Posted on 11/18/2001 4:35:27 PM PST by victim soul
ARVEY, Ill., Nov. 17 — Jason Clark, 17, a junior at Thornton Township High School, stood at the chalkboard in Room 202, thumbing through his Bible as about 30 students stood silently, eyes closed and heads bowed.
"Father, we thank you for being the God that you are, the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords," Mr. Clark said. "We ask you to forgive us for all of our sins, cleanse our minds, cleanse our hearts, cleanse our spirit. We thank you and we praise you and give you all honor and all glory."
"Amen," the students said. Mr. Clark then began his regular Tuesday after-class sermon. The theme was "Self Check," he told the group, because "basically, it's time to get real in our walk with Christ."
Mr. Clark and most of the teenagers who pray with him in this public school in a suburb south of Chicago call themselves Prayer Warriors for Christ. The metaphor is spiritual, but it fits on a political level, too, for the residents here who see the battlefield as the wall between church and state.
They include Harvey's mayor, Nickolas Graves, and City Council members who recently have called for voluntary prayer in the public schools in this city of 33,000, where community and church leaders have asked Harvey officials to petition the state for the right to pray openly in school.
Mr. Graves and Harvey's aldermen have pressed their case in light of the Sept. 11 attacks, and the subsequent national embrace of public prayer. The Harvey City Council, in fact, unanimously passed a resolution calling for the restoration of prayer in schools two weeks after the attacks, and Harvey political leaders held a town hall meeting two weeks ago to discuss the topic.
Mr. Clark and two of his Prayer Warrior friends, Devlin Scott, 17, and David Anderson, 16, were among scores of people who testified at that meeting, which city officials called a first step in restoring school prayer.
While school-prayer initiatives have been fiercely challenged in other suburbs, the mayor's call has been welcomed in Harvey, known to some as "Little Chicago" because of the urban-style ills that have swelled in recent years with the migration of poor city residents. Gangs, drugs and violent crime have added to the roster of suffering in a city already plagued by poverty.
While politicians here concede that constitutional hurdles and potentially years of legal battles lie ahead, they say the need for prayer has never been clearer.
"It's on everybody's mind and on their hearts," Mr. Graves said at the town meeting. "It's about our children."
Illinois is among the dozen states that allow voluntary moments of silence in schools. But Harvey officials pushing for prayer contend that the law, which permits a moment of silence in class at a teacher's discretion, does not go far enough.
"What we want is actual prayer," said Alderman Ronald J. Waters. "I happened to have been around on Sept. 11. The next day at some of those schools, there was open prayer all through the schools. Even the president is asking for prayer. But the very institutions that we need to have prayer the most, it has been outlawed. So why not where it is needed the most and where it can have a lasting effect?"
Mr. Anderson, one of the Prayer Warriors, agreed.
"We have a lot of young people in school that are troubled and hurting," he said in an interview after the meeting. "And the first thing they want to turn to is the gangs, they turn to the drugs. But they are not turning to prayer. Why can't we pray in the school and let peers know that you have somebody to turn to?"
The Harvey meeting on Oct. 30 took on the air of a church service, and it was clear that the speakers were preaching to the converted. Among those in attendance were pastors and ministers, as well as business and civic leaders and residents from across the Chicago area.
The meeting fell on the day after the United States Supreme Court refused to hear a Virginia case that challenged that state's law, which mandates a daily moment of silence in public schools.
At Thornton, prayer at least a couple of days a week has become the norm for the Prayer Warriors. There is also a teachers' prayer group that meets on Thursdays before school. The student group, which has started a step dance troupe called Everlasting Faith, meets for an hour after classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Members as well as nonmembers attend the prayer and Bible study sessions that sometimes include singing and preaching. Otherwise, the group functions the same as any other school-based group at Thornton, said William O'Neal, the school's principal.
"We follow the same guidelines as the science club, the math club and the English club," said Mr. O'Neal, who has been principal for nine years. "The only stipulation that I put there is, I don't want them coercing anybody to come."
"They take some criticism for it," he said of the Prayer Warriors. "I always let kids know that it's O.K. to be different."
Inside Room 202 this week, Mr. Clark was praying again after his sermon. He paced back and forth.
