Catholic AnalysisCatholic Analysis: Full Text of New Document on Priesthood

The Catholic Church is getting a lot of press on the newly released Document on Priesthood. Here is an excerpt containing the most controversial portion:

(20) The spiritual director has the obligation to evaluate all the qualities of the candidate's personality and to make sure that he does not present disturbances of a sexual nature, which are incompatible with the priesthood. If a candidate practices homosexuality or presents deep-seated homosexual tendencies, his spiritual director, as well as his confessor, have the duty to dissuade him in conscience from proceeding toward ordination. It goes without saying that the candidate himself has the primary responsibility for his own formation.(21) He must offer himself trustingly to the discernment of the Church, of the bishop who calls him to orders, of the rector of the seminary, of his spiritual director and of the other seminary educators to whom the bishop or major superior has entrusted the task of forming future priests. It would be gravely dishonest for a candidate to hide his own homosexuality in order to proceed, despite everything, toward ordination. Such a deceitful attitude does not correspond to the spirit of truth, loyalty and openness that must characterize the personality of him who believes he is called to serve Christ and his Church in the ministerial priesthood.

So here's an interesting question. If, for the purposes of this discussion, some people are predisposed genetically to homosexuality, but they vow to be celibate as a priest, and indeed they truly remain celibate, then should they be banned from ordination and serving as a priest? Is this fundamentally different from a celibate heterosexual being ordained and serving as a priest?

Another intriguing way of wording this question is this: If some people are genetically predisposed to homosexuality, then would God call these people to serve as celibate priests?

What do you think? I can see arguments for both sides.

Filed in: catholicism, ordination, ministry, church, theology

C.S. Lewis and the consolation of religion

From the Writer's Almanac for November 29, 2005:

It's the birthday of C. S. (Clive Staples) Lewis, born in Belfast, Ireland, (1898), the author of the children's series about the land of Narnia. He also wrote The Screwtape Letters (1941), in which he wrote, "The safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts." He was a confident Oxford philosopher, not at all prepared to find himself a Christian convert. To his friend Owen Barfield he wrote: "Terrible things have happened to me. The 'Spirit' or 'Real I' is showing an alarming tendency to becoming much more personal and is taking the offensive, and behaving just like God. You'd better come on Monday at the latest or I may have entered a monastery." He said, "Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand."

This is rather timely as the release of Narnia is a little over a week away. I love Lewis' quote on "the consolations of religion."

In our town, we buried 70 people this year. That may not sound like a lot until you know that our town has a population of only 2200! We lost 3% of the town's population by death this year!

And talking about the consolations of religion does very little for deeply grieving people. In fact, I've seen it do much more harm than good. Sometimes words seem so shallow when the pain is so deep!

As a pastor, I find that I often need to give people permission to be angry, to question, to allow themselves to hurt. Sometimes I have to help kick start the grieving process and give them permission to keep it going as long as they need. Many of my pastoral visits following the funeral are sitting with someone, holding their hand, allowing them to weep, and weeping with them. I believe one of the greatest "consolations of religion" as Lewis puts it, is presence. "The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood" (John 1:14, The Message).

More and more, I am convinced that in our ruggedly individualistic, independent, disconnected and fractured society, becoming flesh and blood, and moving into the neighborhood is one of the greatest challenges and opportunities for the Church today.

So how do we move into the neighborhood? And if we do it well, what price is there to pay? What will we sacrifice to make it happen?
Filed in: quotes, C.S. Lewis, ministry

Messy Scriptures - The Story of the Sacred Scroll

Here’s a quote from Dr. Jim Dixon, senior pastor of Cherry Hills Community Church in a message he delivered entitled “The Story of the Sacred Scroll.” This quote comes in the context of discussing biblical infallibility and inerrancy:

But you see, there is a problem with these words. A problem with the word infallible, a problem with the word inerrant. And the problem is these words are not found in the Bible. The Bible doesn’t use these words to describe itself. Now the concepts behind these words may be found in the Bible, depending on how you define those concepts, but you see the Bible doesn’t include those words.

And there’s a deeper problem. The deeper problem is that the words inerrancy and infallibility, they tend to kind of give you a static view of the Bible. And the Bible proclaims of itself it is not static it is dynamic, it is active, it is alive. I mean this is not some kind of a carcass you can perform an autopsy on. The Bible is living and active.

