Protestant churches are losing young adults in “sobering” numbers, a survey finds.

Seven in 10 Protestants ages 18 to 30 ”” both evangelical and mainline ”” who went to church regularly in high school said they quit attending by age 23, according to the survey by LifeWay Research. And 34% of those said they had not returned, even sporadically, by age 30. That means about one in four Protestant young people have left the church.

“This is sobering news that the church needs to change the way it does ministry,” says Ed Stetzer, director of Nashville-based LifeWay Research, which is affiliated with the publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.

“It seems the teen years are like a free trial on a product. By 18, when it’s their choice whether to buy in to church life, many don’t feel engaged and welcome,” says associate director Scott McConnell.

Read it all.

When pools of water began accumulating on the floor in some restrooms at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and the sinks pulling away from the walls, the problem was easy to pinpoint. On this campus, more than 10 percent of the students are Muslims, and as part of ritual ablutions required before their five-times-a-day prayers, some were washing their feet in the sinks.

The solution seemed straightforward. After discussions with the Muslim Students’ Association, the university announced that it would install $25,000 foot-washing stations in several restrooms.

But as a legal and political matter, that solution has not been quite so simple. When word of the plan got out this spring, it created instant controversy, with bloggers going on about the Islamification of the university, students divided on the use of their building-maintenance fees, and tricky legal questions about whether the plan is a legitimate accommodation of students’ right to practice their religion ”” or unconstitutional government support for that religion.

“It’s an awkward thing,” said Alexis Oesterle, a junior. “If I’m sitting with Muslim friends, I wouldn’t want to bring it up. In this country, at this time, it’s not so easy to discuss the issues of Muslims in American society.”

Read it all.

Read it all.

We are a family of faith. No one ever wants their faith tested, particularly by events such as these. When there is no ability to control your life events and you are required to deal with such great tragedy and loss, however, your faith is all the more necessary.

Although we will no longer have Jennifer, Hayley and Michaela physically present with us, and we do now and we will continue to experience an extraordinary sense of loss because of that, we firmly believe that their spirits and all of the goodness that defined their characters and beautiful personas will remain with us forever. We are committed to preserving those spirits and fulfilling their lives of promise, so tragically cut short.

Many ask what they can do….

Read the whole thing.

Gambling seriously damages your wealth. No one feels this razor-sharp truism more than the inveterate visitor to the high street turf accountant or the local casino. Gamblers’ weakness is not ignorance, it is to believe they will join the small band of punters who throw loaded dice and strike it lucky against all odds.

Gordon Brown is the Prime Minister who put the “no” in the Manchester supercasino. Now, at the eleventh hour, James Purnell, the Culture, Media and Sport Secretary, has conjured a fiendishly complicated series of guidelines that appear to be a desperate punt to protect children from gamblers’ advertising. It is important. of course, to shelter tender minds. But rather than struggling to define when replica football shirts are not fit to be worn by lanky teenagers but are suitable for beer-bellied men, a straightforward wealth warning might have sufficed. How about a simple line on every advert truthfully telling how much profit the bookie makes from blockheaded punters? Whether it be 5p in the £1 or 50p, it would be sure to focus minds.

Read it all.

Christians in Iraq are today facing serious persecution, as detailed in a number of recent reports, including in this publication.

Predictably, some of these accounts are filed by sources that were against the war in Iraq, dislike President Bush at a level bordering on hatred, and are more than happy to revel in another example of where they believe the White House has failed in Iraq.

On the other hand, to be sure, many of the accounts come from fair-minded observers with no political agenda ”” such as this publication ”” not to mention the actual victims of the repression.

One very alarming report by the Assyrian International News Agency cites hundreds of killings and an exodus of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Christians.

Read it all.

Last week:

Luminent Mortgage reaffirms Q2 dividend of $0.32 (8.07)
The company announced that its Q2 dividend of $0.32 payable on 8-Aug is secure and will not be canceled.

This morning:

LUM Luminent Mortgage suspends payment of Q2 cash dividend of $0.32….

Houston, we have a problem.

Update: More here.

Sad but understandable to see it.

