eChurch Blog

Good to see American church leaders and Christians with backbone

(UPDATE) This is the full text of the Manhattan Declaration:-

Manhattan Declaration

We, as Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Christians, have gathered, beginning in New York on September 28, 2009, to make the following declaration, which we sign as individuals, not on behalf of our organizations, but speaking to and from our communities.   We act together in obedience to the one true God, the triune God of holiness and love, who has laid total claim on our lives and by that claim calls us with believers in all ages and all nations to seek and defend the good of all who bear his image.  We set forth this declaration in light of the truth that is grounded in Holy Scripture, in natural human reason (which is itself, in our view, the gift of a beneficent God), and in the very nature of the human person.  We call upon all people of goodwill, believers and non-believers alike, to consider carefully and reflect critically on the issues we here address as we, with St. Paul, commend this appeal to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.

While the whole scope of Christian moral concern, including a special concern for the poor and vulnerable, claims our attention, we are especially troubled that in our nation today the lives of the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly are severely threatened; that the institution of marriage, already buffeted by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce, is in jeopardy of being redefined to accommodate fashionable ideologies; that freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons of faith to compromise their deepest convictions.

Because the sanctity of human life, the dignity of marriage as a union of husband and wife, and the freedom of conscience and religion are foundational principles of justice and the common good, we are compelled by our Christian faith to speak and act in their defense.  In this declaration we affirm: 1) the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of every human being as a creature fashioned in the very image of God, possessing inherent rights of equal dignity and life; 2) marriage as a conjugal union of man and woman, ordained by God from the creation, and historically understood by believers and non-believers alike, to be the most basic institution in society and; 3) religious liberty, which is grounded in the character of God, the example of Christ, and the inherent freedom and dignity of human beings created in the divine image.

We are Christians who have joined together across historic lines of ecclesial differences to affirm our right – and, more importantly, to embrace our obligation - to speak and act in defense of these truths.  We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.  It is our duty to proclaim the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in its fullness, both in season and out of season.   May God help us not to fail in that duty.

Life

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. Genesis 1:27

I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. John 10:10

Although public sentiment has moved in a pro-life direction, we note with sadness that pro-abortion ideology prevails today in our government.  The present administration is led and staffed by those who want to make abortions legal at any stage of fetal development, and who want to provide abortions at taxpayer expense.  Majorities in both houses of Congress hold pro-abortion views.  The Supreme Court, whose infamous 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade stripped the unborn of legal protection, continues to treat elective abortion as a fundamental constitutional right, though it has upheld as constitutionally permissible some limited restrictions on abortion.  The President says that he wants to reduce the “need” for abortion – a commendable goal.  But he has also pledged to make abortion more easily and widely available by eliminating laws prohibiting government funding, requiring waiting periods for women seeking abortions, and parental notification for abortions performed on minors.  The elimination of these important and effective pro-life laws cannot reasonably be expected to do other than significantly increase the number of elective abortions by which the lives of countless children are snuffed out prior to birth.  Our commitment to the sanctity of life is not a matter of partisan loyalty, for we recognize that in the thirty-six years since Roe v. Wade, elected officials and appointees of both major political parties have been complicit in giving legal sanction to what Pope John Paul II described as “the culture of death.”  We call on all officials in our country, elected and appointed, to protect and serve every member of our society, including the most marginalized, voiceless, and vulnerable among us.

A culture of death inevitably cheapens life in all its stages and conditions by promoting the belief that lives that are imperfect, immature or inconvenient are discardable.  As predicted by many prescient persons, the cheapening of life that began with abortion has now metastasized.  For example, human embryo-destructive research and its public funding are promoted in the name of science and in the cause of developing treatments and cures for diseases and injuries.  The President and many in Congress favor the expansion of embryo-research to include the taxpayer funding of so-called “therapeutic cloning.”  This would result in the industrial mass production of human embryos to be killed for the purpose of producing genetically customized stem cell lines and tissues.  At the other end of life, an increasingly powerful movement to promote assisted suicide and “voluntary” euthanasia threatens the lives of vulnerable elderly and disabled persons.  Eugenic notions such as the doctrine of lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”) were first advanced in the 1920s by intellectuals in the elite salons of America and Europe.  Long buried in ignominy after the horrors of the mid-20^th century, they have returned from the grave.  The only difference is that now the doctrines of the eugenicists are dressed up in the language of “liberty,” “autonomy,” and “choice.”

We will be united and untiring in our efforts to roll back the license to kill that began with the abandonment of the unborn to abortion.  We will work, as we have always worked, to bring assistance, comfort, and care to pregnant women in need and to those who have been victimized by abortion, even as we stand resolutely against the corrupt and degrading notion that it can somehow be in the best interests of women to submit to the deliberate killing of their unborn children.  Our message is, and ever shall be, that the just, humane, and truly Christian answer to problem pregnancies is for all of us to love and care for mother and child alike.

