“Handing down judgment on Wednesday, Lord Braid said the Scottish rules were a disproportionate interference of Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights.” - C.Today

NAAF “has released a statement addressing recent statements from the SBC Council of Seminary Presidents. It’s an important statement, that will merit response from the SBC seminary presidents, and consideration of SBC leaders.” - C.Today

“Most churchgoers experienced some type of back-and-forth with the availability of in-person services. For 3 in 10 (31%), in-person services stopped at their church for a short period of time and have since resumed. Another 22% say in-person services were halted for much of the year but have resumed.” - LifeWay

“Not having taste or smell has been one of the strangest experiences of my life. I had no symptoms of Covid until I couldn’t smell garlic bread! ….How many of us have lost our ‘taste and desire’ for God’s Word?” - Treg Spicer

HT: Proclaim & Defend

When you represent The Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry, there is sort of an unwritten rule that you will present Passover Seder demonstrations in the spring, leading up to Easter.

Notice that I am careful to point out the fact that these are educational presentations. We are not mandating that the church return to the Mosaic Law and reinstate the Passover. However, there is so much that we can learn from the wonderfully rich heritage behind this festival—which I call the world’s oldest holiday.

“A five-day trial for Hoogland on a similar but separate contempt of court charge is scheduled to begin on April 12. During that trial, Hoogland is expected to be allowed to share his side of the story unrestrained by orders restricting his freedom of speech, according to sources.” - C.Post

“Dominion Voting Systems in January sued Powell over her statements alleging the voting company helped rig the election against then-President Donald Trump.” - NLJ

“…a February article in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion documents trends in the way pastors wrote about their role as counselors as it became commonplace for people to turn to psychologists rather than spiritual leaders with their problems.” - C.Today

“We are so often drawn to bad news more than good, to evidences of depravity more than evidences of grace. Why then should we be surprised that our feet grow heavy, that our pace begins to falter?” - Challies

“Transhumanism says that carbon as flesh is weak and carbon as mechanism is strong; at its most fundamentalist it preaches an eschaton of singularity, the upload of our minds—reduced or assumed to be ones and zeros—on immortal circuitries.” - TAC

What will happen when campers at a Christian camp are influenced by other campers with gender dysphoria? Or when a biological boy registers as a girl and vice-versa? Will churches be able to escape federal mandates based upon our convictions, or will we be forced to play along or be closed?

This concern has been going through my mind, and I am wondering about the future of age-segregated ministry, particularly ministry that involves youth outside the church. But these issues can arise inside the church as well. Are we up fo fighting lawsuits?

According to USA Today:

“One of the trends I’ve noticed when it comes to matters of faith deconstruction is that many of those who talk about their deconstructions have deconstructed from the worst parts of Christian subculture, and rightfully so.” - LifeWay

“At some point after post-lockdown onset, I noticed that the less I saw people, the less I wanted to see people. I just got comfortable like a hobbit.” - WORLD

“Partisan … advance Christian ends with extrabiblical, and sometimes unbiblical, methods. Silent churches rightly reject the partisan model but embrace a kind of quietism, resulting in silence on political issues about which Christians really do need moral and scriptural guidance.” - TGC

Are We Truly Trusting God?

“More than half of evangelicals will be back in person, but most Catholics and black and mainline Protestants are still waiting to return.” - C.Today

Related: Pew Research report

This article is an add-in to the series of posts on Tipping, Tithing, and Grace Giving. As I have continued to study what the Scriptures say about grace giving, I have seen an emphasis on generosity through both the Old and New Testaments. Grace giving is by definition generous.

“The marrying of religion and politics among conservatives to create the well-known and powerful religious right that forms a voting bloc for the Republican Party has led some Americans to abandon their ties to the Christian faith and join the ranks of secularists, scholars argue in a new book.” - C.Post

“Elders at Crabapple First Baptist Church condemned both the ‘extreme and wicked’ actions and the purported motives of a church member who allegedly killed eight people in a series of shootings, calling them a direct contradiction of his professed faith in Christ and the church’s teachings.” - BPNews

Last week, “Israeli archaeologists announced the discovery of dozens of Dead Sea Scroll fragments bearing biblical texts. The fragments of parchment include lines of Greek text from the books of Zechariah and Nahum. Based on the writing style, they have been dated to around the first century AD.” - TGC

“Almost thirty years since its first printing, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus is still a top seller. There are also many other popular books like it. There is a reason for this…” - Scott Sauls

“…some U.S. leaders have in recent years been referring to “freedom of worship” rather than “religious freedom.” That might seem unimportant but it is actually very significant. The freedom to worship is the freedom to practice religion in one’s home or house of worship, privately. But the free exercise of religion is the freedom to speak and to act in public on the basis of one’s beliefs.” - IFWE

Introduction

Let me begin with a few lines from T. S. Eliot:

Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, but ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? (Choruses from ‘The Rock’)

I want to add to this the words of Jesus in John 8:12:

“As the church’s global growth continues, leaders must disentangle its ‘health message’ from views on salvation.” - C.Today

“A father who has long objected to his minor daughter taking testosterone as part of an experimental gender transition has been jailed in British Columbia for contempt of court.” - C.Post

“It was Augustine who described the church as ‘a hospital for sinners.’ He said it would be very strange if people were to criticize hospitals because the patients were sick.” - Colin Smith

“Is it possible that we have a generation of people who grew up in Christian homes and made a ‘decision’ that you’d have to be an idiot to say no to, but have never felt the convicting work of the Holy Spirit and the drawing (and keeping) power of the Father, the covenant-keeping God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?” - Olinger

Scholar: Purity culture and complementarian doctrine are significant aspects of this Christian man’s identity and in his acts of violence.

“As gender fluidity grows more accepted in wider culture, most Protestant pastors remain traditional.” - C.Today

Though reluctance toward COVID vaccination seems to be on the decline, Pew Research found that evangelicals are among the most hesitant in the U.S.