It is time to acknowledge the limits of the church growth model for churches in post-Christendom Canada. Acknowledging these limits will prompt us to explore other avenues. Theologians can help us relearn the Gospel and recapture a biblical theology of the church. Sociologists can help us learn from the explosive growth of the church within its first three centuries, and the growth of the church this century in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Missiologists can help us learn how to reach the majority of the population that are not being reached by contemporary methods.

Albert Einstein said, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” The church growth model will not solve the problems of the church in post-Christendom Canada. It’s time to look elsewhere.

Read it all.

Online virtual world Second Life has a new player – the Anglican Church.

A medieval Anglican cathedral was built in the popular role-playing site five weeks ago and the church started holding services last month.

The idea is the brainchild of Bible Society NZ chief executive Mark Brown. Brown said Second Life had news channels and universities operating within it, but no church. He saw the venture as an opportunity to reach the virtual world’s 8million strong population.

The church has over 150 members and holds Sunday services three times during the day to accommodate different time zones.

“Just a few months ago we had five members and it was just a vision, but it seems to have captured people’s imagination,” he said.

“People are coming to try it out and we are getting some slow building, within 4 to 6 weeks we will have to turn people away.”

Read it all.

Interviews with law enforcement officials and lawyers for the men, and friends, co-workers and relatives of all involved, along with a study of court records, paint a picture of what happened that morning and show that there were missed opportunities on both sides of the law leading up to the deaths.

The criminal justice system failed to treat Mr. Hayes and Mr. Komisarjevsky as serious offenders despite long histories of recidivism, repeatedly setting them free on parole. The suspects never capitalized on those chances to turn their lives around, instead apparently forming a new criminal alliance after meeting at a drug treatment center in Hartford.

“There’s no question about it: The system didn’t work,” Dr. Petit’s father, William A. Petit Sr., 73, said last weekend outside his home in Plainville, 12 miles north, where the family has long formed a pillar of civic life. He paused, then added: “It’s too late now.”

It started out like any summer Sunday.

Read it all but be aware that the content is deeply disturbing..

Before any further discussion of the issues with TEC’s theological document take place, it is important to present the research that TEC missed. Since many churches are struggling with the issue of homosexuality, the information is beneficial to most denominations. It seems quite probable that many churches are not up to date, because they use theological journals to present rigorous science. Although the Anglican Theological Review was interested in the information in this article, for instance, it would not have printed it before the summer of 2009, because of the lag time to publication at theological journals. By then the information would be out of date, and TEC’s error of using old science illustrates the tendency to canonize bibliographies that take a long time to be produced.

One clear area in which recent research has challenged earlier assessments is the genetic causality of homosexual attraction. In 1991 Bailey and Pillard (“A Genetic Study of Male Sexual Orientation,” Archives of General Psychiatry 48) published results of a study in men that suggested a genetic cause of same-sex attraction. It was largely on the basis of that report that To Set Our Hope on Christ concluded that homosexual attractions were based on genetic causes. But a 1994 article called “Homosexuality: The Behavioral Sciences and the Church” by Jones and Workman had already pointed out severe sample bias in that study. Further, a later study co-authored by Bailey did not support the 1991 results.

The 1991 Bailey and Pillard twin study on men looked at identical twins, fraternal twins, siblings that were not twins, and adopted siblings. Seeing traits significantly more often in pairs of identical twins than in the general population suggests heritability of the trait. The authors found that 52% of homosexual identical twins had a homosexual co- twin. Since that was much higher than the 2% rate of homosexuality in the general population at that time, such a large increase would indicate that genetic factors were highly likely. However, the subjects for this study were individuals recruited through gay publications. Besides the obvious problem of who would be likely to respond to such a solicitation, the data itself showed that even the adopted children in the study had five times the normal rate of homosexuality. A high rate in unrelated children indicates that the families of respondents were not typical of the general population. It is clear that the Bailey and Pillard study was subject to sampling bias.