A truly prophetic Christian witness will insistently call on those who have been entrusted with temporal power to fulfill the first responsibility of government: to protect the weak and vulnerable against violent attack, and to do so with no favoritism, partiality, or discrimination.  The Bible enjoins us to defend those who cannot defend themselves, to speak for those who cannot themselves speak.  And so we defend and speak for the unborn, the disabled, and the dependent.  What the Bible and the light of reason make clear, we must make clear.  We must be willing to defend, even at risk and cost to ourselves and our institutions, the lives of our brothers and sisters at every stage of development and in every condition.

Our concern is not confined to our own nation.  Around the globe, we are witnessing cases of genocide and “ethnic cleansing,” the failure to assist those who are suffering as innocent victims of war, the neglect and abuse of children, the exploitation of vulnerable laborers, the sexual trafficking of girls and young women, the abandonment of the aged, racial oppression and discrimination, the persecution of believers of all faiths, and the failure to take steps necessary to halt the spread of preventable diseases like AIDS.  We see these travesties as flowing from the same loss of the sense of the dignity of the human person and the sanctity of human life that drives the abortion industry and the movements for assisted suicide, euthanasia, and human cloning for biomedical research.  And so ours is, as it must be, a truly consistent ethic of love and life for all humans in all circumstances.

Marriage

The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, for she was taken out of man.”  For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. Genesis 2:23-24

This is a profound mystery – but I am talking about Christ and the church.  However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. Ephesians 5:32-33
In Scripture, the creation of man and woman, and their one-flesh union as husband and wife, is the crowning achievement of God’s creation.  In the transmission of life and the nurturing of children, men and women joined as spouses are given the great honor of being partners with God Himself.   Marriage then, is the first institution of human society – indeed it is the institution on which all other human institutions have their foundation.  In the Christian tradition we refer to marriage as “holy matrimony” to signal the fact that it is an institution ordained by God, and blessed by Christ in his participation at a wedding in Cana of Galilee.  In the Bible, God Himself blesses and holds marriage in the highest esteem.

Vast human experience confirms that marriage is the original and most important institution for sustaining the health, education, and welfare of all persons in a society.  Where marriage is honored, and where there is a flourishing marriage culture, everyone benefits – the spouses themselves, their children, the communities and societies in which they live.  Where the marriage culture begins to erode, social pathologies of every sort quickly manifest themselves.  Unfortunately, we have witnessed over the course of the past several decades a serious erosion of the marriage culture in our own country.   Perhaps the most telling – and alarming – indicator is the out-of-wedlock birth rate.  Less than fifty years ago, it was under 5 percent.  Today it is over 40 percent.  Our society – and particularly its poorest and most vulnerable sectors, where the out-of-wedlock birth rate is much higher even than the national average – is paying a huge price in delinquency, drug abuse, crime, incarceration, hopelessness, and despair.  Other indicators are widespread non-marital sexual cohabitation and a devastatingly high rate of divorce.

We confess with sadness that Christians and our institutions have too often scandalously failed to uphold the institution of marriage and to model for the world the true meaning of marriage.  Insofar as we have too easily embraced the culture of divorce and remained silent about social practices that undermine the dignity of marriage we repent, and call upon all Christians to do the same.

To strengthen families, we must stop glamorizing promiscuity and infidelity and restore among our people a sense of the profound beauty, mystery, and holiness of faithful marital love.  We must reform ill-advised policies that contribute to the weakening of the institution of marriage, including the discredited idea of unilateral divorce.  We must work in the legal, cultural, and religious domains to instill in young people a sound understanding of what marriage is, what it requires, and why it is worth the commitment and sacrifices that faithful spouses make.

The impulse to redefine marriage in order to recognize same-sex and multiple partner relationships is a symptom, rather than the cause, of the erosion of the marriage culture.  It reflects a loss of understanding of the meaning of marriage as embodied in our civil and religious law and in the philosophical tradition that contributed to shaping the law.  Yet it is critical that the impulse be resisted, for yielding to it would mean abandoning the possibility of restoring a sound understanding of marriage and, with it, the hope of rebuilding a healthy marriage culture.  It would lock into place the false and destructive belief that marriage is all about romance and other adult satisfactions, and not, in any intrinsic way, about procreation and the unique character and value of acts and relationships whose meaning is shaped by their aptness for the generation, promotion and protection of life.  In spousal communion and the rearing of children (who, as gifts of God, are the fruit of their parents’ marital love), we discover the profound reasons for and benefits of the marriage covenant.

