Follow-up to this post
An Islamic State man detonated bombs on his own body, killing at least 25 others in the congregation at a Christian church last Sunday and wounding another 63 (video from New York Post). It's a Syrian church in the city of Damascus.
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The bishop of the Syriac Othodox Church says: “There is a lot of fear. The fear is not from this incident. It is from what is coming next."
from Washington Post
Polling in America has told us for decades that the number of people claiming no religious affiliation (the "nones") is rising. But that's leveled off. Bible sales are increasing and Christian entertainment has grown.
Generation Z (born 1997-2012) is a significant part of this trend. They generally seem to be curious about Christianity and are looking for hope.
It's especially interesting that young men lead the trend. Gen Z men go to church more than Gen Z women.
Similarly, the Bible Society in partnership with a research team in Britain says:
"We found that the Church is in a period of rapid growth, driven by
young adults and in particular young men . . . [Y]oung adults are more spiritually engaged than any
other living generation, with Bible reading and belief in God on the
rise."
from USA Today
Picture the nation of India as you imagine it to be with its Hindu temples and masses of people. Now add to that picture some Christian megachurches.
Satish Kumar grew up as a "rowdy lad" in a poor Hindu family. When he heard from a street evangelist that Jesus Christ could change his life, he embraced the message. Beginning as a manual laborer for conferences, he started a youth fellowship group. That was followed by a new church of 25 members in 2005.
In ten years that church had grown to 130,000 members. Today Pastor Kumar's congregation numbers over 300,000, a church size unknown in the U.S. and hard to imagine.
(cont'd from yesterday's post)
For reasons related to their faith, 4,998 Christians across the world were actually murdered. An amazing 83% of those were located in Nigeria, "the deadliest place to follow Jesus." (Deadly danger is nothing new in Nigeria, as I've written about for years.)
Attacks on churches and Christian-run schools, hospitals, cemeteries "exploded" to 14,766 in 2023, six times the number in the previous year. That number includes the closing of churches in China (church bombed in 2019) and mob violence in India. The global number of believers forced to flee their homes because of war or extremism doubled last year to 295,120.
Though not in the first ten of the World Watch List, the African country Congo (DRC) was the site just days ago of terrible violence on July 24. More than 57 Christian villagers were beheaded by Islamic State Central Africa Province.
Open Doors was founded to pay attention to these things around the world; to help them, and to inform the West where we know next to nothing of the price some Christians pay to follow Jesus.
(cont'd tomorrow)
(cont'd from yesterday's post)
Why does the man have these nightmares? Because he and his family and his church actually stood by and watched a few feet away as Jews were hauled to concentration camps. His childhood conscience was shocked, and it burned into his adult conscience.
A pastor of that time, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, didn't take the view of this boy's pastor. He claimed that the Christian church has a responsibility to fight evil:
(cont'd from yesterday's post)
The man's dream is a memory from his childhood in Germany as a boy.
Week after week, he and his family gathered with their friends in the 1940's on Sunday mornings in their little church. A train always passed behind them during the service. Fellow Germans--neighbors with homes and families--were being hauled in cattle cars.
Inside the church, the pastor's sermon one morning urged Christians to submit meekly to evil, as he said Christ would do. Outside the church that day, a whistle signaled that the train was stopping right next to them.
At that point, the man's dream becomes nightmarish. Everyone in the church service hears the people in the cattle cars screaming as they pound on their locked doors. The pastor raises his voice over the screams, shouting to his congregation to love their enemies. He nods to the organist and starts them singing a hymn. Loudly.
The congregation is alarmed and disturbed by the screams. But they comply and sing their hymn. The boy walks out by himself and sees the doomed prisoners.
from Sing a Little Louder
(cont'd tomorrow)
Recurring nightmares disturb this man. He wakes up in a panic.
The video below is based on a true story that took place in the middle of the last century. The nightmares come from one of his childhood memories of church services.
It may bear some relevance to church goers today. Take 11 minutes to watch it, time well-spent.
Teenagers, the younger half of Generation Z, should be energetically learning and looking forward to thrilling years ahead. Many are, but way too many are depressed instead. They should be inspired and excited about their future. Why is depression unusually common?
Youth Risk Behavior Survey (from Center for Disease Control) reported a couple of years ago that 57% of girls have "persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness" while the same was true of 29% of boys. Both statistics are significantly higher when compared to 2011.
Americans try to protect our young people from drugs (yesterday's post) and social media. But church activity could improve mental health: "Gallup’s research confirms the “correlation between [an] individuals’ personal religiosity and various measures of wellbeing, happiness and mental (and, in some instances, physical) health.”
Power holders in our culture are not inclined to promote that.
from Daily Signal
This woman is not Christian, and her Unitarian Universalist Church is not Christian. But she and I and you believe in some of the same things: free speech and reason, historic American values. She was loyal to her organization because she thought it was built on them.
So she gave her life to pursuing those values (without God or the Bible) in the service of her "church." But they threw her out because she tried to defend them. She is disillusioned and her heart is broken.
What happened? They abandoned everything that held them together for decades. They were engulfed and overwhelmed with the wave of wokeness that is taking America.
It's not only Christians who grieve over the growing darkness. If you have time, I recommend reading her story. It's a short read.
from FAIR
(cont'd from yesterday's post)
"Christian America is disappearing."
As this author says, "Only 4% of American adults follow a consistent biblical worldview." His message to American Christians is: Wake up! (For another author saying "wake up," see Letter to the American Church by Eric Metaxas.)
