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The Disciples of Christ could lose half their membership within ten years if the current rate of decline remains the same, according to a report by the Institute on Religion & Democracy. Also known as the Christian Church, the Disciples saw their membership decline by 7 percent, going from approximately 411,000 in 2017 to approximately 382,000 in 2018, according to an entry posted Tuesday on the IRD’s blog Juicy Ecumenism. Worship attendance fell 11 percent, going from about 139,000 in 2017 to about 124,000 in 2018, and baptisms declined by 13 percent, from approximately 4,300 in 2017 to approximately 3,700...

Oldline Protestant denominations make for a competitive peer group, but the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) is on track to claim the top spot for fastest declining major U.S.-based church last year. Total membership declined from 411,140 in 2017 to 382,248 (-7%) while average worship attendance declined from 139,936 to 124,437 (-11%) according to numbers reported for 2018. Baptisms dropped from 4,344 to 3,782 (-13%) while the number of other additions (including transfers in) declined from 7,441 to 6,969 (-6.4%). At the current rate, the denomination will shrink by another 50 percent within a decade. This annual rate of decline...

Jesus loves the little children, All the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, All are precious in His sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.

It’s been 35 years since 918 people, including 257 children, died on Nov. 18, 1978, at the Peoples Temple massacre in Jonestown. The mass murder inside the South American jungle commune in Guyana was engineered by Jim Jones, a murderous cult leader, and was the only time in American history a member of Congress, Leo Ryan, D-Calif., was killed in the line of official duty. Most of the victims were forced to commit suicide by drinking a fatal cocktail of poisoned punch spiked with a Valium tranquilizer. In the days that followed the slaughter of the innocents, Jonestown became a...

[caps and emphasis in the original] One of the three major movements within the Campbellite family of American Protestantism, and the one most recent in origin (although the Disciples' "Restructure" dates only to 1968). Its separate identity begins officially with action taken at a Christian Church convention in Cincinnati in 1927. By 1971 this body of independent congregations had sufficient particularity and cohesion in its own eyes to request a separate listing in the Yearbook of American Churches. This "undenominational" fellowship stands to the right of the CHRISTIAN CHURCH (DISCIPLES OF CHRIST) and to the left of the CHURCHES OF...

The head of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. has endorsed a call for McDonalds to improve working conditions and raise the pay of its tomato pickers. In a letter released on Wednesday, the Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, stated clerk of the two-million-member denomination, challenged the fast food chain giant to “put an end to human rights violations” by bringing an “adequate solution to the grievous conditions and sub-poverty wages of farmworkers.” "Farmworkers are explicitly excluded from the National Labor Relations Act, which denies them the right to organize, the right to negotiate with their employers, and the right to appeal grievances to...

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading Jewish human rights organization, is urging Bishop Mark Hanson and the leadership of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) to reject a proposed resolution by the Church’s Caribbean Synod that denies Israel’s legitimacy and calls for ELCA to push for divestment of the Jewish State. ELCA is convening its biennial Assembly in Orlando today. "The Caribbean Synod’s proposed resolution is a major escalation in the worldwide political campaign to delegitimize Israel and is in keeping with the spirit of the 1975 UN resolution that equated Zionism with racism," charged Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate...

On July 27 the General Assembly of the Disciples of Christ, a mainline Protestant denomination, called upon Israel "to tear down the barrier fence." The resolution, originally entitled "Tear Down the Wall," was renamed, more ambiguously, "Breaking Down the Dividing Wall," though it remained rife with factual errors and retained the original intent. The resolution does not deny that Israel built the fence "to shield itself against terrorist attacks," or that the fence has succeeded in saving a great number of lives (including some would-be bombers?). Yet it still demands the security barrier's removal. Why? Because, according to the resolution,...

Another round in the ongoing Protestant campaign against Israeli security measures is set for Tuesday, when the Disciples of Christ Church is to discuss a resolution calling on Israel to dismantle its West Bank security barrier. The Disciples of Christ, a strongly liberal American church that broke from the Presbyterian and Baptist churches in the early 1800s, opened its annual general assembly in Portland, Oregon, on Saturday. The "Tear Down the Wall" resolution that the organization is to weigh is basically the same one adopted at the beginning of July by the United Church of Christ, which shares a common...

EUREKA, Ill. (AP) It stayed open even as most of its students left to fight the Civil War. It remained open during the Great Depression, when many poor families paid tuition in poultry and livestock, and awarded a scholarship and a campus job to a young man who didn't have much money named Ronald Reagan. This weekend, Eureka College celebrates its 150th anniversary a milestone reached by just 260 of more than 4,000 colleges and universities in the nation. ``Not a lot of places can say they've been around for 150 years,'' said theater arts and drama professor Bill Davis....

The extraordinary friendship between President Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher - seen by outsiders as an historic alliance of political soulmates - was viewed by Mr Reagan as evidence of divine intervention, according to letters he wrote to her.   Soulmates: the President and the Prime Minister walking together in Paris "Throughout my life, I've always believed that life's path is determined by a Force more powerful than fate. I feel the Lord has brought us together for a profound purpose, and that I have been richly blessed for having known you," he wrote in 1994, days after she delivered...

The parish nurse began to unravel the unusual pattern one Sunday in June when she went on the Internet and entered the title of that day's scheduled sermon at National City Christian Church. The Rev. Alvin O'Neal Jackson, a charismatic preacher and leader of the denomination, had chosen his subject and titled it "Sorry Mr. President, I Don't Dance." But the search engine Google revealed that a sermon with the same title had been delivered months earlier by the Rev. Thomas K. Tewell, pastor of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City. The nurse, Kathy McGregor, then went to...