We acknowledge that there are those who are disposed towards homosexual and polyamorous conduct and relationships, just as there are those who are disposed towards other forms of immoral conduct.  We have compassion for those so disposed; we respect them as human beings possessing profound, inherent, and equal dignity; and we pay tribute to the men and women who strive, often with little assistance, to resist the temptation to yield to desires that they, no less than we, regard as wayward.  We stand with them, even when they falter.  We, no less than they, are sinners who have fallen short of God’s intention for our lives.  We, no less than they, are in constant need of God’s patience, love and forgiveness.  We call on the entire Christian community to resist sexual immorality, and at the same time refrain from disdainful condemnation of those who yield to it.  Our rejection of sin, though resolute, must never become the rejection of sinners.  For every sinner, regardless of the sin, is loved by God, who seeks not our destruction but rather the conversion of our hearts.  Jesus calls all who wander from the path of virtue to “a more excellent way.”  As his disciples we will reach out in love to assist all who hear the call and wish to answer it.

We further acknowledge that there are sincere people who disagree with us, and with the teaching of the Bible and Christian tradition, on questions of sexual morality and the nature of marriage.  Some who enter into same-sex and polyamorous relationships no doubt regard their unions as truly marital.  They fail to understand, however, that marriage is made possible by the sexual complementarity of man and woman, and that the comprehensive, multi-level sharing of life that marriage is includes bodily unity of the sort that unites husband and wife biologically as a reproductive unit.  This is because the body is no mere extrinsic instrument of the human person, but truly part of the personal reality of the human being.  Human beings are not merely centers of consciousness or emotion, or minds, or spirits, inhabiting non-personal bodies.  The human person is a dynamic unity of body, mind, and spirit.  Marriage is what one man and one woman establish when, forsaking all others and pledging lifelong commitment, they found a sharing of life at every level of being – the biological, the emotional, the dispositional, the rational, the spiritual – on a commitment that is sealed, completed and actualized by loving sexual intercourse in which the spouses become one flesh, not in some merely metaphorical sense, but by fulfilling together the behavioral conditions of procreation.  That is why in the Christian tradition, and historically in Western law, consummated marriages are not dissoluble or annullable on the ground of infertility, even though the nature of the marital relationship is shaped and structured by its intrinsic orientation to the great good of procreation.

We understand that many of our fellow citizens, including some Christians, believe that the historic definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman is a denial of equality or civil rights.  They wonder what to say in reply to the argument that asserts that no harm would be done to them or to anyone if the law of the community were to confer upon two men or two women who are living together in a sexual partnership the status of being “married.”  It would not, after all, affect their own marriages, would it?  On inspection, however, the argument that laws governing one kind of marriage will not affect another cannot stand.  Were it to prove anything, it would prove far too much: the assumption that the legal status of one set of marriage relationships affects no other would not only argue for same sex partnerships; it could be asserted with equal validity for polyamorous partnerships, polygamous households, even adult brothers, sisters, or brothers and sisters living in incestuous relationships.  Should these, as a matter of equality or civil rights, be recognized as lawful marriages, and would they have no effects on other relationships?  No.  The truth is that marriage is not something abstract or neutral that the law may legitimately define and re-define to please those who are powerful and influential.

No one has a civil right to have a non-marital relationship treated as a marriage.  Marriage is an objective reality – a covenantal union of husband and wife – that it is the duty of the law to recognize and support for the sake of justice and the common good.  If it fails to do so, genuine social harms follow.  First, the religious liberty of those for whom this is a matter of conscience is jeopardized.  Second, the rights of parents are abused as family life and sex education programs in schools are used to teach children that an enlightened understanding recognizes as “marriages” sexual partnerships that many parents believe are intrinsically non-marital and immoral.  Third, the common good of civil society is damaged when the law itself, in its critical pedagogical function, becomes a tool for eroding a sound understanding of marriage on which the flourishing of the marriage culture in any society vitally depends.  Sadly, we are today far from having a thriving marriage culture.  But if we are to begin the critically important process of reforming our laws and mores to rebuild such a culture, the last thing we can afford to do is to re-define marriage in such a way as to embody in our laws a false proclamation about what marriage is.

And so it is out of love (not “animus”) and prudent concern for the common good (not “prejudice”), that we pledge to labor ceaselessly to preserve the legal definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman and to rebuild the marriage culture.  How could we, as Christians, do otherwise?  The Bible teaches us that marriage is a central part of God’s creation covenant.  Indeed, the union of husband and wife mirrors the bond between Christ and his church.  And so just as Christ was willing, out of love, to give Himself up for the church in a complete sacrifice, we are willing, lovingly, to make whatever sacrifices are required of us for the sake of the inestimable treasure that is marriage.