Along with falling church membership, the nature of America is corroding. The rich legacy of freedom and goodness that we've had since the founding is being squandered. It's never more than one generation away from extinction unless we genuinely pass it on to our kids and grandkids.
Memes are a visual way to look into popular opposition to Christianity. Are your kids/grandkids seeing these messages? Without a doubt. They are barraged with mocking atheism. Will they leave faith behind? They might - unless they also see answers to these memes, these mocking arguments.
You can help them get the answers they need, because they're online just like the memes are. Go to this article and start learning the answers for yourself, then share them.
from The Stream
(cont'd from yesterday's post)
Church attendance being good for you has been known for decades. I wonder why it's not commonly known and why fewer people go to church. In America, "church membership as a percentage of the population is now at a record low—down more than 20 points in the twenty-first century." That's bad news for America.
Actually, I think that both you and I could think of reasons why church is not so popular anymore. Christians sometimes behave badly (that's true), clergy are vilified in movies, and the "new atheists" tell us that God doesn't exist and claim that science says so.
Another possibility is the trend of our churches to bow to popular culture rather than lifting up a strong Biblical message. "If Christianity is merely a kind of hobby or weekly pep talk designed to enhance psychological wellbeing or career success, then we can find better stuff on YouTube or Spotify."
"For 2,000 years, the knowledge and fear of a transcendent God, not helpful social programs, built and filled churches." We, America's church members, need to bow to God's program, not to our culture's program.
from Breakpoint
Here's an excellent question:
If there were a drug that could improve Americans' mental and physical health at no personal cost, what value would our society put on it? What if it could also reduce mortality by 20-30% over a 15-year-period?
That remedy would be fast-tracked to the public. It would be in media headlines and be taught to school children. (That is, if our culture were rational and focused on the common good.)
Great news, it's already available to the public! It's regular church attendance. Surprised? Someone might suspect this news is simply religious propaganda from a dubious source.
from USA Today
(cont'd tomorrow)
Now for a very different sort of post.
Caleb's life was not a common one. His parents divorced when he was young, both of them entering same-sex relationships, so he was brought up by two lesbian moms and a gay dad. His mom brought him to gay events, parades and clubs.
When he saw some people being mean to them, he asked his mother why they acted like that. She told him that they were Christians and Christians hate gay people. So he decided he would never be a Christian because if they were this bad, how much worse must Jesus be!
As a teenager, Caleb attended a Bible study (to disprove it). At the age of 16 he came out to his parents as Christian - and at first they threw him out of the house. Today he's a pastor. His parents became believers in their old age.
An amazing story. He's uniquely qualified to speak to believers (like me, and every genuine believer) about how to love our LGBTQ friends and family. We in the church must address - not ignore - this issue: how to love them while at the same time holding to Bible truth.
It used to be that a majority of Americans were church goers. Not so today. In my neighborhood, and probably yours, church goers are in the minority.
Sometimes you hear the complaint that church people are hypocrites. But that's never made sense to me. Rich Mullens put it this way:
"I never understood why going to church made you a hypocrite, because nobody goes to church because they're perfect. If you've got it all together, you don't need to go. You can go jogging with all the perfect people on Sunday morning.
"Every time you go to church, you're confessing to yourself, to your family, to the people you pass on their way there, to the people who will greet you there, that you don't have it all together. And that you need their support. You need their direction. You need some accountability, you need some help."
As a church goer, I'm saying that I need God in my life and that I need my church family. Church is for us who know that we're far from perfect.
(cont'd from yesterday's post)
Good news - children seem to be "hardwired" to believe in God. So the advice of yesterday's therapist to bring them up with that faith is well-founded and natural.
"Are children predisposed to belief in a transcendental being?" A developmental psychologist at Oxford University has been researching that question for years. Now her research and her conclusions are published.
It will be a surprise to many, perhaps, but her research indicates that it's likely that children (of whatever ethnicity) are "hardwired" to believe in God.
Both children and adults can be talked out of it. Famous atheist Richard Dawkins tries his best to do that, as do others.
We human beings look for the meaning of things; we want to understand and know the truth. The search for meaning is a feature built into our very nature by our Creator.
But yes, it's possible as a human being to deny meaning and transcendence, to insist that there's nothing beyond the material. That's what atheism teaches.
Re-post from six years ago:
Atheists have a new billboard campaign for the season. Their theme is "Make Christmas great again. Skip church!"
So I wonder how this works. Was Christmas great in the past when God was no part of it? If we all skip church, will Christmas be great again? But there's never been a time when the season was empty of God. Since the beginning, its central core has been the birth of Jesus Christ on earth.
There are lots of cynics who don't have a merry celebration. The good will and beauty of Christmas are just cloying if there's no meaning in it.
Some of you went to "catechism" class at your church as a child where you and your friends had lessons about Christianity. Those two hours per week instructed you to think in a Christian way about life, God, and values.
Then you graduated and catechism stopped. No more instruction in how or what to think. You might still learn a bit about the Christian worldview now from church sermons. Or not.
You may or may not hear Christian teaching today, but there's no doubt that you get instructed in secular culture. Catechism of the secular variety is almost in the air we breathe. Do you watch streaming shows? Read your Google feed headlines? Social platforms? You're learning intolerance of any sexual restraint, and that religion in general is nonsense, just to mention a couple of lessons.
Every single day media brings you lessons in how to think like the cultural elite. In the absence of biblical teaching, Christians will learn “not from churches, but from the media they consume, or rather the media that consumes them.”
(cont'd tomorrow)
