I have heard of the pot calling the kettle black, so what in the world does this newly ordained minister for a COGIC church call his followers? Meet Johnny Lee Clary, a good ol’ boy from Oklahoma, proud white boy who is a minister for a black denomination… and oh yeah, a former imperial wizard for
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Former KKK Leader now an ordained COGIC minister
It would be easy to push through this season and then leave Christmas sermons until next year. It would be a wasted opportunity. Just as it can save money to buy next year’s cards right after this year’s Christmas, so it can save time to give some thought to next year’s sermons now.
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Future Christmas Sermons
This cartoon from Big Fat Whale has something for all us war-on-Christmas foot soldiers* — I particularly like the Richard Dawkins snow man, the wreath design, and the Nietzsche sweater, though I think Nietzsche was an agonized sort of atheist rather than the cheerful sort — I read him to mean something more like ‘Oh crap, god is dead, now what?’ as distinct from ‘Hooray, god is dead, let’s party like it’s 1899!’ Then again, insanity contains multitudes (as does genius), and no one trash-talked religion with more alacrity and verve than crazy, brilliant old Freddy Nietzsche — one of his writings is titled The Antichrist , after all.
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A Very Nietzschean Christmas
I was just writing a mini-article in response to a request. As I was writing it, I came across an article I wrote earlier this year. I’ve linked to it previously, but here it is if you didn’t see it back then – click here . Let me just quote a paragraph: We must preach as those genuinely captivated by the love of God in the Word of God.
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What Will They Copy?
By DAVID YONKE BLADE RELIGION EDITOR The Manhattan Declaration, an affirmation of conservative Christian values on three fronts – pro-life issues, the definition of marriage, and religious freedom – has become an online phenomenon with more than 280,000 people signing the document since its release three weeks ago. The 4,700-word statement also has drawn cries of bigotry and calls for protests from some gay-rights advocates. Chuck Colson, the Watergate figure who founded Prison Fellowship ministries, is credited with initiating the declaration, and he drafted the text with two professors, Timothy George of Samford University and Robert George of Princeton University.
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Signs of the digital times; thousands sign online declaration
I sit on the side of the cultural divide that is more familiar with MC 900 Ft. Jesus than Oral Roberts and his 900-foot Jesus. But it’s hard to forget Roberts’ dramatic televangelism, his faith-healing, the travails of his various ventures, his contributions to the world of direct mail and database management
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Prosperity Gospel’s patriarch?
The wonderful Suzan Shutan has agreed to help me with my resume/cv/statements in exchange for web design and video work. I couldn’t think of a better collaboration. Here is one of the many projects (and its many iterations) that I am attempting to catalog for said documents… Tallit Rebozo , from the series Hiddur Mitzvah , Quilted, Embroidered, Woven, and Recycled Fabric, 2006 Comodification Series: Modeling Tallit Rebozo , Performance 2006 Comodification Series: Maya Carrying Maya , Photo Collage, 2006 Gringa Loves Guatemala , YouTube Video, 2007 Maya Carrying Maya , YouTube background, 2009 Maya Carrying Maya , Twitter background, 2009 Former Myspace Profile Picture , found internet photo (repeated here 3 times), 2006
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maya carrying maya
We’ve looked at a bit of the coverage of the Swiss ban on the construction of minarets — the spires on mosques that are sometimes used for the call to prayer. Earlier this month, I noted a single story that looked at how religious freedom is handled in some Muslim countries .
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The universal problem of religious freedom
As a preacher studying a passage it is tempting to be purposeful, but ignore the purpose of the passage. So you are studying the passage because you are trying to prepare a sermon, or perhaps because you are intrigued by the theological content of the text, or perhaps because you are pondering whether you should preach that passage at all! It becomes normal for a preacher to look at a Bible text and wonder how they would preach it.
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Ponder the Passage Purpose
Only half of Britons now consider themselves Christian after a “sharp decline” in religious belief over the past quarter of a century, according to a new academic study. At the same time, the proportion of Britons who say they have “no religion” has increased from 31 per cent to 43 per cent.
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Just half of Britons now call themselves Christian; ‘nones’ growing
Oral Roberts, the Pentecostal evangelist whose televised faith-healing ministry attracted millions of followers worldwide and made him one of the most recognizable and controversial religious leaders of the 20th century, died Tuesday in Newport Beach, Calif. He was 91. He was the patriarch of the “ prosperity gospel ,” a scam that promotes the idea that Christians who pray and donate with sufficient fervency will be rewarded with health, wealth and happiness
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Oral Roberts, Fiery Preacher With Vast Empire, Dies at 91
A 57-year-old member of a polygamist group raided by Texas authorities last year has been convicted of sexual assault of a child. He faces up to life in prison for his alleged so-called “spiritual marriage” to a 15-year-old girl who gave birth at age 16.
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Polygamist FLDS sect member Allan Keate convicted of sex assault
Yoga practitioners should get out their hymnals and Vedas Colorado Springs Gazette The organization maintains that yoga's rituals predate Hinduism by centuries, and argues yoga shouldn't be classified as a religion simply because multiple …
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Yoga practitioners should get out their hymnals and Vedas – Colorado Springs Gazette
In response to a Swiss vote banning the construction of new mosque minaret s, a group of Muslims this month went into a church building in eastern Turkey and threatened to kill a priest unless he tore down its bell tower, according to an advocacy group.
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Muslim Turks Threaten to Kill Priest over Swiss Minaret Decision
Several GetReligion readers have sent in the URL for a Washington Post story that ran last weekend about the formation of a group for gays, lesbians and, one would assume, bisexuals on the campus of the Catholic University of America . This story is pretty much what you would expect: A love song to a small, courageous band of true believers who are standing up against the establishment. Journalists love that template.