Of course the word the Bible uses to define itself with regard to its authority is inspiration. All Scripture is inspired of God. But the Greek word, the Greek word is theopneustos which literally means God-breathed. That’s what the Bible says of itself, all Scripture is God-breathed. The breath of God is on this book.

His discussion of these doctrines really resonates with me!

So what do you think? Do you agree that there is a problem with these words, with these concepts? Do these concepts cause us to see the Bible as static rather than dynamic?
Filed in: quotes, theology, scripture, bible

The Underrated Spiritual Secret

Before we eat turkey and watch the Broncos beat the Cowboys, take some time to read this great article on the spiritual discipline of being grateful. Here's a quote to whet your appetite:

Developing the meditative habit of constantly whispering thanks to him—no matter the situation—is, in fact, a mustard seed of life-changing power. Radical, for it goes to the root of who we are. Small, seemingly insignificant, yet it has the power to change our lives and blow our socks off, right in the midst of the everyday. When we really give God thanks in everything, we are acknowledging that he is sovereign and that we trust him. And we find that it changes us.

Go Broncos!
Filed in: spiritual discipline, holiday

Theological distinctives poll

Since we are having such a great discussion concerning theological distinctives (and tomorrow's Thanksgiving and I may not be able to update the blog for a few days!) I thought we'd try a little poll.

Theological distinctives
As to theological distinctives, I fall most in this stream...
	Traditional Roman Catholic
	Lutheran
	Anabaptist
	Reformed
	Arminian
	Wesleyan
	Pentecostal
	Neo-orthodox
	Liberal
	This Poll by hawkenstein
Click here to view results

Filed in: quiz, theology

Redeeming Harry Potter

Harry Potter. For some in the Christian community them's fightin' words! Here's an interesting article and a quote to grab your attention:

I was recently interviewed on live radio about current movies, and when asked which I was looking forward to the most, I rattled off a few of my obvious choices—including Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which opens this week.

"Uh oh," said the host half-jokingly, "you've just lost half our audience." I was then asked to justify how a Christian could possibly accept and endorse a series of books and films that promotes the occult. Looking back on my fumbled response, I can't help but think of that verse in 1 Peter about being prepared to give an answer to anyone who asks.

Harry Potter remains a hot potato, polarizing Christians left and right because of three words: wizards, witches, and magic. Deuteronomy 18:10-11 warns us to avoid engaging in pagan rituals and sorcery, and for sure, Christianity and witchcraft don't mix.

So what's your opinion of Harry Potter? Can Christians and Harry Potter get along?
Filed in: movies, culture

Megachurch Google sightseeing: Pulpit Rock Church

I grew up at a megachurch in Denver called Cherry Hills Community Church. I also served there as the junior high youth pastor for awhile. Now I serve two small churches that between the two average 150 in attendance. I arrived here three years ago and both churches have experienced growth. But in a town of 2000, we can only expect to grow so much. We actually have nearly 10% of the town's population attending one of our two churches. How many churches can make that claim!

In these small churches I am often amazed at the scarcity mentality. Much of the time, the leadership is just trying to survive. It's frustrating because it can keep us from risking, moving out in faith.

But a scarcity mentality also characterizes many large and megachurches. It seems to me, that it's just human nature. To think about what we don't have or can't do comes easily to us.

Earlier this year, when Google first released Googlemaps, I started posting megachurch Google sightseeing posts just for fun. There's not really a purpose to them. But it does allow me to visit many megachurch websites and get a feel for them. It also shows me just how many resources the kingdom of God has (though this is obviously just the tip of the iceberg!) Here's the vision and mission for Pulpit Rock Church.

Our Vision
To see lives transformed as we influence our world out of our intimacy with God.

At Pulpit Rock Church we want to see lives transformed by the power of God. In order for that to happen we know that our influence on our world must grow out of an intimate relationship with God.

Our Mission
To passionately pursue God, extend the hands and heart of Christ, build biblical community, and establish a legacy of faith.

To the extent we do these things, we are confident the Spirit of God will transform our lives and transform our community for His glory.

I remember spending staff retreats hammering out vision and mission statements. It was a good exercise but it always looked better on paper. On paper we could say we were going to do or be about anything we wanted to. But to actually achieve those things in the vast majority of the thousands that came on any given Sunday? That is quite another thing.

