, but the purpose of legitimate biblical interpretation is to determine, as faithfully as possible, what the Bible actually teaches — and then to accept, teach, apply and obey.

It’s time to focus on teaching and proclaiming the truths that virtually all societies have taken for granted across those millennia, whether they had a Bible or not, and without being ashamed to do so.

Faith-based programs praised and attacked

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The Courant profiles faith-based programs for the homeless and others:

“I tried all of the bad stuff, the alcohol, the drugs,” says Herman Carrington, on parole after serving eight years in prison for first-degree sexual assault. “I got tired of all the bad things. I never found Jesus. He found me here.”

Like the other residents here, Carrington could have gone from prison to a traditional halfway house for parolees, but instead chose Taste-N-See, a faith-based residential program.

Taste-N-See, which is named from Psalms 34:8, “Taste and see that the Lord is good, Blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him” — is one of about 20 faith-based agencies receiving federal funds through the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services.

Of course, there has to be “equal time” and so there’s the obligatory church-and-state carping to be quoted:

Although Connecticut officials champion the idea, saying it has improved access to treatment for thousands of people who might not have succeeded in traditional substance abuse programs, the practice of giving taxpayer money to religious organizations is hardly without critics.

“A lot of these programs contain a significant amount of evangelizing or proselytizing, and from our position that type of outreach should never be funded with taxpayer dollars,” says Rob Boston, senior policy analyst for Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

“There should be no taxpayer-funded evangelizing, period.”

The actual results of improving access to treatment, recognized by officials in a very blue state, mean little to those who are forever afraid that Jesus may be sneaking in the side door.

Are men going extinct?

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More alarming news from the world of science: apparently pollution is causing men to, well, go extinct.  Or to become girls at any rate.  No, it’s not April Fools’ Day.

The male gender is in danger, with incalculable consequences for both humans and wildlife, startling scientific research from around the world reveals.

The research – to be detailed tomorrow in the most comprehensive report yet published – shows that a host of common chemicals is feminising males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals, including people.

Backed by some of the world’s leading scientists, who say that it “waves a red flag” for humanity and shows that evolution itself is being disrupted, the report comes out at a particularly sensitive time for ministers. On Wednesday, Britain will lead opposition to proposed new European controls on pesticides, many of which have been found to have “gender-bending” effects.

It also follows hard on the heels of new American research which shows that baby boys born to women exposed to widespread chemicals in pregnancy are born with smaller penises and feminised genitals….

Communities heavily polluted with [gender-bending chemicals] in Canada, Russia and Italy have given birth to twice as many girls than boys, which may offer a clue to the reason for a mysterious shift in sex ratios worldwide. Normally 106 boys are born for every 100 girls, but the ratio is slipping. It is calculated that 250,000 babies who would have been boys have been born as girls instead in the US and Japan alone.

Read more here in The Independent.