In 1992 King and McDonald (“Homosexuals who are twins: A study of 46 Probands,” British Journal of Psychiatry 160) did a twin study using an unbiased sample. It showed only about 25% of homosexual identical twins had a co-twin who was homosexual. This is still higher than the general population so it could indicate some heritability, but King and McDonald also did something else that any good researcher would do. They looked into the possibility that there might be environmental factors causing even this relatively low rate of concordance. They found that “genetic factors are insufficient explanation of the development of sexual orientation” because of social factors, including “a relatively high likelihood of sexual relations occurring with same sex co-twins at some time, particularly in monozygotic [identical] pairs.” The identical twins were having a strong influence on each other.

Read it all.

It’s in places like Carpentersville where we may be witnessing the opening of a deep and profound fissure in the American landscape. Over the past two years, more than 40 local and state governments have passed ordinances and legislation aimed at making life miserable for illegal immigrants in the hope that they’ll have no choice but to return to their countries of origin. Deportation by attrition, some call it. One of the first ordinances was passed in Hazleton, Pa., and was meant to bar illegal immigrants from living and working there. It served as a model for many local officials across the country, including Sigwalt and Humpfer. On July 26, a federal judge struck down Hazleton’s ordinance, but the town’s mayor, Lou Barletta, plans to appeal the decision. “This battle is far from over,” he declared the day of the ruling. States and towns have looked for other ways to crack down on illegal immigrants. Last month, Prince William County in northern Virginia passed a resolution trying to curb illegal immigrants’ access to public services. Waukegan, another Illinois town, has voted to apply for a federal program that would allow its police to begin deportation charges against those who are here illegally. A week after the Senate failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform, Arizona’s governor, Janet Napolitano, signed into law an act penalizing businesses that knowingly hire undocumented immigrants. “One of the practical effects of this failure” to enact national immigration reform, Napolitano wrote to the Congressional leadership, “is that Arizona, and states across the nation, must now continue to address this escalating problem on their own.” Admittedly, the constitutionality of many of these new laws is still in question, and some of the state bills and local ordinances simply duplicate what’s already in force nationally. But with Congress’s inability to reach an agreement on an immigration bill, the debate will continue among local officials like those in Carpentersville, where the wrangling often seems less about illegal immigration than it does about whether new immigrants are assimilating quickly enough, if at all. In Carpentersville, the rancor has turned neighbor against neighbor. Once you scrape away the acid rhetoric, though, there’s much people actually agree on ”” but given the ugliness of the taunts and assertions, it’s unlikely that will ever emerge.

It is a long article but worth the time.

Read it all.

Three churches that split from the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles in a dispute over a gay bishop are asking the state Supreme Court to weigh in on who controls the parishes’ buildings.
The petition comes a little more than a month after an appeals court ruled the buildings should be placed under control of the diocese, reversing lower court rulings in favor of the parishes.

St. James Church in Newport Beach, All Saints Church in Long Beach and St. David’s Church in North Hollywood pulled out of the six-county Los Angeles Diocese in 2004, following the ordination of a gay bishop in the Diocese of New Hampshire.

They announced they were placing themselves under the jurisdiction of the Anglican Church in Uganda.

The Los Angeles Diocese sued the parishes to gain control of the properties, arguing the parishes held their church buildings in trust for the diocese and the national Episcopal Church, and were not entitled to them.

Read it all.

In a letter last December, Lawrence said he had no plans to take the local diocese out of The Episcopal Church. On March 8, Lawrence reiterated his position to the Standing Committees of the Episcopal Church to assure the diocese’s continued membership in The Episcopal Church.

“I will heartily make the vows conforming ‘…to the doctrine, discipline, and worship’ of the Episcopal Church, as well as the trustworthiness of the Holy Scriptures. So to put it as clearly as I can, my intention is to remain in The Episcopal Church,” he wrote in the March letter.

The Very Rev. William McKeachie, dean of South Carolina, had called the decision to invalidate Lawrence’s election “the latest outrage from the national church.”

Read it all.

This elf is thinking we might need a scorecard soon to keep track of who has written what to whom… 😉 But all kidding aside, ACI has posted Dr. Turner’s rebuttal to Dr. Noll’s letter to him.