My two little churches don't have a written vision or mission statement. Do you think churches need one? It seems the more statements like these I read, the more they sound the same. What's the value of a vision and mission statement for a church?

Filed in: church, googlemapssightseeing

Expletive Undeleted 2: The F-bomb Fallout

I earlier blogged about part 1 of Expletive Undeleted. Here's part 2. The quote tells you what Mike Sares, the pastor of Scum of the Earth decided to do:

Before Makkai stood up to read, Sares thought it best to issue a disclaimer. “I told the congregation that the next piece was R-rated,” Sares recalls.

Read the rest and tell me what do you think? Did he make the right decision?Filed in: worship, theology, culture

The Problem with Evangelical Theologies

From Christianity Today here, is a fantastic interview with Ben Witherington III. I really need to get his book The Problem with Evangelical Theology. Here's how Dr. Witherington describes the problem:

It (evangelical theology) has exegetical weaknesses that are not recognized or owned up to by the various evangelical Protestant strains of theology. That's what it boils down to...

The issue is not really with Christology, the Trinity, the virginal conception, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, or the Bible as the Word of God. The issues I'm concerned about are the distinctives of Calvinist, Arminian, dispensational, or Pentecostal theology. When they try to go some particular direction that's specific to their theological system, that's precisely the point in their argument at which they are exegetically weakest.

Books like this give someone like me hope. I have long struggled with the theological distinctives in each theological stream. I am from a reformed presbyterian background, but I am not Calvinist enough for most Calvinists. My parents and grandparents grew up in the Assemblies of God and we attended until I was in sixth grade. Yet many of the pentecostal distinctives do not resonate with me. (Though I greatly respect my cousin's beliefs and scholarly insights!)

I have found it difficult to find a theological home in which to minister. Initially this is what attracted me to the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). But they are "so open minded that their brains leaked out" (Steve Taylor, Whatcha Gonna Do When Your Numbers Up).

So are there any good theological homes for a mutt like me?

Witherington argues that postmodernism presents us with a "new opportunity to re-engage the biblical text, which is trying to present word pictures and stories to a world that wants not just answers to its questions, but also its imagination fired up."

These observations are especially poignant:

We have to remember that those who wrote the Bible were not late-Western Christians suffering from post-Enlightenment psychoses. These were people who lived in storied worlds, in an oral culture where storytelling was the essence of the thing. Most people in that culture were not even literate. They didn't live in a world bound by texts.

The Bible was not written in a text-oriented culture but for an oral culture. So these documents were meant to be heard. When you read them out loud in Greek, you notice alliteration and poetry and all kinds of things going on that are totally lost in translation. I think the oral dimension of the biblical world, very much connected to storytelling, is a crucial dimension and is a key to understanding the theology in those texts.

So a question for you all: Is Witherington on to something here? If so, how can we become more faithful to what the Bible teaches? Does postmodernism truly represent a new opportunity to be more faithful to what the Bible teaches as opposed to doctrinal distinctives?
Filed in: theology, hermeneutics

Electrocuted pastor's final prayer: 'Surprise me, God'

It was bound to happen. Christians are seeking to make sense of Rev. Kyle Lake's tragic death a few weeks ago. This article describes the incident and the theological questions surrounding it:

During a service last Sunday morning, Rev. Kyle Lake was standing in waist-high water as he prepared to baptize a woman. When he reached for a corded microphone, the 33-year-old was jolted by electricity, and did not survive. The woman going to be baptized was unharmed.

The incident took place just minutes after the 800 members in attendance had prayed aloud, "Surprise me, God."

When asked if he thought the events were result of asking to be surprised, Esau, who witnessed the electrocution, said, "I wish I could answer that. I honestly, truly don't know. That gets you into all kinds of really, really hard questions. 'Does God cause everything to happen?' or 'Is there tragedy and chaos and stuff in the world because it's the natural consequences of humankind and our freedom of choice?'"

These are indeed very hard questions. Yet some are confident they have the answer and are pronouncing this as God's judgment on the emerging church.

This tragedy forces us to ask why. Why? Why did this happen? Why did it happen this way? Were was God? Why did God allow this to happen?

