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CAMPBELLSVILLE, Ky. (BP)–Thousands of soldiers will be away from their families this Christmas, but graduate student Matt Hodge hopes a Christmas carol he has written will help them feel closer to their families during the holiday season.
For James Govan, Christmas starts before Thanksgiving and doesn’t end until early in February as he displays some of his 500 Nativity scenes around his home in Arlington County. "I keep telling people it’s a disease without a cure," he joked. For Govan and other fans, creche collecting is serious business — with a biennial national convention, commissioned works of art, online shopping and collections displayed in churches and museums.
MADISON (WKOW) — Local churches are giving the gift of water this holiday season, as part of the worldwide Advent Conspiracy movement that involves more than 1,000 congregations.Door Creek, an evangelical free church located on Madison’s east side, is one of the churches participating in the movement. Its senior pastor, Mark Maillefer, says the "conspiracy" is to restore the true meaning of Christmas, which Maillefer says is about giving to one another the way God gave his son.
Here is a curious, widely forgotten episode in the history of French painting. In 1882 James Tissot returned to Paris following an 11-year sojourn as a successful painter of London society. Tissot (1836-1902) intended to produce a series of paintings of fashionable Parisian women, but one day, during a church service, he had a vision of Jesus tending to people in a ruined building. It was his Road to Damascus.Four years later, reconfirmed in his Roman Catholic faith, he took off on a research trip to the Holy Land, beginning a 10-year campaign to illustrate the New Testament.
To some, they are testaments to God’s drawing power. To others, impersonal “Christian warehouses.”Megachurches, a relatively recent phenomenon, inspire and sometimes intimidate with their size.“Our building is large. There’s no way of getting around it,” said the Rev. Chris Dolson, senior pastor of Blackhawk Church on Madison’s Far West Side, one of the largest churches in the state. Sunday attendance averages 4,200.
Fond du Lac – The Seibel Family Christmas Concert is a little like the Seibel family itself.It’s grown dramatically over the years. Some days, just pulling it off feels like a miracle. And the Seibels see both as gifts. The concert, their gift to their community. The family and its musical talents, their gifts from God.Tom and Amy Seibel and their 12 children will stage their 10th annual Christmas concert in Fond du Lac this weekend before an estimated 2,500 people – a far cry from the 20 or so who gathered in their home to watch a decade ago.
NEW YORK — Susan Hong stops Pastor Tim Keller as he dashes up the steps of a Baptist church on a hectic corner of Broadway and West 79th Street.She heard him preach at 10:30 a.m. on the Upper East Side. Now she has brought friends to hear him at the West Side 5 p.m. service. He briefly greets her, then slips into the service just before his sermon.Keller’s service-hopping — he usually preaches to three-fourths of the 5,500 people who attend Redeemer services — reflects a new model for worship spreading rapidly across the U.S. church landscape: multisite churches.
The Rev. Timothy Paul Jones kept hearing one thing when — four weeks before Christmas — he brought a wreath and some purple and pink candles into his Southern Baptist church near Tulsa, Okla.And all the people said: "Advent? Don’t Catholics do that?"This prickly response wasn’t all that unusual, in light of the history of Christmas in America, said Jones, who now teaches leadership and church ministry at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky."In the dominant American, Protestant traditions of this country, we’ve never had a Christian calendar that told us anything about Advent and the 12 days of…
COMMENTARYCold war liberalism had a fine run in the middle third of the 20th century, and it has lingered here and there since. Scoop Jackson kept the flame alive in the 1970s. Peter Beinart wrote a book called “The Good Fight,” giving the tendency modern content.But after Vietnam, most liberals moved on. It became unfashionable to talk about evil. Some liberals came to believe in the inherent goodness of man and the limitless possibilities of negotiation. Some blamed conflicts on weapons systems and pursued arms control. Some based their foreign-policy thinking on being against whatever George W. Bush was for.…
EAST ORANGE, N.J. — The Rev. Dwight Gill figures if there is one thing that will bring more men to church, it’s football. So one Sunday a year at New Hope Baptist Church, NFL doesn’t stand for National Football League, but rather for New Found Life.