Faced with substantial declines in fourth-quarter giving by parishioners, many churches and faith-based organizations have been forced to curb their spending and outreach programs.
Things will change, but it’s not clear how. Will the faith communities ultimately become totally separate? Will another leader appear? Will the mission groups remain faith-driven, or will secular nonprofit people eventually take them over? We always say things shouldn’t be maintained just for the sake of history, but this is our biggest transition yet.
Because of the continuing siege in Gaza and its devastating toll, EPPN is doing a second alert regarding the Middle East. EPPN is asking that you send the Presiding Bishop’s statement of January 5th to your Member of Congress. The 111th Congress has just been seated and it is important that they hear from you now on the situation in the Holy Land.
Michael Jensen of Sydney, Australia, keeps the “The Blogging Parson” wherein he frequently discusses the art and craft of preaching. In this post, he names ten things preachers often inflict on hearers.
…the American Folklife Center will be collecting audio and video recordings of sermons and orations that comment on the significance of the inauguration of 2009. It is expected that such sermons and orations will be delivered at churches, synagogues, mosques and other places of worship, as well as before humanist congregations and other secular gatherings.
Reactions to the California Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling on property in the Diocese of Los Angeles in favor of The Episcopal Church continue, including a
The Rev. Bill Rankin, former Dean of Episcopal Divinity School, co-founded the Global AIDS Interfaith Alliance in 2000 together with Dr. Charles Wilson. The alliance delivers human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention and care to people in impoverished rural areas of Africa, principally in the central African nation of Malawi
In our post-modern American Christmases constructed out of fake glitz and glutinous emotional schlock, I find the vision of God moving in fresh and unexpected ways to be almost totally obscured. In Holy Baptism, we received the name of a peasant who died as a criminal. Yet we, like most who preceded us, insistently demand an exclusionary Messiah who will protect our political system from terrorists, and rapidly restore economic prosperity.
The troubled Central African diocese is still without a bishop even though the bishops that originally blocked the election of the Rev. Nicholas Henderson in November, 2005, have either died, retired or have been ex-communicated.
The first king was very young,
O balow, balow la lay,
With doleful ballads on his tongue,
O balow, balow la lay,