Religious Liberty

The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.  He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners. Isaiah 61:1

Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s. Matthew 22:21

The struggle for religious liberty across the centuries has been long and arduous, but it is not a novel idea or recent development.  The nature of religious liberty is grounded in the character of God Himself, the God who is most fully known in the life and work of Jesus Christ.  Determined to follow Jesus faithfully in life and death, the early Christians appealed to the manner in which the Incarnation had taken place: “Did God send Christ, as some suppose, as a tyrant brandishing fear and terror?  Not so, but in gentleness and meekness…, for compulsion is no attribute of God” (Epistle to Diognetus 7.3-4).  Thus the right to religious freedom has its foundation in the example of Christ Himself and in the very dignity of the human person created in the image of God – a dignity, as our founders proclaimed, inherent in every human, and knowable by all in the exercise of right reason.

Christians confess that God alone is Lord of the conscience.  Immunity from religious coercion is the cornerstone of an unconstrained conscience.  No one should be compelled to embrace any religion against his will, nor should persons of faith be forbidden to worship God according to the dictates of conscience or to express freely and publicly their deeply held religious convictions.  What is true for individuals applies to religious communities as well.

It is ironic that those who today assert a right to kill the unborn, aged and disabled and also a right to engage in immoral sexual practices, and even a right to have relationships integrated around these practices be recognized and blessed by law – such persons claiming these “rights” are very often in the vanguard of those who would trample upon the freedom of others to express their religious and moral commitments to the sanctity of life and to the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife.

We see this, for example, in the effort to weaken or eliminate conscience clauses, and therefore to compel pro-life institutions (including religiously affiliated hospitals and clinics), and pro-life physicians, surgeons, nurses, and other health care professionals, to refer for abortions and, in certain cases, even to perform or participate in abortions.  We see it in the use of anti-discrimination statutes to force religious institutions, businesses, and service providers of various sorts to comply with activities they judge to be deeply immoral or go out of business.  After the judicial imposition of “same-sex marriage” in Massachusetts, for example, Catholic Charities chose with great reluctance to end its century-long work of helping to place orphaned children in good homes rather than comply with a legal mandate that it place children in same-sex households in violation of Catholic moral teaching.  In New Jersey, after the establishment of a quasi-marital “civil unions” scheme, a Methodist institution was stripped of its tax exempt status when it declined, as a matter of religious conscience, to permit a facility it owned and operated to be used for ceremonies blessing homosexual unions.  In Canada and some European nations, Christian clergy have been prosecuted for preaching Biblical norms against the practice of homosexuality.  New hate-crime laws in America raise the specter of the same practice here.

In recent decades a growing body of case law has paralleled the decline in respect for religious values in the media, the academy and political leadership, resulting in restrictions on the free exercise of religion.  We view this as an ominous development, not only because of its threat to the individual liberty guaranteed to every person, regardless of his or her faith, but because the trend also threatens the common welfare and the culture of freedom on which our system of republican government is founded.  Restrictions on the freedom of conscience or the ability to hire people of one’s own faith or conscientious moral convictions for religious institutions, for example, undermines the viability of the intermediate structures of society, the essential buffer against the overweening authority of the state, resulting in the soft despotism Tocqueville so prophetically warned of.¹ Disintegration of civil society is a prelude to tyranny.

As Christians, we take seriously the Biblical admonition to respect and obey those in authority.  We believe in law and in the rule of law.  We recognize the duty to comply with laws whether we happen to like them or not, unless the laws are gravely unjust or require those subject to them to do something unjust or otherwise immoral.  The biblical purpose of law is to preserve order and serve justice and the common good; yet laws that are unjust – and especially laws that purport to compel citizens to do what is unjust – undermine the common good, rather than serve it.

Going back to the earliest days of the church, Christians have refused to compromise their proclamation of the gospel.  In Acts 4, Peter and John were ordered to stop preaching.  Their answer was, “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.”  Through the centuries, Christianity has taught that civil disobedience is not only permitted, but sometimes required.  There is no more eloquent defense of the rights and duties of religious conscience than the one offered by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail.  Writing from an explicitly Christian perspective, and citing Christian writers such as Augustine and Aquinas, King taught that just laws elevate and ennoble human beings because they are rooted in the moral law whose ultimate source is God Himself.  Unjust laws degrade human beings.  Inasmuch as they can claim no authority beyond sheer human will, they lack any power to bind in conscience.  King’s willingness to go to jail, rather than comply with legal injustice, was exemplary and inspiring.

Because we honor justice and the common good, we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.  We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s.  But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God’s.

[END]

Click on a link below to explore the Manhattan Declaration Press Kit.

Manhattan Declaration & Signers

Manhattan Declaration Executive Summary

Nov. 20 Press Conference Speaker Bios

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — More than 150 Christian leaders, most of them conservative evangelicals and traditionalist Roman Catholics, issued a joint declaration Friday reaffirming their opposition to abortion and gay marriage and pledging to protect religious freedoms.

The 4,700-word document, called “The Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience,” sounds familiar themes from political and social debates over the health care overhaul and gay marriage battles.

