Free Republic

It is well and good for the preacher to base his sermon on the Bible, but he better get to something relevant pretty quickly, or we start mentally to check out.” That stunningly clear sentence reflects one of the most amazing, tragic, and lamentable characteristics of contemporary Christianity: an impatience with the Word of God. The sentence above comes from Mark Galli, senior managing editor of Christianity Today in an essay entitled, “Yawning at the Word.” In just a few hundred words, he captures the tragedy of a church increasingly impatient with and resistant to the reading and preaching of...

On New Year’s Day, 48-year-old Frank Turner and his son, Anthony, 21, were shot and killed on a street in Southwest Baltimore. The murders struck at the heart of Sharon Rock, a parishioner of St. Bernardine in West Baltimore. The victims were her relatives. “I just pray every day that things and times will change,” said Rock, 55, who suspects that the Turners were murdered as retaliation over an alleged physical altercation. Nineteen days after her family members died, Rock turned her pain into action and attended a prayer walk at St. Bernardine Church. Prayer walks, which are held across...

Islamic extremists abducted about 100 female students from a school in northeast Nigeria before dawn Tuesday, but some of the teens managed to escape from the back of an open truck, ... Islamic extremists have been abducting girls to use as cooks and sex slaves. Insurgents from the Boko Haram terrorist network are blamed for attacks that have killed more than 1,500 people this year alone. The group — whose name means "Western education is forbidden" — has targeted schools, mosques, churches, villages and agricultural centers in increasingly indiscriminate attacks. They have also made daring raids on military barracks and...

The Harvest Church of St. Petersburg, Russia was closed by the Russian government without warning. Government officials reported that the church was conducting unregistered educational activities, namely holding Sunday school classes during the week without explicit permission. Wade Kusack is the Project Manager for Russian Ministries; his specialty is religious issues in Russia. Krusack explained, “In Russia, the church is supposed to have registration. Without registration, no one has the right to practice their religion. The church was stripped of its legal registration.” Since the Harvest Church did not acquire the proper documentation necessary to hold the weekday Christian education...

First published on New English Review. By Enza Ferreri The similarity between Muslims on one hand and feminist and homosexual activists on the other may superficially seem shocking, but in fact it is normal, indeed predictable. Their enemy is the same: the decency and morality deriving from Christian civilisation. Muslim mobs desecrate and burn churches, they break crosses. And so do feminists, with their LGBT allies. Last 23-25 November a horde of 7,000 lesbians and pro-abortion feminists tried to storm the Cathedral of San Juan Bautista (John the Baptist) in Argentina, to desecrate and ransack it. Since the church was...

"Playing off the idea of using social media to summon crowds for parties, Catholics have been attending some of the city's often sparsely attended churches."

It is a common notion that the number of priests has plummeted in this country. Many speak of the halcyon days when there were four and five priests per parish, and the seminaries were packed. And while some of these memories are accurate, they are drawn from a time in this country that was very brief.The fact is, the number of priests per parish spiked sharply after 1950 and has now leveled back to the levels of 1950 and before.Note the graph at the upper right from the Center for Research in the Apostolate (CARA). It depicts the number of...

LONDON (CNN) - The Sunday Assembly was riding high. The world’s most voguish - though not its only - atheist church opened last year in London, to global attention and abundant acclaim. So popular was the premise, so bright the promise, that soon the Sunday Assembly was ready to franchise, branching out into cities such as New York, Dublin and Melbourne. “It’s a way to scale goodness,” declared Sanderson Jones, a standup comic and co-founder of The Sunday Assembly, which calls itself a “godless congregation.” But nearly as quickly as the Assembly spread, it split, with New York City emerging...

Sen. Mike Lee says a bill he introduced would prevent the Internal Revenue Service from denying tax-exempt status to any person or group that refuses to perform gay marriages. "What we're talking about here is the freedom of religious belief, the freedom of a church, for example, to adhere to its own religious doctrine so that it cannot be discriminated against by the government," the Utah Republican said in an interview with Newsmax. Lee said the federal government's failure to protect religious liberty — citing Obamacare mandates for contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs — was a key motivation for him to...

As to "in church" I mean that not so much broadly as to the Church (body of Christ), but as to which styles are Biblically permitted in individual churches. 1.) At what point (scripturally) does a church worship team (for instance) go too far when plucking the bass guitar or electric guitar, or beat the drums too loudly? At what point is the "riff" (or beat) becoming too "wordly." Define "wordly" music as opposed to non-wordly music if/when discussing this. I ask this of those who lean more towards the Michael W. Smith type worship services or to those who...

