Free Republic

The United States Army has blocked the website of the Southern Baptist Convention from government computers, saying the Christian site contains "hostile content." An Army officer assigned to a U.S. base said he tried to access SBC.net from his government computer, but instead, he got a message that said the site was being blocked by "Team CONUS": Team CONUS protects the computer network of the Department of Defense. "So the Southern Baptist Convention is now considered hostile to the U.S. Army...it just corroborates the recent string of events highlighted by AFA," the officer wrote in an email to American Family...

A former pastor of a northwest Indiana mega-church who has admitted having a sexual relationship with an underage parishioner exchanged hundreds of text messages with the girl and told her Jesus Christ sanctioned their relationship, prosecutors say. The messages are quoted in a memorandum from prosecutors as they argue for a 10-year prison sentence for Jack A. Schaap, who has pleaded guilty to federal charges that he took a minor across state lines with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity. The memorandum, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Hammond, details how Schaap, 55, "groomed" the girl into...

RIVERSIDE, CA, March 12, 2013 (LifeSiteNews) – A 24-year-old man who has been living as a woman has sued California Baptist University for $500,000 in damages after the school expelled him for lying on his application paperwork. Domaine Javier applied to Cal Baptist’s nursing program in 2011 as a transfer from Riverside City College. When asked to check a box indicating whether he was male or female on the school’s admission application, he marked ‘female’ despite the fact that he is biologically male and only dresses as a woman. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Javier told The Press-Enterprise during an...

<p>The congregation of the First Baptist Church of Dallas gave their pastor a standing ovation as he began to deliver the Sunday morning sermon – a sign of affirmation for Dr. Robert Jeffress – a man under siege from the national media and gay marriage activists.</p>

New York Jets quarterback Tim Tebow is scheduled to speak at a megachurch in Dallas whose pastor has spoken out against Muslims, Jews, Mormons and members of the LGBT community. Tebow is listed as a special guest at one of the First Baptist Church's morning services on April 28, according to its website. The church is led by Evangelical pastor Robert Jeffress, who has previously denounced non-Christian religions such as Islam, Judaism and Mormonism. Leading up to the most recent presidential election, Jeffress warned parishioners that re-electing President Barack Obama would "lead to the rise of the Antichrist," according to...

Many saw Jesus ascend into heaven on the Mount. Before this, Jesus told them to tarry in Jerusalem where they would be endued with power. Not many days afterwards, on the Day of Pentecost, tongues of fire appeared above those who had assembled together, and they spake with tongues as the Spirit gave the utterance. Now, a question that I have asked more than one person is this: were those who spake with tongues saved (believers) before the Day of Pentecost or before the moment they spake with tongues as the Spirit gave the utterance? If these believers were already...

Bishop-designate David P. Talley. Credit: Archdiocese of Atlanta. Atlanta, Ga., Jan 3, 2013 / 10:54 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Benedict XVI has named Atlanta priest Monsignor David P. Talley, a convert to Catholicism, as the newest auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Atlanta. Atlanta Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory said Jan. 3 that he announced the appointment “with great joy.” “The Holy Father has selected a wonderful member of this zealous local presbyterate for the episcopacy and I know that he will bring all of his many gifts and talents to this new office,” he said in a statement. The...

It appears that there are multiple churches currently affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention located Virginia that are either led by women pastors, or co-led by women pastors. Is the SBC now departing from its formal opposition and starting to quietly tolerate female pastors to avoid a decline in the number of congregations/members ? Virginias BGAV is unique in how it lists who leads the various churches so its not clear if this is unique to Virginia or is a growing phenomena in other states. My understanding of Virginia Baptist is that there are two statewide bodies both affiliated with...

http://rescueattempt.tripod.com/Stille_Nacht_12-23-2012.wma My dear sister Janet, It is 2:00 in the morning and most of our men are asleep in their dugouts—yet I could not sleep myself before writing to you of the wonderful events of Christmas Eve.

http://rescueattempt.tripod.com/Stille_Nacht_12-23-2012.wma My dear sister Janet, It is 2:00 in the morning and most of our men are asleep in their dugouts—yet I could not sleep myself before writing to you of the wonderful events of Christmas Eve. In truth, what happened seems almost like a fairy tale, and if I hadn’t been through it myself, I would scarce believe it. Just imagine: While you and the family sang carols before the fire there in London, I did the same with enemy soldiers here on the battlefields of France!

“How could God let this happen?” That was the question asked of the former Arkansas governor, Mike Huckabee, by Fox News host Neil Cavuto in an interview following the horrific slaughter of innocent school children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, replied:We ask why there’s violence in the schools, but we’ve systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage? Because we’ve made it a place where we do not want to talk about eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability. That we’re not going...