Clearly there are no easy answers. So what do you think? God's judgment for heresy? Tragic accident? If it was an accident, what about God's sovereignty?
Filed in: theology

Hermeneutics, Anyone? - Christianity Today Magazine

Beyond the Bible sounds like a very interesting book based on this review. Check out this quote:

The book's title, Beyond the Bible, is a recognition that doctrine develops. Even Protestants who are fond of proclaiming the Reformation battle cry "Scripture alone!" cannot pretend that every aspect of the Christian faith is explicitly taught in Scripture. The most obvious examples are the doctrine of the Trinity and the high Christology of Chalcedon. Biblical revelation points us ineluctably toward those truths, but the Bible writers never make them explicit.

Filed in: books, interpretation, hermeneutics

Christian Meditation part 2, quiz

Christian meditation
Do you practice Christian meditation regularly?
	Yes, daily
	Yes, weekly
	Yes, monthly
	No
	No, Christian and meditation are oxymorons
	This Poll by hawkenstein
Click here to view results

Filed in: spiritual discipline, quiz, religion

New Scientist Breaking News - Meditation builds up the brain

This article is fascinating to think about. Here's the opening lines:

Meditating does more than just feel good and calm you down, it makes you perform better – and alters the structure of your brain, researchers have found.

Meditation has come under attack from many in the Christian world and for good reason. Sadly, the new age movement and other non-Christian religions have used meditation for centuries. Yet we read in the Bible, about meditating all over the place, especially in the Psalms.

It looks to me that Christians need to reaquaint themselves with the practice of meditation. So what should a Christian meditate on? What is Christian meditation?

The Psalms give us many ideas:
God's law
God' unfailing love
God's precepts and his ways
God's decrees
God's wonders
God's statutes
God's promises
God's works

Other ideas can be found on the web including this wikipedia article, which describes Christian meditation as

a form of quiet (but not necessarily silent) contemplation often associated with prayer or scripture study. It is rooted in the Bible, which directs its readers to meditate. In Joshua 1:8, God commands his people to meditate on his word day and night to instill obedience. The psalmist says that "his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law he meditates day and night" (Psalm 1:2). The Bible mentions meditate or meditation twenty times.

That's quite a list to get started with! So what's your experience with meditation?
Filed in: spiritual discipline, science, religion

Tagging with BlogThis! - Freshblog

I've been trying to find a way to tag my posts on blogger. I think I've found a way. Basically my tags will be located on a del.icio.us account specifically for my blog. Clicking on the tag will take you to the del.icio.us page and allow you to find items from the same category. These are the instructions via FreshBlog for adding this ability to your blog.

CategoryTagBlogThis!

I have made some very minor changes to the script so that the tags link to my del.icio.us account (and as we know by now, will still be visible in technorati!!) As before, all that you need to do to make this bookmarklet work for you is to right click it on your links bar, select properties, scroll through the script to the very end and replace my del.icio.us signon at the end of the URL http://del.icio.us/***** with your own. Now you can tag & categorise with blogthis!! Tag keywords should be seperated with commas.

Filed in: tagging, blogger

Pat Robertson Warns Pa. Town of Disaster

Pat strikes again!

"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God. You just rejected him from your city," Robertson said on the Christian Broadcasting Network's "700 Club."

Does anyone else cringe whenever you hear this guy open his mouth?
Filed in: quotes, religion

Priest Idol

Just came across this interview. Here's the introduction to orient you to it.

How many American priests end up in their own reality show on British television? James McCaskill did just that when he moved last year from Pittsburgh to the town of Lundwood in England's South Yorkshire district. He was brought in to revitalize a church whose congregation had dropped below ten, and his turnaround efforts were filmed for one year by a camera crew. The results will air—under the name Priest Idol—in a three-part series in November on the UK's Channel 4. Nate Anderson sat down with McCaskill on a recent visit to the U.S. to talk about ministry and media.

I have quite a mixture of feelings regarding this idea. Number 1 is the intrusion of a camera crew into the work of a pastor. How on earth could people open up with the minister and really share their lives with a camera crew present?

And talk about being in a fishbowl:

The worst aspect of it was that I did feel a lot of pressure from the film crew to "film this tomorrow," and I was trying to earn the trust of people in the congregation who didn't want things to happen so fast, and I had the archdeacon tell me, "You need to make this happen and that happen," and all this is being filmed, and they're all watching me, and I'm supposed to perform and produce and succeed—which really overwhelmed me at times. There was a point, after I'd been there about three months, I started having a panic, thinking, "We're not going to have anything to show; we're not going to have anything to make good TV." Which sounds terrible—a minister of the church saying that he's worried about making good TV.

