MC News
After 30 years of defining a subculture it helped create, CCM Magazine is facing its last press run. After April, it will appear online – period.For decades, CCM stood for "contemporary Christian music," while executives debated precisely what that meant. It helps to know that Nashville is a place where judgments about the state of an artist’s career can be based on theology as well as sales.Read more of this story.
Historians and foreign-policy experts have rightly chronicled the abuses of American evangelical overseas missions, especially in the era of colonialism. But Walter Russell Mead, Henry A. Kissinger Sr. Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, takes a different tack. While acknowledging the darker threads of both American and Christian overseas engagement, he argues it is more necessary than ever that evangelicals play a role in American foreign affairs.Read more of this story.
Americans overwhelmingly believe in the concept of sin whether they are religiously involved or not, according to a new Ellison Research study released Tuesday.Read more of this story.
Evangelicals observing Lent? Fasting, and giving up chocolate and favorite pastimes like watching TV during the 40 days before Easter are practices many evangelical Protestants have long rejected as too Catholic and unbiblical. But Lent — a time of inner cleansing and reflection upon Jesus Christ’s sufferings before his resurrection — is one of many ancient church practices being embraced by an increasing number of evangelicals, sometimes with a modern twist.Read more of this story.
Spend a day with Cardinal George and you’ll see him smile a lot. That’s not the cardinal the wider public generally sees. At news conferences, George has a no-nonsense, professorial demeanor. Perhaps that’s why, after more than a decade of watching him, Chicagoans still don’t know the prelate well.Read more of this story.
It looks like another phone booth, graffiti-smeared and slightly grimy, that has been abandoned during these cellular times. But the blue-and-white sign above it says not "Phone" but "Prayer." And there’s no way to call anyone — on Earth, at least — because there isn’t a pay phone inside, but instead a fold-down kneeler like you’d find in a church.Read more of this story.
MADISON — A downtown church has lost its access to free parking because the businessman who owns the parking ramp doesn’t want the church sheltering the homeless. First United Methodist Church in Madison serves as an overflow shelter for the homeless, housing about 20 men per night during the winter.Read more >>
Palm Sunday is going "green."This year, more than 2,130 congregations across the USA, including Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists and Presbyterians, will use "eco-palms" that are harvested in a more environmentally friendly way, says Dean Current, program director at the Center for Integrated Natural Resources and Agricultural Management at the University of Minnesota.Read more of this story.
They say geography is destiny, but perhaps it is damnation as well.We have unveiled the American city that has fallen the farthest from grace in each of the seven deadly sins ( lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, wrath, envy and pride). For each sin we stretched our imagination to find a workable proxy–murder rates for wrath, per capita billionaires for avarice–then culled the available data sources to rank the cities. Some of the results were surprising: Salt Lake City as America’s Vainest City. Some were not: Detroit as America’s Most Murderous.Read more of this story.
Pastor Marty Baker is a believer in the idea. "When Jesus says, ‘I will build the church,’ he says, financially, I’ve got a system for you," Baker preaches, "It’s called tithing." Tithing means giving a tenth of your income – and church construction is exactly what pastor Marty Baker is pitching his congregation to pay for. "God doesn’t fund the church through bingo nights, pancake suppers and chicken dinners," Baker says. "God funds the church through people willing to commit to the tithe." Read more of this story.