A man recently told me about his faith life, as people are wont to do with ministers. He said, “I’m spiritual but not religious. I want to give you my testimony about why I do not attend church….”

After marrying he joined the church in which his wife was brought up, a liberal Protestant church. He described that experience as the equivalent of getting a big warm hug. This church did not frown on dancing and drinking nor on his theological questions. He was encouraged to think critically about scripture. His questions, even his doubts, did not shock anybody. In fact, he was told that his questions made him a very good mainline Protestant.

But his marriage ended, and he began to feel that the church was more his former wife’s than his. He found himself spending Sunday mornings sleeping in, reading the New York Times or putting on his running shoes and taking off through the woods. This was his religion today, he explained. “I worship nature. I see myself in the trees and in the cicadas. I am one with the great outdoors. I find God there. And I realized that I am deeply spiritual but no longer religious.”

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This Sunday’s sermon has been a hot topic for pastors across the country for months. Barbara Brown Taylor, a critically-acclaimed Episcopal preacher and Islam professor at Piedmont College, has become a go-to for sermon counsel. “I would focus on wisdom gained. I would try to think about what we have learned over these 10 years,” she says of the anniversary Sunday. “What we have learned about our religious neighbors, what we have learned about ourselves, and what does our tradition teach us about how to go forward?”

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One of the great themes of the Hebrew Scriptures is that God identifies with the suffering. There are all these great texts that say things like this: If you oppress the poor, you oppress to me. I am a husband to the widow. I am father to the fatherless. I think the texts are saying God binds up his heart so closely with suffering people that he interprets any move against them as a move against him. This is powerful stuff! But Christianity says he goes even beyond that. Christians believe that in Jesus, God’s son, divinity became vulnerable to and involved in – suffering and death! He didn’t come as a general or emperor. He came as a carpenter. He was born in a manger, no room in the inn.

But it is on the Cross that we see the ultimate wonder. On the cross we sufferers finally see, to our shock that God now knows too what it is to lose a loved one in an unjust attack. And so you see what this means? John Stott puts it this way. John Stott wrote: “I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the Cross. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?” Do you see what this means? Yes, we don’t know the reason God allows evil and suffering to continue, but we know what the reason isn’t, what it can’t be. It can’t be that he doesn’t love us! It can’t be that he doesn’t care. God so loved us and hates suffering that he was willing to come down and get involved in it. And therefore the Cross is an incredibly empowering hint. Ok, it’s only a hint, but if you grasp it, it can transform you. It can give you strength.

And lastly, we have to grasp an empowering hope for the future. In both the Hebrew Scriptures and even more explicitly in the Christian Scriptures we have the promise of resurrection….

Read it carefully (noting especially the original setting as described) and read it all.

How then do we speak of God’s rule and reconcile this with the reality of evil? Between these two errors the Bible points us to the radical affirmation of God’s sovereignty as the ground of our salvation and the assurance of our own good. We cannot explain why God has allowed sin, but we understand that God’s glory is more perfectly demonstrated through the victory of Christ over sin. We cannot understand why God would allow sickness and suffering, but we must affirm that even these realities are rooted in sin and its cosmic effects.

How does God exercise His rule? Does He order all events by decree, or does He allow some evil acts by His mere permission? This much we know-we cannot speak of God’s decree in a way that would imply Him to be the author of evil, and we cannot fall back to speak of His mere permission, as if this allows a denial of His sovereignty and active will….

We dare not speak on God’s behalf to explain why He allowed these particular acts of evil to happen at this time to these persons and in this manner. Yet, at the same time, we dare not be silent when we should testify to the God of righteousness and love and justice who rules over all in omnipotence. Humility requires that we affirm all that the Bible teaches, and go no further. There is much we do not understand. As Charles Spurgeon explained, when we cannot trace God’s hand, we must simply trust His heart.

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Coming into the presence of the living God should bring us to our knees at the very least (although we seem to have stopped kneeling in church) as we reflect on Abraham Lincoln’s words that “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” He also wrote:

I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I
had nowhere else to go”¦Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been
a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however”¦is to
deny that there is a God governing the world.

When there is no conception of judgment, or justice, or “a difference of purpose” to define what is meant by the love of God, we are left in a helpless situation….

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When Americans are asked what Sept. 10, 2001, was like, many call that Monday “normal” or “ordinary.”

“Just a normal summer day,” one man said.

That all changed on Sept. 11.

