Free Republic

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- A coalition of mainline Protestant churches have authored a letter to members of Congress asking them to make certain the health care bills they are considering contain taxpayer funding for abortions. The letter comes from a group of churches that have long advocated the pro-abortion position. Under the umbrella of the Religious Institute, the church denominations and more than 1,100 pastors and church staff from the denominations endorsed the letter. The letter calls abortion a “morally justifiable decision” and opposed any amendments to the House and Senate bills, which current contain massive abortion funding, to strike...

It’s summer and the ELCA is embroiled in another extended discussion of human sexuality. We do this sort of thing at least every other year (whenever a Churchwide Assembly is scheduled), and it’s been going on for decades now. Sex must be a big deal in our church. But no, we nervously respond, sex really isn’t that big a deal—at least it shouldn’t be. Sex and what we believe about sex “is not the gospel,” we say. It is a penultimate thing. How our church decides about issues of human sexuality should not be a church-dividing matter, we contend. In...

DANVILLE - Liz Duncan wanted to confide in her friends that she liked girls. So, the teenager outed herself in a place she assumed would be safe, Bible study class.Her friends kicked her out."I was crushed," recalls the 47-year-old Danville woman. "I didn't go to church for a long time."Gays and lesbians risk rejection whenever they reveal their sexual identity. Yet icy receptions from parishioners or clergy fail to cut the spiritual cords."I don't think there's a day that I don't chat with God," said Kent Sack, executive director for the Rainbow Community Center of Contra Costa County. "My spirituality...

Episcopalians aren't making a mass exodus from their church, but dioceses across the country are doing a slow bleed as members realize that a much-anticipated report released six weeks ago has no teeth and that the denomination's ordination of a homosexual bishop will go unpunished.     The Windsor Report, which sought to resolve the Anglican Communion's crisis over authority and homosexuality, criticizes same-sex blessings in U.S. and Canadian churches and the ordination last year of Bishop V. Gene Robinson. But the report also reprimands Third World bishops who have crossed diocesean lines to help marooned conservative parishes.     Within a few...

I have never posted before so have mercy on me. Cleveland Plain Dealer reports the following: A part-time church janitor suspects men beat him because the pastor preached against homosexuality, police said yesterday. Richard Bilski, 49, of Sheffield Lake, told police that the unidentified men assaulted him Sunday morning outside the non-denominational Church on the Rise after demanding to know when Pastor Paul Endrei would arrive. Bilski said the men then fled, one yelling, "This is a message for Pastor Paul." Capt. Guy Turner said police have no way of knowing the motive for the attack, but Bilski and Endrei...

WHEN OFFICIALS ANNOUNCED the vote tally on June 8, thunderous applause showered the crowd at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Concord, N.H. The occasion: Episcopalians in the diocese of New Hampshire had just elected the first openly homosexual bishop anywhere in the worldwide Anglican Communion. As joyous clergy and delegates leapt to their feet, the new bishop, the Rev. Canon V. Gene Robinson, ambled forward, stood before the altar, and embraced his grown children and his male lover. On May 23 in Nashville, officials of Glendale Baptist Church met with officials of the Tennessee Baptist Convention (TBC). The issue: Glendale...