Why Church Members Are Attending Less Frequently
Some highlights from today’s Rainer Report:
- Those who are more affluent have more options to do things other than attend church on the weekend.
- Too many church members consider corporate worship optional.
- Raising the bar of expectations for church members is key to higher attendance frequency.
- The more involved people are in small groups, the more involved they will be in the life of the church.
5 Minutes After You Crash(When Sexual Sin and Adultery Destroy a Ministry)
It is a time to remember how desperately we need the Gospel of God. It is a time to remember how much we need God’s presence, his power, and his daily cleansing. It is also a time to pray for families and churches who have experienced such destruction. It is a time for all of us to remember how much we need the Lord.
The Least of These: Ministry with and to the Incarcerated
It is time for the church to be more engaged in criminal justice reform. We have a critical voice and need to use it. We have resources that can be used to empower those impacted by our criminal justice system. We are called to take care of the least of these.
The False Gospel of Expressive Individualism
In some circles, expressive individualism is being mixed with Christian thought. The logic goes a little something like this: “God is good. God made me. God gave me my desires. Since God is good and gave me my desires, then the desires I have from God must be good. And since God gave me these good desires, I have a right to express them.”
The ‘Educated Elite’ Isn’t Educated, and It Isn’t Elite
Combine academic ignorance with a worldview that too often unthinkingly and reflexively rejects religious traditions and traditional religious notions of morality, and you’ve got the recipe for exactly the proud, “elite” individualist Brooks describes. Or, to borrow a biblical concept, “claiming to be wise, they became fools.”
He is right that the “meritocracy is here to stay,” but he’s wrong that we “need a new ethos to reconfigure it.” An old ethos will do, one grounded in humility, true curiosity, and an openness to challenging ideas.
Seniors Are More Conservative Because the Poor Don’t Survive to Become Seniors
It’s well understood that millennials are significantly more diverse than prior generations. But there is something else driving the relative homogeneity of seniors: Poorer people are often hobbled by chronic illness, and succumb to premature death.
Billy Graham Makes Final Call to Trust Jesus in Last Will and Testament
“I urge all who shall read this document to read and study the Scriptures daily,” the will states, “and to trust only in the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation.”
Graham, who passed away this past February, also asks that his posterity “maintain and defend at all hazards and any cost of personal sacrifice the blessed doctrine of complete Atonement for sin through the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ once offered, and through that alone.”
When the team, appropriately named the Boise Black Knights, came across the accident in Oregon, head coach Rudy Jackson pulled over and the team swarmed out of the car to rescue the couple.
They pulled out the man who was trapped first, then pushed on the side of the overturned car to raise it up enough for another player to rescue the woman stuck inside.