While acknowledging that “Christians and our institutions have too often scandalously failed to uphold the institution of marriage,” the group rejects same-sex marriage. The declaration states that opening a legal door for gay marriage would do the same for “polyamorous partnerships, polygamous households, even adult brothers, sisters, or brothers and sisters living in incestuous relationships.”

Read Entire Article

And from CBN

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To counter this anti-family, anti-religious movement, some key Christian leaders will gather on Friday, November 20th, in Washington, D.C., to announce what is being called The Manhattan Declaration — a 4,732-word statement signed by a collection of Orthodox, Catholic and evangelical Christian leaders who are collaborating around moral issues of great concern.

More than 125 Christian leaders from various faith backgrounds have also signed this declaration, affirming the following:

* The sanctity of human life;
* Marriage as defined by the union of one man and one woman; and
* Religious liberty and freedom of conscience.

The Manhattan Declaration will be publicly released by these Orthodox, Catholic and evangelical Christian leaders at a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Addressed not only to Christians, but to the president, Congress, and civil authorities, the document will call for protection of the sanctity of life, traditional marriage and religious liberty.

The Manhattan Declaration endorses civil disobedience under certain circumstances if it becomes necessary to defend our constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press.

Read Entire Article

Belgrade, Serbia, Nov 20, 2009 / 06:12 am (CNA).- The 95-year old Patriarch Pavle was laid to rest today in Belgrade, Serbia, after having led the Serbian  Orthodox Church through its revival after the fall of the iron curtain and the bloody conflicts in the Balkans during the 1990′s.

The Serbian police reported that over 600,000 people attended the funeral service and procession today in Belgrade, said Domradio.de. The funeral was held in St. Sava’s Church in Belgrade, and the patriarch was buried in the Rakovica monastery in a Belgrade suburb seven miles away.

The Catholic Archbishop of Belgrade Stanislav Hocevar attended the funeral, as well as Cardinal Angelo Sodano who was appointed to be the Pope’s representative at the funeral.  Also in attendance was the apostolic nuncio in Serbia Orlando Antonini as well as Father Milan Zust from the Secretariat of the Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity, reported Radio Srbija.

The Pope also sent a telegram expressing his condolences to the Metropolitan of Montenegro, via his representative Cardinal Sodano. Though Pope Benedict’s meeting last Saturday expressed hope for an increased dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Serbian Orthodox Church, Serbia remains one of the few European countries to never have received a Papal Visit, said the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Patriarch Pavle is famed for his defense of Kosovo, which is esteemed as the epicenter of Serbian culture and the Serbian Orthodox faith. When Orthodox churches and monasteries were under attack by the mostly-Muslim ethnic Albanians during the Balkan conflict, Pavle rallied international support. However, the Manila Bulletin reported that critics condone the fact that various Serbian bishops gave their blessing to Serbian troops who then went out and committed atrocities in Bosnia and Croatia during Pavle’s patriarchy.

Nevertheless, the Patriarch is revered as a simple and humble man, and a “saint who walks” because of the work he did to bring the faith back to the forefront of Serbian society and religion back to the classroom after the fall of communism.

Serbian president Boris Tadi? said that Pavle’s death was a “huge loss” for Serbia, because Pavle’s was “one of those people who by their very existence bring together the entire nation.” The nation of Serbia has declared three days or mourning for the deceased patriarch.

As Biased BBC and the Climate Depot indicate, this escapade could get interesting.

Is the new environmentalism ‘religion’ under attack and suffering persecution from unbelievers?

Could be a hoax, but then again might not be.

Hacker Releases Data Implicating CRU in Global Warming Fraud – BBC confirms that a hack did indeed occur. Is this smoking-gun evidence of global warming data being fabricated?

The Emails are here

E-mails reportedly from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), including personal exchanges, appeared on the internet on Thursday.

ClimateGate – Climate center’s server hacked revealing documents and emails

Hadley hacked: Roundup with updates and hundreds of comments

Hadley hacked: warmist conspiracy exposed?

Hadley CRU hacked with release of hundreds of docs and emails

Breaking News Story: CRU has apparently been hacked – hundreds of files released

By Kate Youde, Third Sector Online

New governance guide for faith-based charities

The Charity Commission has published a new guide to good practice for the 30,000 faith-based organisations in the third sector.

The regulator hopes its Faith in Good Governance guide, released to coincide with National Inter Faith Week, will help trustees, staff and volunteers of charities established with a religious purpose.

The document, launched by the commission’s Faith and Social Cohesion Unit, includes legal information, recommended good practice and practical case studies. It is particularly targeted at smaller and new organisations that operate places of worship.

Dame Suzi Leather, chair of the Charity Commission, said: “It is important that trustees have the flexibility and freedom to decide what is the best way to achieve their charities’ aims, but at the same time they need good, useful guidance to help them in their work.”