Nine individuals told All Things Considered where they were on Sept. 10. They talked about some of their serendipitous experiences, near misses or devastating turn of events of that day ”” the day before America was interrupted.

Be prepared–extraordinarily powerful. Listen to it all (almost 13 minutes). Please note if you do not have audio capacity a link is available to the transcript via the link provided here–KSH.

I really enjoyed this, especially the pictures.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has come under attack by some religious and political leaders for not including clergy members as speakers at Sunday’s official ceremony at ground zero on the 10th anniversary of the attacks.

Richard D. Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which is the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, said in an interview that the planned ceremony only proved that New York was the “epicenter of secularism,” out of step with the rest of America.

“We’re not France,” he said. “Mr. Bloomberg is pretending we’re a secular society, and we are not.”

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As Father Matthew Kozlowski sits in his office at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, he reflects on his calling to the priesthood.

“I grew up in the Episcopal Church,” he said. “I was active in church and chapel in college but I never really thought about the priesthood until I was working as a chaplain at an Episcopal school.”

Kozlowski, 28, saw that goal become a reality this summer when he was ordained in the priesthood and hired in June as assistant rector at St. Mary’s .

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Six years after clubbing the night away in Leeds as a student, a young Anglican pastor is returning to her former haunts ”“ as “pioneering minister” to the night-time economy.

Beth Tash, 27, is taking on hundreds of after-dark venues in the Yorkshire city as a new form of parish, as part of a scheme already serving the local business community and residents of city centre flats.

The archdeacon of Leeds, the Ven Peter Burrows, said: “If you go into Leeds on any Friday or Saturday night and see the huge number of young people coming into the city, it is obvious that the church isn’t engaging with the club culture. Because of that, this is a very significant and exciting appointment.”

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The Auckland Diocesan Synod has decided that people in same-sex relationships should not be excluded from ordination.

After a debate lasting much of yesterday, Synod also agreed that sexual orientation should not be an impediment to ordination or any other offices in the church.

The mover was Rev Glynn Cardy, and the seconder Margaret Bedggood.

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Listen to it all if you so desire.

Like other teachers of preaching, I listen to a lot of sermons, sometimes a dozen in a single day. I have noticed that this fact rarely evokes covetous sighs from my faculty colleagues, many of whom imagine a daily regimen of multiple homilies as akin to endless trips to the periodontist.

Contrary to expectations, though, I find that helping students preach for the first time carries the excitement of teaching skydiving to beginners. There is always that telltale widening of the eyes as they stand in the open bay of the pulpit feeling the wind whip by, staring into the depths below and suddenly becoming aware of what they are about to do as you tap them on the shoulder and say, “Go!”

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[John] Stott meant a lot to me, and in several respects.

First, he modeled intelligent preaching, preaching that implied that both preacher and congregation were intelligent people who were concerned to understand difficult and important matters, and that patient and skilled interpretation of the difficult and important texts of the Bible was not only possible, but to be expected from sermons on every occasion. Preachers I have heard since then, and that’s the majority, who fail to interpret the text intelligently, fail to treat their audiences as intelligent people, and fail to express themselves intelligently, earn either my pity (if they can’t help it) or my contempt (if they can). But they do not get a pass: John Stott showed us what could be done, and we ought to do it, even if few of us can do it so well.

Second, he showed that smart and educated people could be evangelicals and remain evangelicals. In my young adult years, many upwardly mobile evangelicals were hitting the “high road,” so to speak, on their way to Anglo-Catholicism, Catholicism, or even Orthodoxy, but Stott”“whose church services at All Souls Langham Place were like InterVarsity meetings with robes”“was irrefutably sophisticated and unapologetically low-church evangelical.

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For years he stood on one side of the altar as couples said their marriage vows on the other.

But roles were almost reversed over the weekend when a Roman Catholic priest wed the woman he loved.

Sean Page (53) and Clarice Young (47) were married in a low-key ceremony in an Anglican church in front of four of her five children.

Speaking moments before his marriage to the two-time divorcee, Mr Page said: “This is a house of God, and that’s all that matters.”

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I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

A Episcopal priest defrocked by the local diocese must step down as rector of his Rosemont parish and vacate the premises after 21 years there, a Montgomery County Court judge has ruled.

The Rev. David Moyer, 60, said Wednesday that he was saddened by Judge Stanley Ott’s decision but would abide by his order to leave the Church of the Good Shepherd. He said he hoped to become a Roman Catholic priest.