A REPLY BY PHILIP TURNER TO STEPHEN NOLL’S REPLY TO PHILIP TURNER
Written by Rev. Dr. Philip Turner
Monday, 06 August 2007

Dear Stephen,

Thank you for your gracious reply to my response to your open letter calling for a “full and final separation” between those whom you term a “faithful remnant” and The Episcopal Church (TEC). Knowing you as I do I was certain there would be a reply, but I nonetheless hoped against hope that none would be forthcoming. I say this not because I am not open to theological exchange, but because the medium (blogs) now used for such exchanges encourages hasty and ill tempered response and counter response. I have no desire to be involved in such a back and forth and I presume you do not either.

It is this observation that leads to my first response to your response. You and others have questioned my reluctance to use the word “heretic” to refer to those we jointly oppose. I have no desire to enter into an argument about the correct use of the terms “apostate” (which you did not use) and “heretic”(which you do). I believe that my observation that these terms are not being accurately applied is correct. However, my major concern was and is not their correct meaning. Rather, my concern is the way in which they are being used in our present conflict. Both terms are used (more often than not) in anger simply to dismiss those with whom one disagrees. My point concerns a culture of anger, condemnation, and dismissal that makes it unnecessary to address one’s opponent as a brother or sister who has gone astray or as a false teacher who needs correction. Rather, the terms are used to reduce one’s adversaries to a category-one that places them among “outsiders” about whom one’s spirit need not be in agony until Christ be adequately formed in them. So my first hope remains that you might join me in cautioning those who share our view of the sad state of TEC that we, the critics of TEC, stand in grave danger of misreading our circumstances because so many of us have been taken over by one of the seven deadly sins. We cannot possibly hope that God’s agents for reform and renewal will be those who themselves suffer from such a serious spiritual disease.

The full text is here.

Here are the background links:
Noll’s response to Turner (posted Aug 3)
Turner’s response to Noll’s open letter (posted Aug 2)
Noll’s Open Letter to Network bishops (posted Jul 29)

Fr. Matt Kennedy has weighed in to specifically address Turner’s comments about the use of the word “heretic” with his feature at Stand Firm: A Brief Note on the Use of the Word “Heretic”

Also related to this debate, over at Stand Firm, Dr. Noll posted a response to Sarah Hey’s recent essay (which Kendall linked here).

And just so the links are handy, the long thread (270 comments) on Dr. Radner’s resignation from the Network is here. (Stand Firm posted Dr. Radner’s T19 comment on the ensuing discussion as a separate thread here. Note also Stand Firm’s post of Dean Munday’s response to Radner, which I don’t believe Kendall posted here.)

By almost any definition ”” except his own and perhaps those of his neighbors here in Silicon Valley ”” Hal Steger has made it.

Mr. Steger, 51, a self-described geek, has banked more than $2 million. The $1.3 million house he and his wife own on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean is paid off. The couple’s net worth of roughly $3.5 million places them in the top 2 percent of families in the United States.

Yet each day Mr. Steger continues to toil in what a colleague calls “the Silicon Valley salt mines,” working as a marketing executive for a technology start-up company, still striving for his big strike. Most mornings, he can be found at his desk by 7. He typically works 12 hours a day and logs an extra 10 hours over the weekend.

“I know people looking in from the outside will ask why someone like me keeps working so hard,” Mr. Steger says. “But a few million doesn’t go as far as it used to. Maybe in the ’70s, a few million bucks meant ”˜Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,’ or Richie Rich living in a big house with a butler. But not anymore.”

Read it all.

When Jesus said to Simon, “Put out into the deep,” he was simply reminding him to go where the opportunities were. Too often, Fr. Wood reminded us, Christians are caught in the paralyzing trap of fear and a critical spirit, and we miss opportunities. Even with all the distractions in the church and in the world, Jesus still calls, stills sends, and still blesses with bountiful results.

After the Eucharist, the delegates reconvened for the business of the day. The credentials committee announced that 82 clergy members and 201 lay members were present and eligible to vote. Bishop Salmon declared a quorum and opened the convention with prayer. The Rev. Haden McCormick, president of the standing committee, rose to place in nomination the name of Mark Joseph Lawrence. A spontaneous and enthusiastic standing ovation followed.