Harriet Crabtree, director of the Inter Faith Network for the UK, which promotes good relations between people of different religious beliefs, said the guide would be an excellent resource for faith-based organisations.

Christian Today

If the Chinese church committed itself completely to mission it would be a great new force that could complete the Great Commission, a mission expert stated.

There are an estimated 100 million Christians in China, including members of the underground church, and the number is rapidly growing. Some have estimated that 30,000 people in China come to Christ every day, Dr David Shibley, president of Global Advance, told The Christian Post Wednesday.

“I’ve seen it (mission movement) beginning in China and India,” said Shibley, whose organisation focuses on empowering national leaders to plant churches among the unreached people groups. In India, an estimated 15,000 people are coming to Christ daily.

Shibley believes China and India are the great success stories of mission so far in the 21st century.

“China holds the potential to complete the Great Commission,” he said. “If the Chinese movement completely committed itself to mission it could and should become the great new mission force throughout the world.”

Shibley said Chinese missionaries could follow the Silk Road – an ancient network of trade routes connecting China to Europe through the Middle East and North Africa as well as to South Asia – and share the Gospel to the unreached people groups in the region.

Both China and India, which are the most populous populous countries in the world, lie in the 10/40 Window.

The 10/40 Window is a term mission leaders use to refer to the countries that lie between 10 and 40 degrees north of the equator. These countries contain the majority of the unreached people groups and are home to the three primary non-Christian religious systems – Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam – accounting for two-thirds of the global population.

Roughly 5,186 of the 6,639 unreached people groups are located in the 10/40 Window, according to Shibley. These 5,186 unreached people groups translate to 2.39 billion people.

“If you’re serious about the Great Commission, this is the most Gospel-needy area in the world,” he said.

Though the number of unreached people groups in the 10/40 Window is large, Shibley pointed out that in the 1990s mission groups began a “very aggressive” church planting movement to finish the Great Commission.

Part of the goal of the movement was to equip churches in the 10/40 Window to develop a heart to reach their neighbours. Previously, equipping local churches was not the primary goal of missionaries.

The church planting movement was in part inspired by the Joshua Project, a research initiative that regularly tracks the remaining unreached people groups and updates how close followers of Christ are to completing the Great Commission.

In addition to equipping churches, Shibley highlighted the use of satellite to share the Gospel in difficult-to-reach areas.

One such satellite TV ministry, SAT-7, which broadcasts Christian programmes in the Middle East and North Africa, says it reaches nine to ten million people each week.

Earlier this year, the ministry reported that a survey it took indicated that about 5.3 million Iraqis, or about 19 per cent of the population, watch SAT-7 Christian programmes. Iraq only has a Christian population of 600,000, which means that millions of Muslims are watching the Christian programmes.

In Iran, the SAT-7 channel is among the most popular channels in the country. Reports indicate that a growing number of Muslims throughout the Middle East are becoming followers of Christ through Christian satellite television programming.

Currently, Global Advance has three teams in the 10/40 Window that are training Christian and business leaders on how to plant churches and share the Gospel. Due to security concerns, Shibley could not say exactly where the teams are located. But he mentioned that one of the teams this week faced persecution.

Global Advance trains national church and business leaders to evangelise and disciple their nations and plant churches among the unreached. The ministry has hosted over 100 Frontline Shepherds Conferences around the world, equipping national pastors and church leaders to plant churches and start indigenous missions efforts. Global Advance says it has trained 235,000 leaders in 75 countries.

I was genuinely pleasantly surprised to read some of the past statements (2004) from our new European Emperor (The first for 500 years)

Here is a couple from the EU Observer:-

“Turkey is not a part of Europe and will never be part of Europe,”

[.....]

“An expansion of the EU to include Turkey cannot be considered as just another expansion as in the past. The universal values which are in force in Europe, and which are also fundamental values of Christianity, will lose vigour with the entry of a large Islamic country such as Turkey,”

It also transpires that he is a devout Roman Catholic. So we have a devout Roman Catholic leading a secular European Empire?

Gosh, this is going to be more interesting than I first thought.

By Piero A. Tozzi, J.D.

(NEW YORK – C-FAM)  The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) released its annual State of the World Population Report yesterday, linking efforts to promote “sustainable development” and affect “climate change” to its “reproductive rights” agenda. Critics see the report as a thinly-veiled attempt to harness popular environmental concerns in service of population control.

The report, “Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate,” asserts that achieving “universal access to reproductive health” would both contribute to declines in fertility and “help reduce green-house gas emissions in the long run.” It calls upon nations to “fully fund family planning services and contraceptive supplies.”

