Take a roller-coaster ride through basic church life: buildings, budgets, crises, staff conflict, growing pains, disgruntled members, besetting sins and providing care, sermons, meetings…meetings…..meetings….and more meetings….fatigue, excitement about lives changed, another sermon to preach….more meetings…personal struggles, various ministries and programs to staff and events to plan, desperate need of volunteers, difficult people! Life in a... Continue Reading

These servants of the Word see the multi-ethnic promise of God to Abraham in Genesis 12:3, “In you all the families of the earth will be blessed.”  They see the implications of Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are... Continue Reading

While it was a foregone conclusion that the Conscience Clauses (which permitted complementarians to serve in the RCA without fear of persecution of any kind) would be removed from the BCO it still merits a mention.  We now enter a time when complementarians are fully dependent upon the grace of the seminaries and the MFCA... Continue Reading

We’re not leaving the Presbyterian Church. We’re moving from one part of the Presbyterian family to another part,” he said. “We’re being faithful to God’s call.”   More than three years have passed since First Presbyterian Church of Kingwood started its journey to a new denominational home. At long last, the trek out of the... Continue Reading

1. Has worship attendance declined in at least seven of the past ten years? 2. Has budget giving declined in at least seven of the past ten years? 3. Does my church look more like the community or less like the community than ten years ago? 4. Are church conflicts significantly more frequent today than... Continue Reading

The Christian Church Disciples of Christ — a small mainline Protestant denomination — has experienced a steep drop in membership in recent decades. Beer & Hymns is one attempt to attract new people, in this hip, beer-loving city, while keeping a safe distance away from stained-glass windows. Rodney Page is optimistic. The 78-year-old is a... Continue Reading

There were three overtures in the last General Assembly requesting the SJC to take over original jurisdiction in the Leithart case. The SJC has ruled on those three overtures in the negative. The reasoning of the overtures was that a mistrial should have been declared, given the conflict of interest of the prosecutor. Given, then,... Continue Reading

At its stated meeting on November 2, 2013, Heartland Presbytery voted to prohibit the practice of intinction in the churches within its bounds. Heartland is a presbytery of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). Intinction is the practice in a communion service of participants dipping the bread into the wine before it is eaten. There... Continue Reading

In 2002 the Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) for the domestic dioceses of the Episcopal Church was 846,640. In 2012 the domestic ASA was 640,142; a decline of 206,498 or 24 per cent over ten years. The 2012 totals do not account for the session of the Diocese of South Carolina, which would subtract an estimated... Continue Reading

The SBC is changing and laypersons deserve to know. The debate over Calvinistic theology is not precisely the issue. Calvinists have always been among us, and they are certainly welcome in our convention. The issue, more specifically, is the apparent exclusion of those who are not Calvinistic from leadership vacancies in the Southern Baptist Convention... Continue Reading