Free Republic

WASHINGTON, D.C., MARCH 29, 2010 (Zenit.org).- This Easter, thousands are planning to become Catholic, including a man who almost lost his life five times. The U.S. bishops' conference shared the story of Jeremy Feldbusch, 30, from Blairsville, Pennsylvania, who is among the thousands preparing to enter the Church Saturday evening. Feldbusch was in the armed services in Iraq, and on April 3, 2003, he was wounded with shrapnel from the conflict, which resulted in blindness in both eyes and traumatic brain injury. He was expected to die shortly after, or if he lived, to sustain extensive brain damage. Doctors put...

Chelsea Clinton, daughter of President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton will not be having a traditional Christian wedding but are planning a Jewish wedding since her future husband, Marc Mexvinsky is Jewish. The bride and groom announced their wedding in November and are just now talking openly about the groom’s Jewish religion. Much of the talk that is circulating is coming from Jewish Community Centers who are looking eagerly to having a member of President Bill Clinton’s family join their Community. The talk might have started since gossip is that Chelea has been looking for a Jewish rabbi to...

Political Gaps Strain Churches Alan Wisdom February 24, 2010 In a society already ideologically polarized, many believers go to church in hopes of a respite from conflict. But recent surveys show similar political disparities straining the Christian community. There are huge gaps in political affiliation between clergy and laity, especially in the oldline Protestant denominations. The divide between oldline and evangelical Protestant leaders remains exceedingly wide. The much publicized evangelical left, purporting to bridge that divide with a fusion of evangelical theology and liberal politics, remains statistically insignificant. It is little wonder that debilitating conflicts have wracked the oldline denominations,...

The Methodist Church is prepared to be absorbed by the Church of England if that is the price of unity, Britain’s most senior Methodist said yesterday. The Rev David Gamble, president of the Methodist Conference, told the General Synod of the Church of England, meeting at Church House, Westminster: “We are prepared to go out of existence, not because we are declining or failing in mission, but for the sake of mission.” Methodists were “prepared to be changed and even to cease having a separate existence as a Church” if that served the needs of the Kingdom of God. The...

DALLAS (AP) - A sheriff's dispatcher says fires have struck two more rural east Texas churches, just hours after investigators announced that a blaze last week marked the eighth arson against a house of worship in the state this year. A Smith County sheriff's dispatcher says fire struck a Baptist church near Tyler Monday night. Another hit a church about 3 miles away. The fires come the same day the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives announced a blaze that happened last week was the seventh east Texas church fire of 2010 to be deliberately set.

Virginia bishop Charlene Kammerer urges everybody to read and study this toxic letter here: http://www.vaumc.org/Page.aspx?pid=1016 The letter itself is here: http://hopeandaction.org/main/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Adopted-Pastoral-Ltr-GRC-11_03_09-no-line-s.pdf Full text: God’s Renewed Creation: Call to Hope and Action A Pastoral Letter from the Council of Bishops of The United Methodist Church1 God’s creation is in crisis. We, the Bishops of The United Methodist Church, cannot remain silent while God’s people and God’s planet suffer. This beautiful natural world is a loving gift from God, the Creator of all things seen and unseen. God has entrusted its care to all of us, but we have turned our backs...

Chelsea Clinton is Methodist. Her new fiancé is Jewish. From Ivanka Trump to Ed Koch, Jewish Americans talk to The Daily Beast’s Samuel P. Jacobs about the question every mother-in-law wants answered. “The great thing about America is everyone wants to marry a Jewish boy.” —Harvard professor of Yiddish literature Ruth Wisse All summer long, Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky were dogged by rumors of an engagement. A Martha’s Vineyard wedding was in the works—and then it wasn’t. Over Thanksgiving, the couple at last made it official. So now that the former first daughter has finally announced her plans to...

Methodist Bishops Urge Surrender in Afghanistan Mark Tooley November 25, 2009 The following article originally appeared on the Front Page Magazine website, and is reproduced with permission. Nearly half of the bishops of the United Methodist Church, America’s third largest (though declining) denomination, are demanding that the U.S. withdraw from Afghanistan by next year. “We believe there is no path to military victory in Afghanistan,” harrumphed the bishops in their November letter to President Obama. But it’s not clear that these bishops ever wanted a “victory” in Afghanistan. After 9-11, the Council of Bishops declined to condemn al Qaeda or...

Several commemorative events will be held in Augsburg, Germany, over the next two days to celebrate the signing of a landmark ecumenical agreement ten years ago between representatives of the the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) and the Roman Catholic Church. It was on Oct. 31, 1999, that the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (JDDJ), considered one of the most significant agreements since the Reformation, was signed by church officials from the Vatican and the Lutheran World Federation, which claims to represent 66.7 million of the world's 70.2 million Lutherans. Members of the World Methodist Council later adopted the...

