Free Republic

(A little something different for today's devotional) We asked Rev. Michael Brown, a pastor in Milan, Italy, how we can be praying for the Italian church amid the coronavirus situation. Here is his response: I am a missionary of the United Reformed Churches in North America serving in northern Italy, where I pastor Chiesa Riformata Filadelfia, an Italian congregation in the suburbs of Milan. As you have probably seen in the news, we have experienced a devastating outbreak of the coronavirus. In the past ten days alone, we have seen the number of reported cases in Italy skyrocket from 888...

Around the world, more than 260 million Christians—one of every eight believers—experience high levels of persecution, just for following Jesus. For the past 28 years, the Open Doors World Watch List has offered a global indicator of countries where human and religious rights are being violated, and those countries most vulnerable to societal unrest and destabilization. During the 2020 World Watch List [https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/the-countries-where-its-most-dangerous-to-be-a-christian-in-2020/] reporting period, in the top 50 countries, a total of 9,488 churches or Christian buildings were attacked; 3,711 Christians were detained without trial, arrested, sentenced and imprisoned; and 2,983 Christians were killed for faith-related reasons. On average,...

President Trump is live now on CSPAN giving a speech at the largest Hispanic Christian church in the U.S. About 5,000 there. Refer to CSPAN channel

She tried. Oh, how she tried. However, no matter how many times Atlantic magazine writer Emma Green tried to get the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, Leith Anderson, to criticize President Trump, she failed completely, as you can see in her Wednesday interview, "Evangelicalism’s Silent Majority."Green kicks off the interview by attempting to extract the desired criticism from her subject:

Nearly 200 evangelical leaders condemned Christianity Today's editorial calling for the removal of President Trump, which “offensively questioned the spiritual integrity and Christian witness of tens-of-millions of believers who take seriously their civic and moral obligations," they wrote to the magazine's president. Christianity Today, one of the nation's top Christian magazine publications called for the removal of Trump on Thursday, one day after the House of Representatives passed two articles of impeachment against him. The letter to Timothy Dalrymple, the president of the magazine, also condemned the editorial for dismissing evangelicals who oppose its views as "far-right," the Christian Post...

-snip- The Rev. Franklin Graham, a staunch Trump supporter and the son of the magazine’s founder, the late Rev. Billy Graham, leaped to Trump’s defense, telling The Washington Post that “(my father) would’ve been very embarrassed that the magazine he started would call for something like this when there are no crimes committed.” Less than 48 hours later, Trump’s reelection campaign announced a new “Evangelicals for Trump” coalition, launching at a Miami rally in early January. But here in suburban Milwaukee, where Trump narrowly edged out Clinton in 2016 and where it is crucial he maintain or build support heading...

The publication is small, reaching just a fraction of the evangelical movement. But when Christianity Today called for President Trump’s removal in a blistering editorial on Thursday, it met the full force and fury of the president and his most prominent allies in the Christian conservative world. If the response seemed disproportionate, it vividly reflected the fact that white evangelicals are the cornerstone of Mr. Trump’s political base and their leaders are among his most visible and influential supporters. In the background, however, is a more nuanced reality that Christianity Today’s editorial hints at: a number of conservative Christians remain...

Like most of my colleagues, I intended to have two, maybe three kids. And like them, I thought the Catholic view of sex and contraception was ridiculous. That was about 25 years ago. Since then, I’ve discovered Theology of the Body (TOB) — Pope John Paul II’s biblical analysis of what it means to be human. This radically transformed my view of the body, human sexuality — and in turn, birth control. And now, I don’t think the Catholic view is ridiculous. I think it’s biblical. And though I’m not dogmatic about it, I, like a growing number of evangelicals,...

As I explained in the initial edition of the Sunday edition of the French Press, one of the fundamental goals of this newsletter is to bridge the gap between secular and religious readers. That certainly means explaining the basics of religious belief amid public controversies—helping the mainstream media to “get religion” in New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet’s memorable phrase. But it also means identifying the trite, the silly, and the sometimes manipulative aspects of religious political rhetoric. And that brings us to today’s topic, whether God chose Donald Trump and what the answer to that question means for...

There;s a lot of America's heartland that's been gutted out by the forces of Big Government and Big Business but some Americans still have that good vision for the farmlands and ranch lands of our country under federal government control. The Republicans moving the Bureau of Land Management office to Grand Junction, Colorado doesn't change the principle of federal control that strangles the use of the land and put people like Dwight and Steven Hammond in jail. When Ammon Bundy brought his peaceful protest..... In our world today much rage obviously in the spirit of anarchy and Marxism-Leninism manifesting itself...