Read it all.

We are committed to pray and support Archbishop Rowan Williams in keeping the unity of the Communion at this difficult time. We recognize the importance of maintaining our faith and the unity of the Church of Christ especially in this region where we face many challenges.

We accept and affirm the recommendation made by the Primates in their last meeting in Dar-es-Salaam and we fully endorse their communiqué.

We greet all the churches in the Anglican Communion in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit to the glory of God the Father.

Read it all.

The nation’s largest Lutheran denomination will again face the divisive issue of sexuality when it considers resolutions on gay clergy and same-sex blessings at its biennial assembly in Chicago this week.

After the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) voted at its last Churchwide Assembly in 2005 to maintain church rules that ban noncelibate gay and lesbian ministers, many thought the issue would be tabled until a comprehensive study on sexuality was completed in 2009.

But 22 of the ELCA’s 65 regional synods have asked the church to again address standards for gay clergy this year, pushing for change within the 5 million-member denomination.

About half of the 125 proposed resolutions to be debated at the assembly address sexuality, standards and discipline for sexual conduct of clergy and same-sex blessings. “The battle lines are being drawn,” said one advocate, while ELCA leaders are pleading for comity amid the contentious debate.

Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson, who is expected to be be re-elected for a second six-year term in Chicago, is among those who say the church should wait for the 2009 study on sexuality, called a “social statement,” before taking action.

Read it all.

The day is sunny and hot, the hamburgers are on the grill, the kids are jumping on the moon bounce and about 400 people are milling around the brand new Dar Al Noor mosque in Manassas, Va.

Neighbors and members of the congregation are here ”” even Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine is coming. James Dade, a non-Muslim who lives nearby, is manning the grill. As he hands a burger to a Muslim friend, he turns and gives this assessment of his new neighbors.

“They’re very friendly, very helpful, very community-oriented,” he says, noting that his best friend attends Dar Al Noor. “If there were more Christians like my friend, we wouldn’t have any problems in this world.”

Listen to it all.

Five times in the last dozen years, bills on medically assisted suicide have risen in the California Assembly, and five times they have failed.

In every instance, a great deal of the credit for their demise goes to a constituency associated with advancing personal choice and civil rights ”” namely, the disability rights movement.

The latest attempt, Assembly Bill 374, which its backers called the California Compassionate Choices Act, failed to make it out of committee in June. Modeled on a statute passed by Oregon voters in 1997, it would have allowed mentally competent patients, whom doctors found had less than six months to live, to legally acquire lethal prescription drugs for self-administration.

Many disability rights activists contend that the increasingly cost-conscious healthcare system, especially health maintenance organizations, inevitably would respond to legalized suicide by withholding expensive care from the disabled and terminally ill until they chose to end their lives.

“HMOs are denying access to healthcare and hastening people’s deaths already,” said Paul Longmore, a history professor at San Francisco State and a pioneer in the historical study of disability. “Our concern is not just how this will affect us. Given the way the U.S. healthcare system is getting increasingly unjust and even savage, I don’t think this system could be trusted to implement such a system equitably, or confine it to people who are immediately terminally ill.”

Read it all.

On Sunday mornings, it’s now commonplace to see presidential candidates in church pulpits or pews, proclaiming their faith and ”” not coincidentally ”” jockeying furiously (but piously) for crucial “values voters.”

So, with so much at stake, now might be a good time to ask, “Who speaks for America’s evangelicals?”

Will it continue to be bombastic, GOP-leaning, Southern preachers, such as the late Jerry Falwell, and strident, hard-line broadcasters such as Pat Robertson and Focus on the Family’s James Dobson? I don’t think so. From my neighborhood in the suburban Sunbelt, it is clear that a subtle, incremental but nonetheless tectonic shift is underway. And this is more than what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences.”