"Father God, only you know the things that they are going through," Mr. Clark prayed. "I ask Father that as they confess with their mouth and believe in their heart that Jesus Christ is Lord, I ask that you cleanse them."
The teenagers stood, some crying, calling upon God.
I am actually trying to discover why some Christians want prayer in schools and what the possible consequences could be. If you do not want to argue about that, fine. But why did you join in in the first place?
Amen!
Thanks so much for the flag.
I originally posted a positive comment. I do not mind sharing or debating intelligently. I will not argue.
I want to discuss these matters with others. And people get emotional. (especially me).
So, to calm myself down, I have some topic digressing jokes for you all:
>From the Australian Bureau of Statistics
> >3 Australians die each year testing if a 9V battery works on their >tongue.
>142 Australians were injured in 1998 by not removing all the pins from new shirts.
>58 Australians are injured each year by using sharp knives instead of screwdrivers.
>since 1998 17 Australians have been seriouly injured after being hit by cars while running naked down the street.
>31 Australians have died since 1996 by watering their Christmas tree while the fairy lights were plugged in.
>19 Australians have died in the last 3 years by eating >Christmas decorations they believed were chocolate.
>Hospitals reported 4 broken arms last year after cracker pulling incidents.
>101 Australians since 1997 have had to have broken parts of plastic toys pulled out of the soles of their feet.
>18 Australians had serious burns in 1998 trying on a new jumper with a lit cigarette in their mouth.
>A massive 543 Australians were admitted to casualty in the last two years after opening bottles of beer with their teeth or eye socket.
5 Australians were injured last year in accidents involving out of control scale electic cars.
.........and finally:
8 Australians cracked their skull in 1997 after falling asleep (passingout) while throwing up into the toilet.
YEP! It's great to be Australian!
If Christianity is true, good people will end up in Hell. I cannot justify Christianity to myself on those terms. Therefore, I looked for a way to reconcile my desire for justice (good rewarded, evil punished) with Christianity. I could not do it and came to atheism instead.
What I AM pushing for even without the nation truly reforming to Christ yet is a return to teh founder's views on religion in public...which are more right wing than even myself on this issue since well, Jefferson and Madison had a bill in Virginia that they wrote and introduced (it ended up passing) to punish Sabbath breakers. The funny thing is, this was in the same day they put in a bill establishing religious freedom. So, what I am pushing for is prayer in schools, the Ten Commandments being posted, doctrinal classes on basic Christian principles that all the denominations can agree on. However, at the same time, I would allow people to exempt out of the prayer and doctrine classes. AFter all, as a Calvinist Christian, I understand that it is not what I do that saves anyone, but only the working of the Holy Spirit, which does what it pleases WHEN and HOW it pleases and it is contrary to Scripture to force unbelievers to learn about God in such a forced manner..and quite frankly, it stinks in God's nostrils to have unbelievers pray to him as some ritual when they don't believe in him!
A more complex answer could start along these lines:
1.) If someone told you that unless you believed a certain thing that could not be proven true, you would go to eternal damnation, how would you feel towards them? (how do you fell towards Muslims?)
2.)What if they told you that even if you believed a certain thing, all of your dead relatives who had not believed were already suffering in hell?
Throw in the fact that some Christians did not preach love but burned and massacred Christians of other sects and what do you get? A confusing mess. If all Christians lived by the Word then maybe it wouldn't be so hard to believe. Unfortunately, not many of them seem to.
I do have a long way to go in my search for knowledge and truth - it is an infinite journey in a finite lifetime. However, if i fail to find the same truths you have, why then do I deserve hell? Surely God could have designed things better than that. Why not, for example, give me another shot (reincarnation)? Or even just mercifully put me out of my eternal torment? So many questions....
/sarcasm.
Perhaps if you would do your own research, instead of just believing what your public school teachers have told you, you would realize that it is not so cut and dry that the founders hated religion like you seem to think.
If we are saved through grace alone then everyone is saved because choosing to believe is an action (a 'work'). If we are saved through works, then there must be good people.
Because God has a plan for our salvation, he must want us to be saved, correct?
If he wants us to be saved, that means that he at least thinks we are worth saving.
That means that there must be good in us.
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