“Navigating church with a challenging child isn’t easy, and I understand why many families who desire to be part of a community of faith decide they can no longer deal with the raised eyebrows, the cramped physical space or the implicit comparisons with all the seemingly normal children.”
Stories of churches being church in their communities and around the world:
Changing Attitude, UK, hosted a book launch party for the Rev. James Alison, the brilliant gay Catholic theologian recently. Colin Coward reports on the evening.
I looked at the crowd of mingling people, and the loud music triggered my thoughts. It never occurred to me that people would not know that churches care for the sick. What had church become in the minds of most people?
Churchill called Halifax the Holy Fox and sent him off as British Ambassador to Washington in 1941. Halifax visited Tuskegee Institute in 1943 and afterwards wrote of its students, They are asking for bread and getting a stone. He saw segregation as a great human problem building up, not being tackled by very wide-seeing people, and a good many things that are being followed are pretty hollow.
If there be one point of ecclesiastical order which would at first might seem, more than any other, to be commanded by Holy Scripture, fashioned by primitive usage, and required by common sense, it is surely this,—that the public offices of the Church should be offered in the vernacular language of the people. To employ, in addressing God, a tongue which his worshippers cannot comprehend; to wrap up lessons, epistles, and gospels in the obscurity of a dead language,—can this be a reasonable service?