Beth Moore's "New England Nights" tour coming to Bloomfield this October

Popular author and Bible teacher Beth Moore will be in New England for a series of meetings this October, including a stop at Bloomfield's First Cathedral on the evening of October 17. Appearing with Beth will be worship leader Travis Cottrell.

Each "New England Nights" event is scheduled for 7:00 - 9:15 p.m., with doors opening at 6:00 p.m. All seats are general admission, $35.00 per person.

For more information, visit Beth Moore's website at Lifeway.com.

For more Christian events near you, visit our Connecticut Christian Events Calendar.

The fruit of the sexual revolution

U. S. News & World Report lays it out in black and white:

"What we found is alarming," Dr. Sara Forhan, from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said during a teleconference Tuesday. "One in four female adolescents in the U.S. has at least one of the four most common STDs that affects women."

"These numbers translate into 3.2 million young women nationwide who are infected with an STD," Forhan said. "This means that far too many young women are at risk of the serious health effects of untreated STDs, including infertility and cervical cancer."

These common STDs include human papillomavirus (HPV), chlamydia, herpes simplex virus and trichomoniasis, Forhan said.

Forhan announced the results as part of the CDC's 2008 National STD Prevention Conference, in Chicago.

"These findings are really giving us a lot of pause about how we provide care to adolescent girls who are sexually active," said Dr. Elizabeth Alderman, an adolescent medicine specialist at Children's Hospital at Montefiore in New York City and chairperson of the Executive Committee of the Section of Adolescent Health of the American Academy of Pediatrics. "The numbers are really astonishing."

Global Day of Prayer to be celebrated May 11

On Sunday, May 11, 2008 Connecticut believers will once again come together for the Global Day of Prayer.

The Global Day of Prayer is a world-wide celebration centered around Pentecost Sunday. The mission of this celebration is to unite the global body of Christ, to seek God for revival, intercede on behalf of our world, and collaborate for the blessing and transformation of our cultures. It is preceded by ten days of prayer (Acts 1:14); celebrated in public venues on Pentecost (Acts 2:1) and followed by "90 Days of Blessing" on communities after Pentecost (Acts 2:42).

Please join us as hundreds of thousands of people from around the world join together in worship and intercession.

The local site for this year's meeting will be held at: Gateway Christian Fellowship, 129 Bull Hill Lane, West Haven, Connecticut. For more information, please contact the church at (203) 934-0880. The meeting will be held at 6:00 PM.

Flickr photo by Jorge Andrés Paparoni Bruzual; some rights reserved.

Street preachers rile up Mystic

Interesting issues here:

Last Saturday, one of the preachers, a polite young man from the Victory Bible Baptist Church in Ledyard, 18-year-old Jayson Hill, was issued a $103 ticket by Stonington police, accused of creating a public disturbance.

I was there when police wrote Hill the ticket, and it was a remarkably subdued and, yes, quiet confrontation. Hill and a companion preacher lingered afterwards, still holding big signs suggesting the GIFT OF GOD IS ETERNAL LIFE THROUGH JESUS CHRIST OUR LORD.

Hill stopped preaching that afternoon, but he said he would plead not guilty to the ticket, hire a lawyer if necessary and return.

“We have the right to do what we are doing,” said Hill, who lives in Ledyard and works as a construction laborer. “This is America. We have the freedom to do this. We are spreading the Gospel. We are not going to whisper.”

More here at the Day, and here.

A Christian blog worth reading - from an unlikely source

Over the years many Christians have looked down their noses at Charisma magazine. Some complain that its too gossipy, others that it's simply one big advertisement. Although some may consider the magazine an unlikely source to generate a blog worth reading, I continue to be impressed and challenged by the "Fire In My Bones" blog written by author J. Lee Grady, Charisma's editor.

Grady is seemingly on a personal mission to grab the American church by the lapel and slap it. I think he's succeeding. His latest column shares a meeting the late Kenneth Hagin had in 2003 with various preachers in which he attempted to correct their overemphasis and outright false teachings on giving and propsperity:

4. The “hundredfold return” is not a biblical concept. Hagin did the math and figured out that if this bizarre notion were true, “we would have Christians walking around with not billions or trillions of dollars, but quadrillions of dollars!” He rejected the popular teaching that a believer should claim a specific monetary payback rate....

Hagin condemned other hairbrained gimmicks designed to trick audiences into emptying their wallets. He was especially incensed when a preacher told his radio listeners that he would take their prayer requests to Jesus’ empty tomb in Jerusalem and pray over them there—if donors included a special love gift. “What that radio preacher really wanted was more people to send in offerings,” Hagin wrote.

Thanks to the recent resurgence in bizarre donation schemes promoted by American charismatics, the prosperity gospel is back under the nation’s microscope. It’s time to revisit Hagin’s concerns and find a biblical balance.

Hagin told his followers: “Overemphasizing or adding to what the Bible actually teaches invariably does more harm than good.” If the man who pioneered the modern concept of biblical prosperity blew the whistle on his own movement, wouldn’t it make sense for us to listen to his admonition?

In his previous post, Grady had discussed the call to holiness being put forth by noted pastor Larry Stockstill:

Stockstill became alarmed about the anemic condition of American churches in 2006, when he had to step in and help bring discipline to Ted Haggard, the Colorado pastor who was removed as senior leader of New Life Church because of a moral failure. Stockstill offered correction and oversight to Haggard and his family and helped the leaders of New Life pick up the pieces after the scandal. Many observers praised Stockstill for his level-headed leadership and compassionate but strict adherence to biblical principles during the crisis.

What Stockstill learned during that painful process became the basis of a new book, The Remnant: Restoring Integrity to American Ministry. He hopes the message will trigger a movement of holiness and integrity in the American church, which has suffered a long string of embarrassing sexual and financial failures since Haggard’s fall 15 months ago.

“We look like a sleaze bucket in the eyes of the nation,” says the 54-year-old pastor, who has avoided the national spotlight during most of his 33 years in ministry. Once a missionary in Africa, Stockstill has focused most of his ministry on church planting and missions. Bethany has helped start more than 17,000 churches worldwide since 2000.

Stockstill says the level of dysfunction among American ministers concerns him because their unhealthiness is then passed down to their congregations.

This is all a good corrective to some of what's flying at us over the Christian airwaves.

Obama and the Book of Romans

Barack Obama weighs in on the Scriptures:

I believe in civil unions that allow a same-sex couple to visit each other in the hospital or transfer property to each other.

I don't think that it should be called marriage, but I think that it is a legal right that they should have that is recognized by the state.

If people find that controversial, then I would refer them to the Sermon on the Mount, which I think, you know, is in my mind, for my faith, more central than an obscure passage in Romans.

That's my view.

But we can have a respectful disagreement on that.

Here's the obscure passage I think Sen. Obama is referring to:

For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. Romans 1:26-27.

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