An outspoken critic of liberal trends in the Episcopal Church, Moyer was defrocked in 2002 by the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania after he agreed to become a bishop in a small, conservative Anglican denomination.

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It may be OK, finally, for people to admit that they don’t know things for sure ”” whether it’s about quarks, light, God or the best way forward for the nation’s economy.

At 80, Polkinghorne doesn’t let his own doubts keep him from believing, any more than he let his doubts about quantum physics keep him from solving problems. He still prays, still celebrates the Eucharist, still believes in some kind of life eternal.

As for belief in God, “It’s a reasonable position, but not a knock-down argument,” he said. “It’s strong enough to bet my life on it. Just as Polanyi bet his life on his belief, knowing that it might not be true, I give my life to it, but I’m not certain. Sometimes I’m wrong.”

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Moms who are ministers face the same challenges as working moms everywhere, with a couple of twists. Time demands can be extraordinary — on call 24 hours a day, and no Sundays off — and raising kids in a church can be akin to parenting on center stage.

Hudson-Jacoby and her husband, Mike, have two sons, ages 8 and 5, and a 3-year-old daughter. She said most of that pressure is self-imposed.

“It’s pressure I put on myself,” said the 37-year-old University of South Carolina graduate and native of Lancaster. “But I’ve rarely felt it from the people in the congregation. I have to be really intentional not to have different expectations of my own children than I do from other children.”

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On the death of Earnshaw-Smith the churchwardens made strong representations to the Crown, as patron, that their young curate should succeed him. For the next 25 years John Stott produced at All Souls a model of the life and witness of a local church which was copied eagerly across the world. He developed his own gifts as pastor and evangelist, preacher and expositor. It is hard now to realize how innovative was his approach, even while making every allowance for the privileged position held by such a church.

Soon he found himself responding to urgent invitations to employ these gifts on a wider canvas. His university missions, starting with Oxbridge but extending to many continents, showed how fruitful was his prayerful determination to reach the heart and will by first engaging the mind. It was while conducting a string of such missions in North America that he spent one Christmas with Billy Graham and his young family, cementing a relationship of mutual affection and respect that was to bear fruit in their partnership in Lausanne Movement, and prove lifelong.

Scripture was the basis of his teaching. To him preaching began with exposition and moved on to application in its God-given role of proclaiming Christ, calling to repentance and faith, and building up the church as a mature, worshipping, witnessing and serving fellowship. Half-reluctantly, faced with the pressures of the day, faithful exposition led on to a defence of the faith, and so also to proclaiming Biblical standards of morality and behaviour, courageous and indeed painful as such a role often proved to be. If forced to choose, he would style himself an evangelical who was also an Anglican; but he held steadily and with affection to the Biblical foundations of his Church, resisting calls (such as in the famous debate with his friend Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones) to leave. He resisted, too, with equal firmness what he saw as unbalanced emphases in the neo-Pentecostalism of the day.

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Q: Seacoast is a highly successful and very large church with several campuses. As your congregations grow, how do you ensure that spiritual growth keeps up? How do you cater to the individual needs of your members?

A: Jesus was very clear about who was responsible for doing what in his instructions to the disciples. He said that he would build the church and we were to make disciples. If we will do our job, he will do his. Our job at Seacoast is not to grow the church. Our job is to make disciples. Disciple-making is done one-on-one, one-on-two, etc. We take that seriously. We try to make disciples by huddling small groups of leaders who in turn huddle others, helping them to hear the voice of God in their lives.

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As the BBC reports, some church leaders in the Netherlands want to transform their small nation into a laboratory for rethinking Christianity ”” “experimenting with radical new ways of understanding the faith.”

Religious Affairs Correspondent Robert Pigott tells of Rev. Klaas Hendrikse, a minister of the PKN, the mainstream Protestant denomination in the Netherlands. Pastor Hendrikse doesn’t believe in life after death, nor even in God as a supernatural being. He told the BBC that he has “no talent” for believing historic and orthodox doctrines. “God is not a being at all,” he says, but just an experience.

Furthermore, as Pigott reports, “Mr. Hendrikse describes the Bible’s account of Jesus’s life as a mythological story about a man who may never have existed, even if it is a valuable source of wisdom about how to lead a good life.”