Sounding alarmist, UNFPA claims that “The harsh realities of high per capita emissions among industrialized countries and swiftly rising ones among developing countries highlight the urgency of mobilizing all of humanity to stop collectively at the brink of this possible climate disaster zone.” In a statement accompanying the report, UNFPA Executive Director Thoraya Obaid avers that “rapid population growth and industrialization have led to a rapid rise in greenhouse gas emissions. We have now reached a point where humanity is approaching the brink of disaster.”

Peter C. Smith of the International Right to Life Federation observes that agencies such as the UNFPA always need a “looming disaster” to secure their funding.” Smith sees the “true looming disaster” as the “demographic implosion of the developed world” which is being exported to the developing world. The report touts declining birth rates in Japan and the European Union (EU) as positives and criticizes higher fertility in the United States (US).

In places, the report disavows overt population control arguments and acknowledges development specialists such as Bangladesh’s Atiq Rahman, who attributes climate change to “consumption patterns” rather than “demographic considerations.” Yet it also asserts that “Each birth results not only in the emissions attributable to that person in his or her lifetime, but also the emissions of all his or her descendents. Hence, the emissions savings from intended or planned births multiply with time.” ??Further, the report states that “fear of appearing supportive of population control has until recently held back any mention of ‘population’ in the climate debate. Nonetheless, some participants in the debate are tentatively suggesting the need at least consider the impacts of population growth.” It points to an EU proposal “that population trends be among the factors that should be taken into consideration when setting greenhouse-gas mitigation targets.”

Critics also point to the report’s favorable citation of Obama administration’s science czar, John Holdren, as signaling openness to coercive measures. In the 1970s, Holdren called for forced abortion and sterilization in his writings.?? Concern over UNFPA’s role in facilitating China’s one-child policy, which is beset by allegations of forced and sex-selective abortion, contributed to a recommendation by the US State Department under then-Secretary of State Colin Powell to suspend funding of the agency. In March of this year, the Obama administration reversed the Bush administration policy and directed that $50 million be given to UNFPA, despite continued concerns over its China role.

By Professor Barry Rubin (Don’t forget to subscribe to his blog for selections of great reading, Middle East politics, U.S. foreign policy, and more)

An Article that gives an Amazing Insight into Radical Islamism, its Western Coddlers and its Cures

This is perhaps the best newspaper article I’ve ever read on the phenomenon of radical Islamists in Europe, written from the point of view of those who have left the movement and now discuss how they felt and what they did. Well worth reading. It is by Johann Hari and entitled, “Renouncing Islamism: To the brink and back again.”

The two key points are:

First, how some–in this case imprisoned leaders of the Egyptian jihad–developed an alternative Muslim perspective:

“After more than 20 years in prison, they had reconsidered their views. They told him he was false to believe there was one definitive, literal way to read the Koran. As they told it, in traditional Islam there were many differing interpretations of sharia, from conservative to liberal – yet there had been consensus around one principle: it was never to be enforced by a central authority. Sharia was a voluntary code, not a state law. `It was always left for people to decide for themselves which interpretation they wanted to follow,’ he says.

“These one-time assassins taught Maajid that the idea of using state power to force your interpretation of sharia on everyone was a new and un-Islamic idea, smelted by the Wahabis only a century ago. They had made the mistake of muddling up the enduringly relevant decisions Mohamed made as a spiritual leader with those he made as a political ruler, which he intended to be specific to their time and place.”

I would call this the rediscovery of conservative traditional Islam, with a bit of a liberal modernist twist. That was the view of Islam which dominated the religion for many centuries between its early era and the recent rise of Islamism.

Second, and particularly fascinating and important is how Western Political Correctness and multiculturalism has disastrously encouraged and legitimized radical Islamism:

“From the right, there was the brutal nativist cry of `Go back where you came from!’ But from the left, there was its mirror-image: a gooey multicultural sense that immigrants didn’t want liberal democratic values and should be exempted from them. Again and again, they described how at school they were treated as `the funny foreign child,’ and told to `explain their customs’ to the class. It patronised them into alienation.

“`Nobody ever said–you’re equal to us, you’re one of us, and we’ll hold you to the same standards,’ says [Ed] Husain. `Nobody had the courage to stand up for liberal democracy without qualms. When people like us at [Newham] College were holding events against women and against gay people, where were our college principals and teachers, challenging us?”’

What a devastating indictment of leftist Political Correctness and multi-culturalism that is! Those two paragraphs should be read all over the West and in classrooms. Western behavior encourages radical Islamism by failing to champion Western intellectual, cultural, and political values. The same effect results by turning off the assimilation process.

But also responsible is the behavior of most Muslim leaders in the West who spend their time criticizing Western policies and societies while complaining about how Muslims are treated but never seeming to wage the war against extremism in their own communities.