“In Him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1. 4,5) We, the Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem, share with you the joy of this Christmas season of the Incarnation. Our physical closeness to the town of Bethlehem where this took place is a constant reminder to us of its wonderful reality. We praise God for the Word made flesh in the person of Jesus Christ from the pure blood of the Blessed Virgin Mary and for her willingness to...

The Ministry of Health announced on Monday that the death toll of Al-Warraq's Keniset Al-'Adra (Church of the Virgin Mary) attack increased to four while the number of injured rose to 18. Unknown assailants opened fire late on Sunday during a wedding ceremony held at the church in Al-Warraq, a working class neighbourhood in Imbaba, Giza. ...

A video uploaded to YouTube by a pro-life organization appears to show a university student verbally attacking a campus pro-life group on Thursday. Students For Life said in an email that the video, which has garnered a little over 2k views since it was posted Thursday, captures “one of the most disturbing ones our team has yet to take on a college campus.” The 26-second clip appears to show an unidentified student at Indiana University approaching the pro-life college group, allegedly upset with a display they had erected on the campus. “You’re in conflict with the world that I want...

Attorney General Eric Holder and IRS officials advised black ministers on how to engage in political activity during the 2012 election without violating their tax-exempt status. Holder, then-IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman, and Peter Lorenzetti, a senior official in the scandal-plagued agency’s exempt organizations division, participated in a May 2012 training session for black ministers from the Conference of National Black Churches at the U.S. Capitol hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). Holder spoke at the event. “We’re going to, first of all, equip them with the information they need to know about what they can say and what they...

Good words from Wild Bill Finlay. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2Nb8rp2WHQ

God created government. So preached Pastor Jack Hibbs of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills in the days leading up to the presidential election. Hibbs has joined with nearly 1,600 pastors across the country and about 140 in California in the Pulpit Initiative, a legal effort aimed at protecting the free-speech rights of pastors in the pulpit. Hibbs' sermons in a series called "Politics and Faith" may have been enough to let the church know which candidate he supported. Or at least who he didn't. He preached about politics and Israel. And politics and defending the pre-born. Hibbs was emphatic during an...

At the same time the IRS harassed Republican nonprofit groups during the 2012 political campaign, it selectively advised black churches and other Democrat nonprofits on how far they can go in campaigning for President Obama and other Democrats. This raw exercise in political favoritism has not been reported in the context of the still-smoldering IRS scandal, in which the agency in 2012 audited big GOP donors and blocked Tea Party groups trying to obtain tax-exempt status as part of what House investigators suspect was an effort to re-elect the president. But that same year, top officials with both the IRS...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- Worried they could be sued by gay couples, some churches are changing their bylaws to reflect their view that the Bible allows only marriage between one man and one woman. Although there have been lawsuits against wedding industry businesses that refuse to serve gay couples, attorneys promoting the bylaw changes say they don't know of any lawsuits against churches. Critics say the changes are unnecessary, but some churches fear that it's only a matter of time before one of them is sued. "I thought marriage was always between one man and one woman, but the Supreme...

Islamists in Minya, Egypt held Muslim prayers inside three destroyed Coptic Churches after they were destroyed this week. Copts pray inside the Church of St. Moses (Moussa), destroyed by Muslim rioters in Minya, Egypt, Aug. 14-15, 2013. (Rotati Caeli) Islamists prayed in three Coptic Churches in Minya on Saturday.The Muslims believe that any place in which they pray has to be turned into a mosque.Wataninet reported: In the ruins of three of the churches the Islamists had attacked and burned in the Minya region in Upper Egypt, the Islamists yesterday gathered and held Muslim prayers. The three churches are...

BENI MAZAR, Egypt — The fire burned all night long. It was only after desperate town residents borrowed the keys to a firetruck that they were able to quell the blaze. By then, the evangelical church was all but destroyed. It was one of more than 60 churches that have been attacked, vandalized and in many cases set aflame across Egypt in a surge of violence against Christians that has followed the bloody Aug. 14 raid by Egyptian security forces on two Islamist protest camps in Cairo. The attacks, most of them in Egypt’s Nile Valley, have lent legitimacy to