In rural areas focused denominational interests are becoming more and more a hindrance to the furtherance of the Kingdom.
This author believes that out of the culture of the post-industrial era a new rural and Christian community could arise, from which a new authentic rural culture could be regenerated. This then is the call - to return to a model of apostolic times when the church formed strong local entities that nurtured the people to reach out to a hostile environment. The challenge is to find an appropriate way of communicating "the Gospel" to this new culture - even as it forms. And so the future mission of the rural church is "stretched between a great vision of the past and a new vision not yet fully formed." Midwives are needed to help a new church emerge.
Ray Simpson wrote that "the ground is so hard, and the people so pagan, that perhaps nothing less than a community of love in action will suffice to transplant the Body - the Life - of Christ."
Loren Mead opines that there is "a call to something genuinely new ... our task is no less than the reinvention of the church."
If by church we mean a community of believers, there is every reason to expect that the rural churches will be with us for a very long time. If, on the other hand we view churches as institutions within the local community, the question of their survival in the rural communities is less certain ...
Rural communities tend to be small and built on cooperation. According to Shannon Jung, "given the pressures on small communities from the outside world, congregations that squander precious resources on simply keeping a building open, instead of pooling resources, are sinful." The reality might well be that rural poverty will eventually force churches to work together to survive. It is now recognized that the days are gone where everyone was assumed to be a Christian and church member. Yet this assumption lives on in the "status quo," making new initiatives very difficult, if not seemingly impossible.
...one can begin to suggest areas where the theological message of Hosea relates to theological issues the church has struggled with in every era of its existence. If one views Baalism as a cultural expression of a Canaanite religious worldview, the true comparison for modern application is not limited to situations where pagans are worshiping idols in India or involved in some perverted sexual cult in some faraway country. The Canaanite culture needs to be copmared to the British culture, the Hutu culture, the American culture, or the Brazilian culture.
Each of these countries has a popular "religious" philosophy of life that explains how the world works. Each culture includes ethical standards for appropriate conduct, ecomonic ways of gaining prosperity (fertility in ancient Near Eastern terminology), and an explanation of how people are related to the divine powers. The questions that the church in every culture must ask are similar to the questions Hosea raises. Are the people who claim to be believers actually the people of God, or have they so accepted the popular religious culture of their day that they, like Israel, are "not my people"? Has the syncretism of the church with modern religious culture so infiltrated the fiber of the fellowship that people can no longer see a distinction between the two? Has the church lost its identity by compromising its beliefs and accepting the moral standards of the society that the church was supposed to transform?
Honesty begins at home, so I should acknowledge that I had two abortions during my all-too-fertile years. You can call me a bad woman, but not a bad mother. I was a dollar-a-word freelancer and my husband a warehouse worker, so it was all we could do to support the existing children at a grubby lower-middle-class level. And when it comes to my children - the actual extrauterine ones, that is - I was, and remain, a lioness.
Duke University will give each of its 1,650 incoming freshmen a free iPod this fall as part of an initiative to foster innovative uses of technology in the classroom
Think how many in the church would respond today if someone in our midst believed that God had called them to marry a morally questionable young woman let alone a prostitute. Wouldn't we doubt God had spoken to them? Wouldn't we challenge this notion? In fact, it appears that in regards to Hosea and I would argue many other prominent people in Scripture, that God violates the first spiritual law:
God LOVES you and offers a wonderful PLAN for your life.
I doubt Dr. Bill Bright had marrying a prostitute in mind as part of God's wonderful plan for anyone's life. Yet that is exactly the plan God had for Hosea's life. This is just one of the problems with reductionist thinking. We want to boil down the gospel in four spiritual laws, pithy statements that summarize our core beliefs concerning God and our relationship to him. Yet Hosea's understanding of God and his relationship to God was a tad bit more complex then a set of spiritual laws.
Hosea may have given rise to the entire reality TV genre. The original show was, "Who Wants to Marry a Prostitute?"
Could it be that the church is as it is in so many places not because of a lack of effort or a lack of sincerity or a lack of spirituality (or even a lack of money, commitment, or prayer), but rather because our sincere efforts, passionate prayers, and material resources are all aimed in the wrong direction—the direction of self-preservation, self-aggrandizement, self-improvement?
How ironic if the church were to find life by losing it, by giving it away.