Like all accounts of God’s faithfulness, mine begins with a genealogy. In the late seventeenth century, my mother’s Congregationalist ancestors journeyed to the New World to escape what they saw as England’s deadly compromise with Romanism. Centuries later, ­American Presbyterians converted my father’s great-­grandmother from Coptic ­Orthodoxy to ­Protestantism. Her son became a Presbyterian minister in the Evangelical Coptic Church. By the time my parents were ­living in ­twenty-first-century Illinois, their families’ historic Reformed commitments had been replaced by non-denominational, ­Baptistic ­evangelicalism. This form of Christianity dominated my Midwestern hometown. My parents taught me to love God, revere the Scriptures,...

Accepting the Vatican II Sect as the Catholic Church has consequences. So does believing that Jorge Bergoglio is the Vicar of Christ despite being a public apostate: If he is a valid Pope, then there is no power on earth that can undo his papacy. If he is truly the successor of St. Peter, then he can resign voluntarily, but no one can take the pontificate from him... Clearly, it is high time we looked at what the Catholic Church teaches on the (im)possibility of judging and removing a valid Pope. In this post, therefore, we will examine two things:...

After an expose’ on Zack Exley by Pulpit & Pen several weeks ago, it seems that the sugar-daddy of woke evangelicalism might be in trouble with federal prosecutors for corruption and the unauthorized diversion of campaign dollars to his own pet-projects and shell companies. Zack Exley isn’t an evangelical, but he spent half a decade strategizing how to get evangelicals to vote Democrat before serving on campaigns for Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Now the man who thought up how to get Christians to embrace “Social Justice” to change their voting patterns—and who is funneling cash to ‘woke’ organizations...

The official story is that northern Iraq is at peace. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) has largely been defeated; the Iraqi Army and its allies are in charge. But for Christians, the persecution continues. Those who can are getting out. Those who stay are preparing themselves for more violence. "Things are bad more than any other time," Fr Behnam Benoka tells me at his church in Bartella, a ghost town protected, if that's the right word, by soldiers with Kalashnikovs. "It's harder even than before Isil." ...

In the waning days of 2015, renowned televangelist Kenneth Copeland laid out exactly why he needs a luxury private jet to do his job: you can’t “talk to God” while riding commercial. Criticized at the time for his use of extravagant planes, Copeland argued travel for his work would be difficult, nay, impossible without them. The Texas-based preacher invoked his mentor, prosperity gospel preacher Oral Roberts, who Copeland said faced unsolicited requests for prayer when he flew on public airliners, “agitating his spirit.”

The World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) has responded to charges from three of its member bodies that it has an 'ecumenical agenda' inconsistent with its historic evangelical roots. National Evangelical Alliances in Italy, Spain and Malta released an open letter in December alleging there had been a 'progressive implementation of an ecumenical agenda in WEA without proper discussion at a grassroot level and without involving the different parts of the Alliance in the decision-making process'. It also says this 'ecumenical trajectory' is to reach a 'tipping point' in 2018. The statement placed on the WEA's website followed meetings between its secretary...

The quiet heartbreak and pain of infertility is well known to many evangelicals, whose aspirations to have a child have been frustrated for reasons they cannot understand or control. It is frequently a secret burden that couples carry, which only emerges into the open as they reveal their struggles to family, friends, and doctors. The weight of infertility and the value of children has increasingly prompted infertile couples to pursue procreation by every means possible: artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, and even surrogacy have all found their way into evangelical communities. Yet while evangelicals have become increasingly aware of the...

Dr Michael Brown speaking at Southern Evangelical Seminary APRIL 13, 2019

It’s hard to think of a single prominent American Christian who better illustrates the collapsing Evangelical public witness than Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son. His commitment to the Christian character of American public officials seems to depend largely on their partisan political identity. Let’s look at the record. In 1998, at the height of Bill Clinton’s sex scandals, the younger Graham wrote a powerful op-ed in the Wall Street Journal combating Clinton’s assertion that his affair was a “private” matter. Clinton argued that his misdeeds were “between me, the two people I love the most — my wife and our...

Austrian Evangelical Church votes to publicly ‘bless’ homosexual unions AUSTRIA, March 15, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – After weeks of discussion, the General Synod of the Austrian Evangelical Church (EKÖ) – a Lutheran denomination – agreed on Saturday, March 9 to allow homosexual couples to receive a church blessing during a public ceremony of worship. The move was approved by 45 votes to 18. Despite several measures intended to protect conscientious objection on the part of pastors and communities, the vote is expected to create a deep divide in the Austrian Lutheran church and some commentators in Austria are already warning that a...