News
About 40 years after Dave Voetmann began work as an African aviation missionary in Africa, his dream of building a better plane to visit those hard-to-reach jungle settings is nearly complete.For the 72-year-old Edmonds man, it has taken almost 10 years just to build the Kodiak, a plane he says will modernize aid trips to places like Mok, West New Britain, and Aziana, Papua New Guinea — places too small to even be listed on a world map.Read more of this story.
March 26, 2007 issue – What would Jesus download? One of the hottest sites on the Internet is GodTube.com, the Christian answer to YouTube. It’s a goofy, fascinating window into the world of Christian youth. There’s a clip of Ray Comfort, the popular evangelical preacher, demonstrating the perfection of God’s creation with an actual banana. It’s hard—OK, impossible—not to see it as an (unintentional?) dirty joke. Another clip sends up the hip-hop anthem "Baby Got Back": This version is called "Baby Got Bible" and contains hilarious lyrics like "Bless me, bless me and teach me about John Wesley."Read more of…
When the levees broke in New Orleans, the Rev. Jerry Kramer scrambled to get his family out alive. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed their tiny house, but within days, Kramer, pastor of the Free Church of the Annunciation, was wading through the filthy floodwaters to help others. Before rebuilding his own home, Kramer helped rebuild homes and find shelter for many others. His congregation took out a million-dollar mortgage to turn the church and several surrounding properties into what they call Resurrection House, which includes a dormitory for volunteers who do construction work or reach out to the needy in…
BRIARCLIFF MANOR – Religious Protestants who have immersed themselves in national politics, taking on a culture they perceive as hostile to their values, may have lost sight of what they are trying to accomplish, a leading analyst of the religious right said.Read more of this story.
Christian ministries and charities promise to do all kinds of good things with your money, and that makes donors feel great about sending in their checks. The problem is, they can’t always find out exactly how their donation is being spent.Read more of this story.
Megachurch or small church, the life of a pastor’s wife has challenges. Crystal Cathedral’s Donna Schuller talks about her role one year later.If ministry can be difficult for a pastor, the adjustment of the wife has its own challenges. One pastor’s wife has written about the prerequisites for being a minister’s wife — “to be cute, perfect, always smiling, piano or organ player, soprano singer, having the perfect marriage, perfect children, setting a beautiful table, and putting out an extra couple dinner plates at a moment’s notice.”Read more of this story.
COMMENTARYOne of the great treasures from the Roman Catholic tradition is its longstanding list of the Seven Deadly Sins (e.g.: Envy, Greed, Gluttony, Anger, Sloth, Lust, and Pride). Even with its limitations, such as isolating only a few areas of failure, this teaching has highlighted human tendencies that offend God, and harm us. It has been a good teaching tool for young disciples.Read more of this story.
Public-school courses on the Bible…there aren’t that many. But they’re rising in popularity. Read more of this story.Professor: Religion courses have place in public schoolsQ & A with Stephen Prothero, author on religious literacy, Dallas Morning News
COMMENTARYHe was a small man—barely five feet in his knickers, knee socks, and ballooning white shirts. For two weeks, first as a freshman and then again as a senior, I sat in my assigned seat at Wheaton College’s chapel and heard him cry. He was the evangelical conscience at the end of the 20th century, weeping over a world that most of his peers dismissed as not worth saving, except to rescue a few souls in the doomed planet’s waning hours. While Hal Lindsey was disseminating an exit strategy in The Late Great Planet Earth, Francis Schaeffer was trying to…
COMMENTARY Lent and March Madness have something in common—they both involve a lot of prayer. The two come around for a visit every spring, like young-adult children who look and act remarkably different yet acknowledge they’re somehow related. Lent, of course, is the elder, quietly sober, disciplined, and sometimes penitential; March Madness (whose real name is NCAA Basketball Tournament) can get hysterical, obsessive, and sometimes criminally insane. But it’s usually short-lived.Read more of this story.