This sounds like such a bizarre experiment! What are your thoughts?
Filed in: religion, tv, culture

Out in the Sticks on SuprGlu

SuprGlu is one of the coolest things I have come across in a while! You can set it up to receive all kinds of RSS feeds in one place. My page shows my RSS feeds from my blog, my playlist, my 43 things, my 43 places, my All Consuming, my del.icio.us links, and my flickr photos.

The style is that of a blog. Check it out and try your own!

Expletive Undeleted: Dropping the F-bomb in Church from the Leadership Blog

Here's a great case study (though I doubt I'd ever be faced with this dilemma in my two churches).

"A few days before Christmas, pastor Mike Sares got a call from his associate. “Mike,” he said, “Mary Kate Makkai has agreed to read one of her poems at the Christmas Eve service. It’s really, really good, but it’s got the F-bomb in it several times, and I just thought I should check with you about that.”"

Check out the entire article here.

Warfare worldview evidence: Copts' Night of Terror

"Copts will long remember Friday, October 21, as a night of terror, flame, and violence in Alexandria. Late that evening, thousands of rioting Muslims targeted three poorly protected Protestant congregations and an Orthodox church in the Muharram Bey section of Alexandria. Muslims were venting their anger over a video of a Christian play, produced at an Orthodox church. Muslims allege the video defamed Islam.

Days after the violence, I visited Christian congregations all over Alexandria and found everyday believers in a state of anxiety and shock over the attacks. Muslim-Christian violence, they told me, was something that happened in poor areas of Cairo or rural Upper Egypt, not Alexandria."

Wired News: Eat, Sleep, Work, Consume, Die

Ted the Gerbil
Originally uploaded by meke.

This is a powerful article that speaks much truth. Consider this great quote:

"My expectations have been raised to this ridiculous level by technology running amok through my heretofore-bucolic existence. I used to be a laid-back guy. Now I'm impatient. I chafe. I get irritable when my gratification isn't instantaneous. And it isn't just me. The whole world is bitchier these days.

I'm old enough to remember when waiting a few days for a letter to arrive was standard operating procedure, even in the bare-knuckles business world. I recall a time without answering machines, when you just had to keep calling back on your rotary phone until someone picked up. (Which had the unintended benefit of allowing you to reconsider whether the original call was even worth making in the first place.) The world moved at a more leisurely pace and, humanistically speaking, we were all the better for it.

Just because technology makes it possible for us to work 10 times faster than we used to doesn't mean we should do it. The body may be able to withstand the strain -- for a while -- but the spirit isn't meant to flail away uselessly on the commercial gerbil wheel."

The author, Tony Long is copy chief of Wired News. Maybe you thought you were reading an excerpt from the Constructive Curmudgeon but alas this is Wired News making this commentary all the more powerful.
For discussion: How do you feel about work, technology, and consumerism? Is your body keeping pace but your soul falling behind?

Good Morning, Evangelicals! - Christianity Today Magazine

The following quote describes an interesting approach to church and church programs. This sounds a lot like Frank Tillapaugh's ideas as communicated in his book Calling.

"Haggard is so enthusiastic about free-market economics that he applies it to church. New Life offers hundreds of small-group activities, everything from 'Growing in God as a Wife and Mother' to 'Holy Hip-Hop Jam Session.' How do the pastors decide what to include? They don't. If someone comes up with an idea, and that person passes a basic screening, the church will help promote the group. New Life organizes the marketplace but leaves the details to the people, who write their own programs."

Sounds like a great idea to me! It would definitely keep churches from uttering those seven last words of a church: "We've never done it that way before!"

Good Morning, Evangelicals! - Christianity Today Magazine

Here's another excerpt from the Christianity Today article on Ted Haggard. At the end of this quote is a great line:

"Prominently displayed are books by culture warriors like Pat Robertson and Phyllis Schlafly, but also books by public-policy experts, historians, and analysts of secular culture like Dinesh D'Souza, Samuel Huntington, Bernard Lewis, Newt Gingrich, Thomas Friedman, and David Gergen. Yet we are in a church bookstore, where nearly all the titles are inspirational. Haggard is telling his congregation, Think big. Think about the whole world. The Bible does not tell you everything you need to know."

