When Jim Elliston, a former nondenominational pastor, decided to start a technology company in 2007, he turned to a customer he knew best””the church””to win initial business.

Mr. Elliston says his firm, Clover Sites Inc., of Newbury Park, Calif., has since sold its website templates and Web-hosting services to more than 4,500 churches in the U.S. He also counts those institutions’ members among his company’s clientele, crediting referrals for providing a steady stream of leads.

He started out promoting his business by placing an ad in a booklet for an annual church-leader conference. From there, he says the business started growing through word of mouth. Some 95% of his business now comes from churches.

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Moving Images, Changing Lives by Sarah Brush and Phil Greig uses popular films to engage young people creatively with the themes and ideas associated with Confirmation and discipleship via a course of 11 sessions.

There are clips from more than 30 films, including Star Wars: A New Hope (where Obi Wan Kenobi faces Darth Vader in combat), Bruce Almighty, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (showing the reanimation of life on earth), Big Fish, The Miracle Maker, Notting Hill, The Matrix, Dogma, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Dolores Umbridge’s speech), The Passion of the Christ and The Life of Brian. All lead to discussions, the study of Scripture, fun ice-breakers and prayer.

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Nearly two years into recovery, American households are still leaning heavily on the crutch of government ”” more specifically, government borrowing….

new personal income data from the Commerce Department, which include the impact of the recent 2-percentage-point payroll-tax cut, provide a window into the extraordinary support that the federal government is providing to consumers.

Three props to personal income ”” higher social insurance benefits, lower tax payments and higher government wages and benefits ”” are adding just shy of $1 trillion to personal income on an annualized basis relative to pre-recession levels.

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Hamstrung by shrinking budgets, the police say the volunteers are indispensable in dealing with low-level offenses and allow sworn officers to focus on more pressing crimes and more violent criminals.

“We had the option to either stop handling those calls or do it in a different manner,” said Fresno’s police chief, Jerry Dyer, whose department has lost more than 300 employees in recent years. “I’ve always operated under the premise of no risk, no success. And in this instance, I felt we really didn’t have very much to lose.”

Other chiefs facing budget problems are also using volunteers. In Mesa, Ariz., a Phoenix suburb, 10 of them have been trained to process crime scenes, dust for fingerprints and even swab for DNA. In Pasadena, Calif., a team of retirees is combating identity theft ”” and, apparently, their own ennui.

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Hundreds of Christians have taken to the streets of Pakistan in protest at the assassination of the minorities minister, Shahbaz Bhatti, who was gunned down outside his home on Wednesday.

As the government declared three days of mourning, demonstrations were held across Punjab, where the Christian community is concentrated, with protesters burning tyres and demanding justice.

Such a show of anger is rare among Pakistan’s Christian minority, who enjoy little political power and are more often in the news as victims of violence from Muslim extremists. One of the largest crowds gathered in Gojra, in Punjab, where nine Christians were killed ”“ seven of them burned alive ”“ in 2009.

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Pope Benedict has rejected the idea of collective Jewish guilt for Jesus Christ’s death, in a new book to be published next week.

Tackling an issue that has led to centuries of persecution, the Pope argues there is no basis in scripture for the Jewish people to be blamed.

The Catholic Church officially repudiated the idea in 1965.

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A divided nation will not lead to a divided church, the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church of the Sudan said last month in a statement released at the close of their Feb 11-12 meeting in Juba.

Official results of Southern Sudan’s January independence referendum showed that 98.83 per cent of the South voted for secession from the Khartoum government. The vote means that Africa’s newest nation will receive its formal independence on July 9, 2011. However, key issues remain unresolved, and must be negotiated between the north’s National Congress Party (NCP) and the south’s Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM).

In their first meeting since the independence vote, the Sudanese Bishops outlined the challenges facing the two nations and their church. South Sudan risked becoming a “failed state,” the bishops said, unless reforms promoting free markets and open government were implemented, and the border disputes with the north were settled.

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The UK government’s aid arm the Department for International Development (DFID), in its report “Changing Lives, Delivering Results” has proposed cutbacks in funding for some multilateral agencies, and also cuts in spending to some developing countries. Director of the Anglican Communion’s Anglican Alliance for Development, Relief and Advocacy Sally Keeble has today asked for a meeting with DFID officials to go through details of the proposed cuts which would have a serious impact on people in some very poor countries.

In a letter to Secretary of State for International Development, Andrew Mitchell, she writes: “In particular the decision not to fund work in Burundi, Lesotho, Niger, Cameroon, Angola and the Gambia puts pressure on some of the poorest countries, which have very particular challenges in terms of size, geography and in some instances conflict. Lesotho, for example, has suffered major loss of its adult population through HIV and Aids and its geography makes economic diversification problematic.

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Leaders from the Church of England have gathered in Sheffield to meet over 150 young people.

The Bishop of Sheffield, Right Reverend Dr Steven Croft attended the event at St Thomas’ Church in Hillsborough alongside Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams and the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu.

The event, called ‘Regeneration’ was a summit led by young people aged between 15 and 21-years-old, giving them an opportunity to talk about how young people feature in the churches agenda.

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More than 100 young people are preparing to meet with Church of England bishops at a national summit in Sheffield where the future of the church will be discussed.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, will be attending the Regeneration Youth Summit on March 3rd along with more than 25 bishops and 30 youth leaders.

Regeneration is being led by young people, aged between 15 and 21 years old, and offers them a unique opportunity to meet with bishops on their terms. Throughout the day they will seek to make the future generation a priority for the Church of England and discuss in small groups how the church can better equip, resource and reach young people in the UK.