October 26 October 26David TwellmanFormer United Methodist

Offering a new perspective on the reality of aging denominations, The United Methodist Church studied the death rates of Methodists and the general American population and found that the church is dying faster. The death rates for members of the nearly 8 million-member denomination are about a third higher than the national average, according to the "Pockets of 'Youthfulness' in an Aging Denomination" report. In 2005, the United Methodist death rate was 134 percent of the U.S. death rate among those 15 years and older. Among UMC's 62 annual conferences, or regional bodies, in the United States, 34 of them...

Cardinal Francis George / Bishop Mark Hanson Washington D.C., Sep 30, 2009 / 02:49 am (CNA).- Catholic, Lutheran and Methodist church leaders will mark the tenth anniversary of a joint agreement on the Doctrine of Justification in a meeting in downtown Chicago on Thursday. A service including Evening Prayer and tributes to the joint declaration will be held at Old St. Patrick’s Church, a press release from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) reports.The Vatican and the Lutheran World Federation signed the Joint Declaration on October 31, 1999. It was the product of nearly 35 years of Lutheran-Catholic...

Methodists Celebrate Ramadan CHRISLAM COMES TO OMAHABythelastcrusade.org The First United Methodist Church in Omaha, Nebraska hosted an interfaith prayer vigil on Sunday, August 23. The vigil was neither held in preparation of feast days of St. Louis, the heretic fighting King of France, who died during the Second Crusade, nor of St. Bartholomew the Apostle, the first Christian missionary to India.The ceremony was rather conducted in celebration of the first day of Ramadan, the ninth month of the Muslim calendar, when the Angel Gabriel revealed the first verses of the Qur’an to the prophet Muhammad.The vigil was held at...

“Good morning sir, how are you this fine day?” With that one text from his 22-year-old intern’s boyfriend, Republican state Sen. Paul Stanley’s professional and personal life began to unravel, as his sexual liaison with his intern became public. And the hypocrisy of the “family values” 47-year-old married lawmaker with two children came to light. Stanley announced his resignation from his office on Tuesday, effective August 10, amid growing calls for the hypocritical lawmaker to step down. Stanley issued a short statement saying, “Due to recent events, I have decided to focus my full attention on my family and resign...

The call was made in the report ‘Hope in God’s Future’, received by the annual Methodist Conference on Wednesday. The report encourages people to repent in particular for their complicity in systems that exploit creation and prey on the powerless, but also offers advice on how Christians can make positive lifestyle changes. Rev David Gamble, the President of the Conference, said the report sent out a challenge to the Church to tackle the issue head on and commit to “significant action” over the next few years. “The first step in making a difference is the recognition of what we’ve done...

Shrinking mainline Protestant denominations are turning to marketing to help stem decades of membership losses and stay afloat. The United Methodist Church recently unveiled a $20 million rebranding effort aimed at attracting younger members to the large but diminishing Protestant group. The new ads will appear over the next four years as part of the denomination's "Rethink Church" campaign. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has invested nearly $1.2 million over the past two years launching a similar branding effort based on the theme, "God's Work, Our Hands." The denominations are trying to bounce back from losses that began...

I've always suspected that George W Bush wasn't really a big fan of Christian fundamentalists: he's an evangelical with Catholic leanings, not a Bible-basher. Now my suspicions have been confirmed by a new book about the worldwide religious revival called God is Back by the Economist's John Mickelthwait and Adrian Wooldridge.What did Bush really think of Bible-bashers?In the 2000 campaign, they report, Bush was visiting the Boeing Plant in Washington State when he was asked whether his enthusiasm for free trade with China might cost him the Christian vote. The reporter who asked him the question was from a...

In June 1828 Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of Mormonism, joined the Methodist Church [probationary class] in Harmony, Pennsylvania. This was a strange thing for this prophet of a new religion to do, and seriously challenges the story he put out ten years later about the origin of his work. That later story claims that in 1820 Joseph Smith had seen two glorious personages, identified as the Father and the Son, and was informed that the creeds of all the “sects,” or various denominations, “were an abomination” and he was twice forbidden to join any of them. In retelling this...

The United Methodist Church's top court recently ruled that clergy, both active and retired, cannot perform same-sex marriages or civil unions. Performing such services is "a chargeable offense," Bishop Beverly J. Shamana ruled last Friday. UMC's Judicial Council affirmed her decision. The council further ruled that an annual conference, or regional body within the UMC, "may not negate, ignore, or violate provisions of the Discipline with which they disagree, even when the disagreements are based on conscientious objections to the provisions." The council’s ruling was on a resolution passed by the California-Nevada Annual Conference last year, months after the California...

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, April 16 (Compass Direct News) – Buddhist mobs attacked several churches in Sri Lanka last week, threatening to kill a pastor in the southern province of Hambanthota and ransacking a 150-year-old Methodist church building in the capital. On April 8, four Buddhist extremists approached the home of pastor Pradeep Kumara in Weeraketiya, Hambanthota district, calling for him to come out and threatening to kill him. The pastor said his wife, at home alone with their two children, phoned him immediately but by the time he returned, the men had left. Half an hour later, Kumar said, the...