What Happens When Satan Rules the Street

I recommend to you as highly as I can this piece by Cindy Brown Austin, writing for the Courant. It shows very clearly the clash between good and evil in our capital - urban combat complete with turf-level spiritual warfare. It's all too easy in our schizophrenic State to overlook what is happening in our seat of government. Pray earnestly for Hartford, as without prayer all the hard work will be limited in what it can do.

New Christian Events Calendar for Connecticut!

I'm in the process of constructing a new Christian events calendar for Connecticut, which you can access here. The calendar will also be available from the link in the right-hand column, and will also be accessible from the PrayCT website very soon. (I was more than a little displeased with the performance of the one I had originally selected. Lesson learned: we get what we pay for!)

How to post events to the calendar:

Please e-mail us to post your events. Please provide as much info as you can. If you would like to post a brochure or flyer, you may also send them to me. Try to use Windows-friendly formats such as Word, Publisher, or PDF. I will host these files on the PrayCT server and therefore the calendar will enable people to quickly jump to your brochure. If you provide no brochure, I will instead provide a link to your church or ministry's home page. The service is free for the foreseeable future, but any donations to defray the cost (even micropayments) would be appreciated. Just click the Paypal button which appears in the right-hand column under "donations."

Episcopal Church Boiling Over in Connecticut

Several weeks ago, six Episcopal parishes, their elected officials, and five priests brought a federal lawsuit against the Bishop of Connecticut and the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the USA. Part of the ongoing dispute over the consecration of an open, practicing homosexual as the Bishop of New Hampshire, the lawsuit alleges numerous violations of State and Federal on behalf of Bishop Smith. The entire lawsuit can be read in PDF form here. To follow what I must sadly refer to as the implosion of the Anglican or Episcopal Church worldwide, go to www.ctsix.org, or Virtue Online.

Now the AP is reporting that the members of the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut, at their annual meeting, have come out strongly in favor of civil unions, and passed a resolution urging Bishop Smith to allow priests to officiate at these ceremonies.

Ordinarily in a post like this I would ask prayer for the Episcopal Church at this point - but is there any point to that? Hasn't such a denomination reached the point of no return? Please pray for those Episcopalians who are holding to the truth of God's Word and not melting like chocolate in the face of these pressures. Ask God for wisdom and help as they face the future...

Connecticut Going Nowhere Fast?

The Conncticut Economic Resource Center has come out with an alarming report on the future of Connecticut's economy. James C. Smith is the CEO of Webster Bank, one of the companies that commissioned the report, and editorialized about it in the Courant.

Smith notes the trends many are already aware of, but adds:

To be sure, these trends are similar to those in other Northeast states - a region that has seen people and jobs leave for other parts of the country. But Connecticut has lost more people and more jobs than other Northeast states.

Between 1990 and 2000, we experienced a greater loss of young adults (18-34) to other states than any state in the nation. We lost a congressional seat in 2000. Unless this trend is changed, we will more than likely lose another seat by 2030, further diminishing our clout in Washington.

In terms of median age, we are now the seventh-oldest state in the country. Our Medicaid spending per capita is twice the national average.

We have shown no net job growth over the past 15 years. In fact, we would have shown negative growth if not for the Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos.

Then there is the growing disparity between our core cities and the surrounding suburbs. We are the most affluent state in the country, and yet we have three of the nation's poorest cities.

To download a copy of the report (PDF documents) go here.

Pray Connecticut Website Launched With New Features!

We're happy to announce that we've launched the new and improved Pray Connecticut website! The time required to work on that explains my absence from blogging for several weeks.

Please stop by and check out these features:

• The beginnings of a true Christian portal for the State of Connecticut, including links to all Connecticut municipal websites and nearly all online Connecticut news sources

• Our ever-growing Connecticut Church Google Map

• Brand-new Connecticut Christian Events Calendar

• Articles on a variety of prayer and discipleship topics (just starting)

• Loads of Christian links and Bible study resources (coming soon)

• Online Christian bookstore (coming soon)
  

We hope you'll stop in and watch us grow over the next few weeks and months. Please help us build the site by sending us info on your church event or suggesting a church for the map.

And now, we resume blogging...

Nature and Nature's God - how did they vote on Civil Unions?

Today's the day...

Here's my question: does a State Legislature even have the power to invent "civil unions?" Professor Bradley Watson writes:

"Henry Herbert, the second Earl of Pembroke, said that Parliament can do anything but make a man into a woman. In this remark, he was pointing to the idea that some things exist in nature, and Parliament, while supreme over human affairs, was not omnipotent. Parliament is, ultimately, a human institution that lacks power when it comes to controlling the articulations of nature and nature's God— the most fundamental and self-evident of which is the man-woman distinction and the natural consequences of it. It is also worth noting that Pembroke was speaking only of Parliament, not of the far more hubristic, nominally common-law courts of America, which have come much closer to toying with the order of nature than Parliament ever dreamed possible. We can now foresee the day when, in effect, courts will routinely declare men to be women, and vice versa, according to the political pressures of the age."

The phrase "nature and nature's God" also appears in an ancient document which is no longer read by our citizenry and which, if it were proposed to day, would be shot down as unconstitutional because of its religious references. I'm speaking, of course, of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration not only speaks of Divine Providence (the active working of the God of the Bible in history) and the Creator (referring to the active working of the God of the Bible as He makes all human beings in His image, thereby giving them inalienable rights and dignity), it also speaks of the laws of nature and Nature's God.

Thus, our founders understood that the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government were fenced in by natural law as well as the Christian consensus of society as revealed in the primary Judeo-Christian text, the Bible. There were certain things which could not be legislated (to say nothing of their being imposed by judicial power) even if a large segment of society agitated for them because society as a whole understood that they were contrary to the way human society was designed to function. We would say nowadays that they had no paradigm that would enable them to conceive of legislating such a thing.

Reason and experience, in addition to Scripture, taught our ancestors that the legislature has no power to destroy and, indeed, should only proceed very carefully to regulate, the relations between parents and children, or spouses. Thus there could be no government-sanctioned abortion, nor easy divorce, nor sodomy, nor civil union, nor tolerance of sharia law in Western nations - whether they were Protestant or Catholic nations.

Who or what gave our legislators and our governor the authority to obliterate the very definition of civil society as we know it has existed across the entire world for literally millenia?

Maybe it's time we started asking our legislators harder questions.