Incidentally, please note that the word “Israel” is not mentioned in this article, which shows how small a part that issue plays in this movement. It is a revolutionary movement seeking state power and the transformation of Muslim-majority societies, or even of the whole world.

On one point I differ a bit but the differences can be easily reconciled. I am willing to accept the idea that actions like the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq heated up this movement in Europe by seeming to prove that the West was trying to destroy Muslims. But it is equally valid to point out that the Afghan–though not the Iraq–action was necessary to defend against September 11. This is a choice that the Jihadists force against the United States–and regarding Hamas and Hizballah against Israel. In effect, they say: we will attack you. If you don’t respond we will become stronger and win; if you do respond we will use that against you by making propaganda. The latter is ultimately less damaging than the former.

Another point of interest in the article is that the British-born radicals were disillusioned by: actual contact with the Jihad, seeing the kinds of societies it created, and coming to understand how different real Muslim-majority societies were from their own vision of the only proper style of Islam. This is important to understand but of course the majority are not persuaded away by such experiences.

At a time when the reality of radical Islamism as an international and internal threat is being explained away or silenced in Western countries–even when Jihadists shouting “Allahu Akbar” gun down their citizens, this article is an important corrective.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). To read and subscribe to MERIA, GLORIA articles, or to order books. To see or subscribe to his blog, Rubin Reports.

Guest post from the Christian Mental Health Website Team:-

This is the anniversary of a Christian brother (Justin Robert Thomas) who suffered from mental illness and sadly committed suicide this time last year.

As a result of his death the Christian Mental health website was set up for Christian mental health sufferers, carers and professionals and has become a valuable resource of information and mutual support for all Christians whose lives are impacted by mental illness.

We have many articles on an array of mental health issues, a prayer request and a forum for discussion

Please take the time to read the following article from the website:-

Exposing the Myth that Christians Should Not Have Emotional Problems

Church Times

THE parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) disagreed strongly with the Archbishops’ Council over a proposal to modify the Equality Bill, it emerged this week. The Bill awaits the Report stage before its Third Reading in the House of Commons.

The Council had suggested that in one clause that provided an exception for “the pur­poses of an organised religion”, a proposed definition of those purposes should be re­placed by an explicit link to a hitherto separ­ate excep­tion.

The first exception allows some discrimina­tion on the basis of gender, marital status, the circumstances of a divorce, being a transsexual, or “a requirement related to sexual orientation”. But this applies only when the employment is “for the purposes of an organised religion”. The second exception permits discrimination on the grounds of religion or belief by any organisa­tion “with an ethos based on religion or belief”.

The Council had written: “It seems to us both logical and necessary that in the case of a post in respect of which it is legitimate to im­pose a requirement that the holder be of a particular religion, it should equally be possible to impose a requirement that the holder of the post should not engage in conduct contrary to the tenets of that religion.

“Indeed it is only in respect of posts that are subject to a requirement to be of a particular religion or belief that the Church would ever wish to impose any of the [other] requirements listed. . . It is our view that the scope of the ex­ception . . . should simply be expressed to apply to posts in respect of which a requirement to be of a particular religion was (lawfully) applied. . .”

The JCHR wrote in its Scrutiny Report, pub­lished this week: “We consider that substantial grounds exist for doubting whether the ‘reli­gious ethos’ exception . . . permits organisations with a religious ethos to impose wide-ranging requirements on employees to adhere to reli­gious doctrine in their lifestyles and personal relationships, by, for example, requiring em­ployees to manifest their religious beliefs by refraining from homosexual acts.

“We agree with the Government that it is ‘very difficult to see how, in practice, beliefs in lifestyles or personal relationships could consti-tute a religious belief which is a requirement for a job, other than ministers of religion’ (which is covered by a different exception). This should put beyond doubt the position that the [religion or belief] exemption cannot be used to discriminate on the basis of sexual conduct linked to sexual orientation. We sup­port this view and recommend that this be made clear in the Bill.”

The Council had earlier voiced its concern about the new definition (News, 15 May and 12 June). This limits the exception to those whose roles are “(a) leading or assisting in the observa­tion of liturgical or ritualistic practices of the religion, or (b) promoting or explaining the doctrine of the religion (whether to followers of the religion or to others).”

A Church House spokesman said this week: “Our argument was that it does not make sense to say that you can require the holders of cer­tain posts to be of a particular religion, but that you can’t go on to say that their personal con­duct must not be contrary to the teaching of that religion.”

The Council’s proposal was included in three memoranda sent in June to the JCHR. The other main points of concern to the Archbishops’ Council were that: harassment on the grounds of Religion or Belief and Sexual Orientation should remain excluded from the Bill, and that existing (wider) exceptions relating to employ­ment in religious schools should remain un­changed.

The Council again repeated its previously voiced concern about a “trend towards regard­ing religion and belief as deserving of a lesser priority in discrimination legislation than the other strands”.