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On November 11, during a 9:00am class of first-year students, led by Allen Hood and Wes Hall at International House of Prayer University (IHOPU), the Spirit moved in their midst with physical healings, deliverance, and a spirit of joy. That class, on November 11, continued for more than 15 hours. The word spread quickly, and nearly 2,000 people spontaneously gathered in the auditorium from all over the Kansas City area, as deliverance and physical healings increased. The meeting continued well past midnight. Recognizing that the Spirit was moving, the leadership of IHOPU canceled all classes for the next few days…
COMMENTARYEvangelicalism has become a global phenomenon. In the past year I have visited the Middle East, India, Africa, Latin America, and Europe as the guest of churches and ministries. In each place, evangelicals exude life and energy. While staid churches change slowly, evangelicals tend to be light on their feet, adapting quickly to cultural trends.The Jesus movement, the house-church movement, seeker-friendly churches, emergent churches—evangelicals have spawned all of these. In their wake, worship bands have replaced organs and choirs, PowerPoint slides and movie clips now enliven sermons, and espresso bars keep congregants awake. If a technique doesn’t work, find one…
WASHINGTON – Unlike in the United States, there is little controversy among evangelicals around the world on whether climate change is real, said an evangelical representative at a press briefing on Capitol Hill.“They know it is real,” said Deborah Fikes, executive advisor of the World Evangelical Alliance – a global alliance of churches in 128 nations and over 100 international organizations. But in the United States, many evangelicals deny climate change is real because they are “self-absorbed” and “lack [the] spiritual will” to change their lifestyle to help solve a problem that is life threatening, she said.
COMMENTARYAllow me to make a very direct statement. I believe it is time for the Church in this country to stand up for religious freedom. Especially over the course of the last few years, we have seen repeated efforts — in the courts, in state legislatures, in Congress, and on Pennsylvania Avenue — to erode what has been called the first freedom: religious liberty.It isn’t hard to cite numerous cases where Christian organizations and individuals have been singled out and punished for adhering to their faith.
There are no church bells ringing at Truckstop Ministries near Carlisle, Pa. The call to worship is chaplain Dave Hershey walking through the parking lot of a Pilot truck stop on a Sunday morning, inviting any trucker he sees to join the group for the 11 a.m. service.
The bombshell from the new Pew survey on government faith-based initiatives: Democrats are now more supportive than Republicans of houses of worship getting government money for social services, a turnabout from 2001, when George W. Bush launched the White House faith-based office.
If members of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod have heard it once, they’ve heard their national leaders repeat this mantra a thousand times: “This is not your grandfather’s church.”That’s certainly what musician Phillip Magness experienced when he took a sabbatical at Bethany Lutheran Church in Naperville, Ill., and began a research tour after the 2006 release of the Lutheran Service Book. Since he led the committee charged with promoting the new hymnal, Magness wanted to see what was happening in the conservative denomination’s sanctuaries.“What I found out is that we’re a lot like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates,” he said.
The old hymn Trust and Obey has a lot of meaning for Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker. Ramping into a second campaign for governor of Wisconsin, Walker spoke Friday to 100 men who attended Madison’s monthly outreach lunch of the Christian Businessmen’s Committee (CBMC).Walker stayed away from political issues during his talk, and spoke about his faith walk as a follower of Jesus Christ. Walker was raised in a Christian family, his father was pastor of First Baptist Church in Delavan. He and his family currently attend Meadowbrook Church in Wauwautosa.
COMMENTARYEarlier this year, American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray wrote a warning about American elites pushing America to become like Europe. European social policies "drain too much of the life from life," Mr. Murray wrote in a March article in The Washington Post called, "Thank God America Isn’t Like Europe."
In slightly more than two decades—roughly from 1949 to 1971—Billy Graham moved from leader to celebrity to icon, and he retained that iconic status into the new millennium. For millions of Heartland Americans, he functioned very much as a Protestant saint. By the time he retired in 2005, reportedly he had preached to nearly 215 million people in person in more than 185 countries and territories, and to additional hundreds of millions through electronic media.