Rural dwellers are now prepared to go to the larger centres to obtain the services desired and in the process bypass the local centres, eventually leading to the demise of the latter. Thus while these local centres have suffered the major centres have expanded.
when the State sanctions homosexual relationships and gives them its blessing, the younger generation becomes confused about sexual identity and quickly loses its understanding of lifelong commitments, emotional bonding, sexual purity, the role of children in a family, and from a spiritual perspective, the "sanctity" of marriage. Marriage is reduced to something of a partnership that provides attractive benefits and sexual convenience, but cannot offer the intimacy described in Genesis. Cohabitation and short-term relationships are the inevitable result. Ask the Norwegians, the Swedes, and the people from the Netherlands. That is exactly what is happening there.
With marriage as we know it gone, everyone would enjoy all the legal benefits of marriage (custody rights, tax-free inheritance, joint ownership of property, health care and spousal citizenship, and much more) without limiting the number of partners or their gender.
This group of scholars tends to be members of the Fraternidad Teologica Latinoamericana (FTL), an association of a broadly evangelical persuasion that was founded in 1970 with the express purpose of reflecting upon the Bible in light of the needs of the continent. On the one hand, they were frustrated by the failure of more traditional evangelical circles to respond adequately to those realities; at the same time, their interaction with liberationist scholarship stimulated them to look at the biblical text through a more contextualized lens.
Sometimes formal academic training dichotomizes exegesis and contextualization; some believe that such a combination diminishes their academic standing, especially in the academic guild beyond the continent; [4] and, to be honest, others are themselves detached from the warp and woof of their context and thus to incorporate those concerns is not a natural move.
[4] In my own experience I have sometimes found that First World scholars have not taken work from the Two-Thirds, or Majority, World seriously. In various ways they have communicated that, whereas those approaches might be "interesting," "real academic study" is done in North America and Europe according to more traditional methods. I have had students from the Two-Thirds World, who are studying in the West, confide in me how they have been discouraged from relating their research to their home context and have been told to "just deal with the text."
Roman Catholic officials need to look to the laity for many parts of the church's mission that historically have been dominated by priests and nuns
Bishop William B. Friend of the Diocese of Shreveport, La., said there used to be large numbers of people taking holy orders, enough that Catholic schools and hospitals once were heavily staffed with nuns working as teachers and nurses.
"Now their numbers have diminished. But the good news is there are large numbers of young lay people" who are interested in helping the church, Friend said.
A Midland vicar apologised to a Church of England court yesterday - for laying a new carpet.
The Rev Nigel di Castiglione, Rector of St Mary's and All Saints' Church in Trentham, Staffordshire, covered some rare tiles with the carpet, took out some pews and moved the font to tidy the place up.
But he carried out the work without the permission of his diocese.
'Don't let worries kill you; let the church help.'
'The best vitamin for a Christian is B-1.' 'God answers knee-mail.' 'Free Trip to heaven ... details Inside!' 'Running low on faith? Stop in for a fill-up.' Motorists glance at them for just a moment, but ministers see church marquee messages as a great chance to attract people with a groaner of a pun or a thought-provoking phrase. Coming up with pithy messages has even sparked a cottage industry of sorts, inspiring a half-dozen books and e-mail traffic.
The churches are a reflection of the truth of Plato’s statement, "What’s honored in the country will be cultivated there." When we got started as a country, we had no more than 3 million people--less than Los Angeles County today. Yet we turned out Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton--you can name a list as long as your arm. How many people on the public stage can you name today who are of the caliber of those first men? And why aren’t there more? Because what’s honored in the country will be cultivated there.
Or how come those itty, bitty Italian city-states turned out one fantastic painter and sculptor after another? Because every kid couldn’t wait to get his mitt on a paint brush. What’s honored in the country will be cultivated there. We have fantastic athletes. I watched the Spurs and Lakers yesterday. Those guys play basketball like nobody’s business. Yet we have mediocre politicians, and the clergy is pretty mediocre also. But what’s honored in a country will be cultivated there. The greatest recession in this country is not economic; it’s spiritual. And so the great biblical mandates of pursuing justice and seeking peace are shortchanged.
In the postmodern worship experience, emphasis is often placed on the feel of worship, incorporating the five senses into a service.
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In other words, is the emerging church movement a vital example of contextualizing the gospel, or is it a syncretism
The two men will be formally anointed later this month at the Democratic convention in Boston
1. To apply oil, ointment, or a similar substance to.
2. To put oil on during a religious ceremony as a sign of sanctification or consecration.
3. To choose by or as if by divine intervention.