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In 2007 software was released which could intercept bits of data used by websites to identify a user from anyone on the same public Wi-Fi network. Session tokens, as these bits are called, are generated after a login, in which a secure connection is used just long enough to allow the entry of a username and password before the web browser is redirected back to an unsecured version of the website. By grabbing hold of these, impostors were able to “sidejack” a Gmail account or other services that his victim had accessed. With access to email, an attacker could visit popular sites, reset a user’s password and use email to retrieve login information. Following a flurry of sidejacking activity Google began the process, which ended up taking several years, of tweaking most of its services to provide SSL/TLS as an option (though not a requirement).

A smattering of technical know-how was needed to sidejack””and the sidejacker had to be in close proximity of a sufficient number of users to make it worthwhile. Two developments have changed that equation. First, the release of a proof-of-concept plug-in for the Firefox browser, called Firesheep, made worldwide headlines last October. With a couple of clicks, even the most unsophisticated user could take over the identity of anybody else on the same network that happened to be browsing any of a few dozen popular websites. (Mr [Charles] Schumer fingered Firesheep in his public appearance.) Second, the growth of smartphones and tablets with Wi-Fi connectivity””along with the spread of free networks in America””dramatically increased the number of proximate targets. A few years ago a sidejacker (or “sniffer”) might have had access to a handful of laptops from which to siphon data; now hundreds of smartphones and slates can be logged on to such networks at any given time.

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Notice how the conclusion does not even begin to follow from the premise. Because the Constitution does not circumscribe the authority of the Presiding Bishop does not mean either (a) the authority must be unlimited; or (b) that General Convention has the power to define the authority of that office — or to add to, or detract from, its authority on its own. And since duty flows from (and is defined by) authority, having the power to prescribe duties appropriate to the authority that has been given is not the same as having the power to create new authority by creating new “duties.”

Can anyone today seriously argue that the office of the Presiding Bishop of ECUSA is without any limits on its authority? The Title IV Task Force II seems to think so — and they defend their extension, sub rosa, of metropolitical authority to that office on the ostensible ground that such authority is “nothing new,” because General Convention “has never considered that office to be limited as the Runyan & McCall paper states.”

Only persons who were determined to ignore the evolutionary history of the office of Presiding Bishop could make such an outlandish statement….

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Out of a possible 100% what percentage do you think it is?

You have to guess before you look.

O God of love, who dost give to each of us our appointed work: Help us steadfastly, and as in thy sight, to fulfill the duties of our calling; so that when our Lord shall take account of us, we may be found his good and faithful servants and enter into his eternal joy; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Westminster Prayers

And Moses summoned all Israel, and said to them, “Hear, O Israel, the statutes and the ordinances which I speak in your hearing this day, and you shall learn them and be careful to do them. The LORD our God made a covenant with us in Horeb. Not with our fathers did the LORD make this covenant, but with us, who are all of us here alive this day.

–Deuteronomy 5:1-3

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has said he will investigate Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, his sons and senior aides for crimes against humanity.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo said no-one had the right to massacre civilians.

Thousands of people are thought to have died after security forces targeted protesters in unrest which began in mid-February.

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Check their website here; I will post more on this tomorrow.

I am undone by it all–ugh; KSH.

Each Province IX diocese ”“ Honduras, the host diocese, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Ecuador Litoral, Central Ecuador and Colombia ”“ is represented by a five-member team, including bishops, clergy and lay leaders. In addition, Cuba, Brazil, Panama, Mexico, Guatemala, Swaziland and Zambia, as well as the Philippines, are represented.

Observers include staff from the Episcopal Church Center, Church Pension Group, Episcopal Relief & Development, Trinity Wall Street and the Episcopal Church Foundation. The conference is supported by Church Pension Group, Trinity Wall Street, Province IX and an Episcopal Church Constable Grant, which also will fund ongoing developmental work throughout the province over the next two years.

With the exception of Puerto Rico, all the dioceses of Province IX, plus Mexico, Cuba, and the other Central American churches, which are organized as the Iglesia Anglicana de la Region Central de America (IARCA), receive subsidies in varying amounts from the U.S.-based Episcopal Church. Offshore dioceses in Provinces II and VIII also receive grants.

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“I always thought, ‘The Roman Catholic Church – that is the Church.’ So when this opportunity arose, after a couple of weeks of thinking very deeply about it, I thought, ‘Yes, yes, I’ll go home.'”

So says Ann Vaughan, one of a group of 40 from the parish of St John the Baptist in Sevenoaks, Kent, who are leaving the Church of England to join the Roman Catholic Ordinariate for ex-Anglicans.

The group, headed by their vicar, Father Ivan Aquilina, plan to celebrate the Eucharist in the Anglican Church for the last time on Sunday.

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The United States could, as my colleague Elliott Abrams points out, arm the rebels. But that policy has its own drawbacks. It may merely increase the carnage, rather than give the rebels the upper hand. Sophisticated weapons require training to use, but we aren’t going to send in trainers.

Equally troubling is the fact that the weapons we want Libyans to use against Qaddafi could wind up in the wrong hands and used against us. There’s a real risk that what succeeds Qaddafi’s regime is not a stable, broad-based government but something that looks more like Somalia.

Asking others to arm the rebels doesn’t solve the problem. Would the Saudis, for instance, be as careful to make sure that weapons don’t fall into the hands of Islamic extremists who are as mad with the West as they are with Qaddafi?

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The greenback…is not just America’s currency. It’s the world’s.

But as astonishing as that is, what may be even more astonishing is this: The dollar’s reign is coming to an end.

I believe that over the next 10 years, we’re going to see a profound shift toward a world in which several currencies compete for dominance.

The impact of such a shift will be equally profound, with implications for, among other things, the stability of exchange rates, the stability of financial markets, the ease with which the U.S. will be able to finance budget and current-account deficits, and whether the Fed can follow a policy of benign neglect toward the dollar.

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