What is your experience in this area? Do you agree with this idea?

Good Morning, Evangelicals! - Christianity Today Magazine

Here's an interesting article on Ted Haggard teh president of the National Association of Evangelicals. The following quote includes Haggard's definition of an evangelical:

'When I became president of the NAE [National Association of Evangelicals],' Haggard tells the Inquirer's Nussbaum, 'the talk was about doing away with the term evangelical. Evangelicalism was morphing and changing so much that people were wondering if the term applied. The first decision I made as president was to start using the term prolifically and defining it simply. I define an evangelical as a person who believes Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that the Bible is the Word of God, and that you must be born again.'

So what do you think of his definition? Do you agree or disagree? Are you an evangelical according to this definition?

"All things to all men" or "Be ye separate"? - Christian History

Here's another great article from Chris Armstrong encouraging all of us to read more great church history biographies. I have included a passage from his article that I found particularly interesting. Please read it and let me know what you think. Specifically, do you think his assessment of the Emergents (as he calls them) is correct? Do you believe Emergents agree with both the peculiar people thinking and the intrepid translator thinking? Here's the quote:

"Christian churches, say the Emergents, need to look like Christian churches—down to the crosses, candles, and even (if necessary), the stained glass; and they need to teach like Christian churches—including a hearty dose of good 'vintage' doctrine.

So our Emergent friends would likely agree with both parties in this dispute: the church needs both to find new ways of translating the gospel to directly address the questions of the day (per Niebuhr), and to refuse to buckle to secular culture by knocking the sharp edges off of Jesus' radical kingdom message and pretending that 'we Christians are really just like the rest of you folks!' (per Hauerwas)."

Exploring a Parallel Universe - Christianity Today Magazine

In this article Philip Yancey asks "why does the word 'evangelical' threaten so many people in our culture." His thoughts, especially his closing paragraph should be taken to heart by us all! Here's the opening to get you started:

"For almost ten years, I have participated in a book group comprising people who attended the University of Chicago. Mostly we read current novels, with a preference for those authors (Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, J. M. Coetzee) who have a connection with the school. The group includes a Marxist-leaning professor of philosophy, a childhood-development specialist, a pharmaceutical researcher, a neurologist, and an attorney.

I marvel in our meetings at how the same book can evoke radically different responses."

Does Electrocution Happen for a Reason? - Christianity Today Magazine

Here is an excerpt from Kyle Lake's book to ponder at the time of his tragic death.

"We'll never know what Kyle Lake would have said about the reason why, when he reached for a microphone as he was performing a baptism in front of 800 people, he was fatally electrocuted. But his explanation of a verse that may be infuriating to hear right now to some of those he left behind—Romans 8:28—may at least hint at his answer. It is reprinted, with the publisher's permission, an excerpt from Understanding God's Will: How to Hack the Equation Without Formulas (Relevant, 2004)."

Warfare worldview evidence: Christian Teens Beheaded in Indonesia

Ever since I became familiar with Greg Boyd and his books, especially God at War, I have been wrestling with my reformed roots, which emphasize the sovereignty of God and understand God's sovereignty and omnipotence to mean total, absolute meticulous control. The understanding is that God has a "blueprint" for history that he is following. But does the evidence in the world around us support this view? Or does the evidence suggest a warfare worldview as argued for by Greg Boyd? To help me and perhaps you wrestle through this issue, I've decided to start blogging evidence for a warfare worldview. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this issue as we seek to sort this out. Here's the first post:

In what one Indonesian human rights activist describes as the latest attack in an ongoing terror campaign against Christians of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, three teenage girls en route to school through a cocoa plantation were beheaded Saturday morning, apparently by Muslims.

Theresia Murangke, 14, and Ida Lambuaga and Alfina Yarni Sambue, both 15, were attacked one mile from Sayo village near the town of Poso, reports Indonesian Christian journalist Ibrahim Buaya, who formerly lived in this volatile region of Indonesia. A fourth girl, Noviana Malewa, 14, escaped from her attackers with machete wounds to her face. Buaya reported that she is in Poso General Hospital under heavy guard. The Associated Press reported that Noviana told police the six attackers wore black shirts.