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“There was a man sent from God whose name was John”

John the Baptist, to whom the above reference refers, was beheaded by a king in a palace at a relatively young age. John Stott , who I met in January of 1957, spent his final days on earth in a small bed-sitt er in a rest home for retired clergy about 30 miles south of London. He was weak, frail, nearly blind, and bedridden. He had turned 90 this spring, and was expecting to go home to the Lord very soon. But in his heyday, and for more than a half century, John Stott had an impact on his world akin to that of John the Baptist.

Both were sent from God. Both pointed to Jesus. Both att empted to live very simply. Both had few possessions. Bothwere fi lled with the Holy Spirit….

Read it all (page 4)

Six chaplains serve Creedmoor, a state hospital with 400 residents and 10,000 outpatients. The majority of those patients have received diagnoses of schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. The chaplains represent Judaism, Islam, Catholicism and both mainline and evangelical Protestantism. They lead worship services, text study groups, spirituality discussions. They will soon hold a 9/11 memorial event. And up and down the corridors and through the wards they offer pastoral counseling.

A black spiritual, drawing on the prophet Jeremiah, has a refrain for this work: “There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole.” Rabbi Benjamin A. Samson, the chief chaplain at the hospital, has his own description: chicken soup.

“We provide a sense of almost refuge,” said the Rev. Jeff C. Williams, an evangelical Protestant minister. “It’s nonjudgmental, nonconfrontational. In all the other parts of their lives, there are limitations based on their diagnoses.”

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Experts say the parsonage allowance was originally included as a way to minimize taxes on clergy members, whose compensation was often meager. It still is widely used for that purpose, church officials said, although the IRS doesn’t track usage of the benefit.

“For most of them the housing allowance is modest because their compensation is modest,” says Daniel Gary, an attorney with the United Methodist Church in Nashville.

Similarly, D. August Boto, general counsel of the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, says for leaders of the organization’s 46,000 churches “the housing allowance is critically important for making ends meet””it is not a luxury.”

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For over a decade from his pulpit here at Oak Hill Baptist in North Mississippi, the Rev. Michael O. Minor has waged war against obesity and bad health. In the Delta this may seem akin to waging war against humidity, but Mr. Minor has the air of the salesman he once was, and the animated persistence to match.

Years into his war, he is beginning to claim victories.

The National Baptist Convention, which represents some seven million people in nearly 10,000 churches, is ramping up a far-reaching health campaign devised by Mr. Minor, which aims to have a “health ambassador” in every member church by September 2012. The goals of the program, the most ambitious of its kind, will be demanding but concrete, said the Rev. George W. Waddles Sr., the president of the convention’s Congress of Christian Education.

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This “unexpected miracle” was not a one time event that made it into the Bible. Desperate mothers, and fathers, have been calling out to the Lord, and He has done the “unexpected miracle” over and over again.

One of my favorite “unexpected miracle” stories comes out of World War II. The mother was the wife of a Free Methodist pastor. She did her best to raise her children in the church to know and follow Christ. But when he was in high school, Jacob, her son, turned his back on the church walked away from God. He joined the newly formed Army Air Corp and became a bombardier on the B-25 Liberator.

In April 1942, Lt Col Jimmy Doolittle gathered the crews of sixteen B-25’s to go on a top secret mission. The B-25 had never flown off an aircraft carrier before. Giant cranes loaded the bombers on to the USS Hornet and the famous Doolittle Raiders were on there way. The mission was so secret that the crews could not tell their families where they were going, which, of course, caused great concern for the families.

Read it all or if you prefer audio you may find the audio link here.

All good brands need a mission statement or a manifesto. Warren’s breakthrough to a mass audience came in 2002 with The Purpose Driven Life. His book describes itself as a “40-day spiritual journey for Christian living in the 21st century”. Though he rejects descriptions of it as a “self-help book” for the religious, it is reminiscent of the genre, with its folksy prose and short chapters. It reassures those with busy lives that they can converse with God “while shopping, driving or working” and that everyday tasks can be devoted to God including “taking out the trash”.

Warren says: “There’s not a new idea in [it] that hasn’t been said in 2,000 years of history. It’s been said all before. If I had a 15-word sentence, how could I say it in nine? How can I say it in five?”

Warren’s revolutionary tactic was to bypass bookshops and market the book directly to evangelical America, through its churches. It became a classic word-of-mouth success: it has sold more than 30m copies in the US, been translated into more than 50 languages and generated sequels.

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