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Gays, doctrine and Catholic University
Knowledgeable sources say that the Physicians Organizing Committee is one of several Bay Area front groups set up to disguise a strange political cult. The cult, an umbrella organization based in New York, goes by names such as the Provisional Communist Party and the National Labor Federation, abbreviated as NatlFed
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Charitable Front: Some Bay Area organizations appear to be part of a secretive group
Some preachers think that there are two legitimate options in preaching, but to go further would be wrong. Legitimate would be to exhort listeners – that is, to appropriately pressure their will to obey the Lord, respond to the gospel, etc. Legitimate would be to educate the listeners – that is, to feed information to their minds so that they know more and can therefore make better decisions. But the next step? Well, many people think the next step beyond the will and the mind is to address the emotions, and that, of course, would be wrong. It must be wrong to address the emotions since that can so easily seem like manipulation. I would agree that it can become manipulation. I would agree that manipulation is wrong. But I still think our preaching has to go deeper than mind and will. How?
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Exhort, Educate . . . Manipulate?
In the UK a growing number of schools have scrapped the traditional Mary and Joseph performances in favour of secular alternatives such as Snow White or Scrooge, writes the Telegraph . Others have removed explicitly religious messages from their re-enactments of the birth of Christ for fear of upsetting pupils of other faiths.
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Schools criticised for replacing baby Jesus with sheep in nativity plays
Asheville City Councilman Cecil Bothwell believes in ending the death penalty, conserving water and reforming government — but he doesn’t believe in God. His political opponents say that’s a sin that makes him unworthy of serving in office, and they’ve got the North Carolina Constitution on their side
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North Carolina councilman may face lawsuit over his atheism
While Muslim leaders criticized the Nov. 29 vote in Switzerland that banned construction of minarets, they don’t support Christians who want to build churches in some Islamic countries.
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Egypt Forces Coptic Christians to Hide as Muslims Hit Swiss Minaret Ban
Paul Harvey I blogged about this collection a couple of years ago, if I recall correctly, but time to do so again as I’m going through it now more carefully and thoroughly: Joanna Brooks, ed., the Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Native America (with a foreword by Native American scholar Robert Warrior) — Oxford Univ. Press, 2006. Occom is best-known as the student (and later critic) of Eleazar Wheelock, and Indian emissary for Moor’s Indian Charity School in England for two years before returning to New England for a career as a minister, author of hymns, and increasingly bitter critic of the treatment accorded to himself and his people.
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Samson Occom’s Dream
When the House of Representatives passed the Stupak amendment preventing federal tax dollars from being used to fund or subsidize abortions, it was hard to find a story that didn’t mention the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. That group, and several other organizations that oppose abortion, had worked for months to ensure passage of such an amendment
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The missing motivation
If you have read any book on sermon composition, or studied preaching formally, you will have come across the two basic approaches to shaping a sermon – inductive and deductive. Both have strengths and weaknesses, both are useful. Yesterday I preached a message that was essentially inductive. I began by introducing the basic concept and made a promise – “I want to show you the greatest song of all time.” The message progressed by setting the scene for the book (an OT prophet), and surveying the content of the book to give a feel for it’s scope and intensity. The focus narrowed to the final section of the book, then finally onto the central feature of that final section. In the last minutes of the message, the place of final emphasis, the greatest song ever became evident. This is one example of an inductive approach. Often used when an audience is antagonistic to the main idea of the message (as in Peter’s message on Pentecost), but not exclusively so, the inductive approach has some real strengths. It does give you time to overcome antagonism and lower defences. It does allow time for intrigue to build so that people actually want to hear the main idea by the time it is stated. It allows for final stress to be placed on the most important thing. Inductive approaches to preaching can be complicated and daunting. They often require a different set of skills from the preacher: not least the ability to build trust and maintain interest for the entire message. But we shouldn’t feel daunted. Perhaps with the next message it is worth considering the option of not stating the main idea at the end of the introduction. Instead give the question or the incomplete sentence only, leaving the answer (or complement) until later on in the message
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Save the Best for Last
If I haven’t mentioned it before, I am quite the fan of awful horrible animated gifs. As I continue to work with seeNoga and Rio Yañez on the Jewish characters from Acciones Plásticas プリクラ : The Jewess Blogging Queen , The Avodah Girl and The 612er ; I thought I would share this terrible image created early on in our collaboration.
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rio prayed for la virgen de guadalupe and instead got…
I’m pretty sure that my favorite story of this Hanukkah season was this one from Good Morning America : For centuries, the Dreidel game has been a Hanukkah tradition. The simple gambling game remains a fixture at Hanukkah parties, but today it’s often more decoration than entertainment – a party favor and not a party favorite.
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Catching a gimel on the river
The roles of Newsweek and its religion reporter Lisa Miller’s as reporter (conveyor of information) and pundit (advocacy) have been blurred for a while now. One minute, Miller is reporting on a story, the next, she’s offering her personal opinion on it. This week’s target is California megachurch pastor Rick Warren, who is being connected to the proposed legislation in Uganda that would, among other things if it were passed in its original version, execute homosexuals who are infected with HIV
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Bullying Rick Warren
A Christian friend who knows I am a journalist but tries to love me anyway subscribes to USA Today . After he read Cathy Lynn Grossman’s print and online articles on that latest Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life survey, he asked if I could explain “how this media-stuff works and how headlines are ‘pitched’ different ways for different audiences.” Well, Gene, I can’t get more precise than to say that different journalists (or even different stories by the same journalist) address different aspects of of the world of religion—in this case Pew’s complex 22-page report, “Many Americans Mix Multiple Faiths,” which can be downloaded here
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Shopping for religion: Pew view