The emerging face and voice of American evangelicalism is that of a pragmatic, politically sophisticated, pastor of a middle class megachurch. A younger generation of ministers such as Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life; Bill Hybels, of the pioneering Willow Creek Community Church outside Chicago; T.D. Jakes, the African-American pastor of The Potter’s House in Dallas, as well as a music and movie producer; and Frank Page, the re-elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Or, this younger generation might be personified by someone like Joel Hunter, of Northland Church, just outside Orlando. The amiable Midwesterner, who opposes the death penalty, looks like Johnny Carson and sounds like Gene Hackman. He’s a regular reader of such periodicals as The Economist, Foreign Affairs and Harvard Business Review.

Read it all.

Bishop Azad Marshall from Pakistan was officially installed as Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Iran during an August 5 service at St. Paul’s Church in Tehran, a turning point for interfaith relations in the Islamic Republic.

More than two hundred people attended the three-hour service, which was marked by singing in Farsi and English by the House of Worship and Messiah Worship Choir and orchestra, according to the Anglican Communion News Service. The congregation included Anglicans, members of the Assemblies of God, Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and Muslims. The service was also attended by a senior official from the office of the President who spoke afterwards of the respect and freedom given to all religious minorities.

Among those attending the installation were Jerusalem Bishop Suheil Dawani; President Bishop Mouneer Anis of Jerusalem and the Middle East; Church of England Bishops Michael Nazir Ali of Rochester and Paul Butler of Southampton; Retired Jerusalem Bishop Riah Abu El-Assal; and Archbishop John Chew, Primate of South East Asia.

According to reports, Marshall said “Iran’s leaders want to open a new chapter with the Anglican Church, nearly 30 years after the Islamic revolution.”

Read it all.

Update: There is a good picture here.

It was a shocking moment for members of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Manchester, N.H.: One of their congregants was accused of sexually abusing an underage relative.
Church leaders gave the man one chance to remain. He had to sign an agreement to stay away from any church setting where there were children, limiting himself to events like adult education classes and one-on-one meetings with the pastor.

He refused and decided to leave, but the ultimatum let the church stick to its mission of trying to minister to all while keeping its children safe.

“We had a policy in place,” said Sandra Greenfield, who was the church’s director of education at the time and now holds a similar job at the South Church in Portsmouth, N.H. “There was no confusion about how we were going to handle the situation.”

Read it all.

Whenever an organization begins to lose its grasp on the message it wants to deliver, it concentrates its efforts on improving the means of delivery. With gratifying timeliness, ECUSA has responded to its identity crisis by developing an Organizational Effectiveness Plan to streamline the ministerial services whose purpose it can’t seem to find.

Read it all.

Listen to it all.

The Presbyterian Church (USA) has selectively disseminated two “privileged and confidential” documents by denominational lawyers calling on presbyteries to use draconian measures when claiming local church property.

The tone of the documents is reflected in the words they use to describe the parties: the “true church” ”“ meaning those who submit to the government and decisions of the PCUSA ”“ versus the “schismatics” ”“ meaning those who believe the denomination has abandoned its Biblical and Reformed roots. One recommendation for presbytery representatives is to portray themselves as the aggrieved party embattling the ungodly ”“ “keep the presbytery in a ‘defensive’ secular legal posture. (Let the schismatics seek Caesar’s help.)”

That proposal is interesting in that most litigation in church property disputes is begun by presbyteries filing civil complaints and congregations having to defend themselves.

Read it all.

Science and spirit. Life and death. The natural and supernatural. The essence of body, the essence of soul. For the Rev. Kirtley Yearwood, it’s the duality of experience that makes life so interesting and meaningful.

As an Episcopal priest, Yearwood has laid his hands on his brothers and sisters in Christ, nurtured their spirits and inspired them to seek the truth.

As a forensic pathologist, Dr. Yearwood has employed scalpel and sight in seeking a different sort of truth, an empirical explanation of death.

It is a dual career that has made him whole, he says. His faith strengthens him as he confronts death, and his medical experience strengthens his faith. They are the yin and yang of his life; two parts of a single enterprise.

‘I have always been drawn to death,’ he says. ‘It’s a holy moment, God is there, the angels are circling. I have learned how fragile and important life is.’

Read it all.