FULL TITLE: Outrage as Westboro Baptist plans praise gathering outside Sandy Hook Elementary school to celebrate God 'executing his judgement' in horrific shooting rampage that killed 20 children and 6 adults The tight-knit community of Newtown, Connecticut is numb in the aftermath of the heart-wrenching massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary school on Friday when a gunman killed 20 young students, all aged six and seven, in addition to six adults. As families mourn the lives that were cut short in this unspeakable horror, an extremist group has announced they plan to congregate at the scene of the tragedy and...

MOSCOW -- A recent nighttime raid and destruction of an evangelical church outside Moscow raised concerns that religious freedom is fading in Russia. That's because police simply watched as dozens of men with heavy machinery demolished the Holy Trinity Pentecostal congregation. Some fear its part of a threatening pattern against Russia's evangelical Christians. Authorities Raid Church Sveta Romanyuk finds it difficult to talk about what happened the night of Sept. 6, 2012. "What they did was not right. We didn't even have time to save the Bibles," she said. On a recent morning on the edge of Moscow, 12-year-old Sveta...

About 75 North Carolina Baptist Men (NCBM) volunteers are now on site assisting with response efforts after Hurricane Sandy. All three NCBM feeding units are serving in the New Jersey/New York area. The three large feeding units have a combined capacity of 80,000 meals per day. Recovery, administration and chaplaincy volunteers are also on site. The Command Unit, along with large shower units, laundry units, generator units and recovery units, are on the ground and ministering. Recovery teams are already working in some areas and others will be organized as reports come back from assessment teams. With the recovery phase...

Richard Land, a Baptist leader who has been one of the leading pro-life evangelicals for many years has written an opinion piece in which he lays out the case for social conservatives as to why they should vote for Mitt Romney.Land is executive editor of The Christian Post and president of The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, but wrote the endorsement piece as a private citizen. The endorsement represents a break from his 24-year-old tradition of not endorsing presidential candidates.“Every four years we have pundits and political gurus tell America, “This is the most important presidential election in a generation.”...

From the days surrounding the American Revolution, Baptists used religious arguments to make political points and political arguments to make religious points, historian James P. Byrd, associate dean at Vanderbilt Divinity School, told a conference at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor. At the same time Baptists argued for separation of church and state, they did not hesitate to preach on political topics or embrace patriotic causes with religious fervor, Byrd said, addressing an Oct. 12-13 conference on “Baptists and the Shaping of American Culture.” In a sense, Baptists reflected their culture. Neither Thomas Jefferson nor Benjamin Franklin accepted orthodox Christian...

Further proving that opposition to the Obama administration’s HHS mandate is not limited to Catholic groups, two Baptist-affiliated colleges filed their own lawsuit today against the HHS mandate that promotes abortion.Today, East Texas Baptist University (ETBU) and Houston Baptist University (HBU) filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, asking the court for relief from the Department of Health and Human Services’ “preventative services” mandate, which forces the Christian Universities to violate their deeply held religious beliefs or pay severe fines.“Baptists in America, by virtue of their history, are particularly sensitive to coercive government...

The horror of a Southern Baptist missionary’s death in Jordan is gradually resonating to her childhood home on the rural South Plains this week. Sudan native Cheryll Harvey, 55, a longtime member of College Heights Baptist Church in Plainview, was found stabbed to death late Tuesday night in her apartment in the city of Barha, about 50 miles north of Amman. Harvey’s teaching was in connection with the Jordan Baptist Society, according to a report published by the Baptist Press. Don Robertson, pastor at College Heights Baptist Church, said Harvey had taught English and other subjects in Jordan for 24...

A rally will be held Monday night in Crystal Springs, Mississippi after a black couple wasn’t allowed to get married at their church because of their race. Continue reading The Wilsons were told they couldn’t wed at the town's First Baptist Church because it goes against tradition since a black couple had never been married there in its 129-year history. Charles Wilson and his fiance, Te'Andrea, wanted to get married there, but church members got upset. The paster then asked the couple to take their wedding elsewhere. "This had never been done here before, so it was setting a new...

It was to be their big day, but a Jackson couple says the church where they were planning to wed turned them away because of their race. Now, the couple wants answers, and the church's pastor is questioning the mindset of some of members of his congregation who caused the problem in the first place. … "The church congregation had decided no black could be married at that church, and that if he went on to marry her, then they would vote him out the church," said Charles Wilson. The Wilsons were trying to get married at the predominantly white...