Baylor University Scholars Say Reports About Imminent Death of Religion Have Been Greatly Exaggerated; Faith Is Growing, Not Dying, In America and Around the World

May 11, 2015 – Baptist News Global – Ken Camp

Conference speakers highlight statistics and trends showing that in the U.S. and around the world, faith is on the rise.

Reports about the imminent death of religion, the rise of secularization and the growth of atheism largely ignore facts or rely on faulty research, scholars from Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion said during a recent conference.

Reports emphasizing the rise of “nones” and the massive flight of Millennials from organized religion greatly exaggerate — and sometimes misinterpret — hard data, said Byron Johnson, distinguished professor of the social sciences at Baylor and founding director of the Institute for Studies of Religion.

“There’s a story some people want to report — that religion is on life support — but it’s just not true,” he asserted.

Surveys that report Millennials have left the faith of their parents often really mean they have stopped attending church for a few years or identify with a nondenominational church rather than a Mainline denomination — not that they have abandoned Christianity, he said, pointing to findings from the Baylor Religion Survey.

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200 Chibok Mothers Do Not Know Whether Their Daughters Are Dead or Alive This Mother’s Day – Keep Them In Your Prayers

May 09, 2015 -The Christian Post – David Curry

As mothers around the world celebrate Mother’s Day with flowers and homemade gifts from their children, there is a community of 200 mothers who do not know the fate of their daughters.

On the night of April 14, 2014, an Islamic militant group kidnapped more than 200 female students from the Government Secondary School in Chibok, Nigeria. There has been no sign of the girls since.

The government has rescued hundreds of women and children from Boko Haram camps in the Sambisa Forest, and for that we praise the Lord. But the Chibok girls are still missing, and it is their mothers that I will be thinking about on Sunday.

Can you imagine not knowing the fate of your child, but being reminded by daily news reports of the cruelty of her captors? They are the ones who have killed thousands in one attack, have assaulted several of their female victims and have then sold some of these women into Islamic marriages.

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From Monnica to Susanna Wesley: Remembering Great Mothers In Church History

May 09, 2015 – Baptist Press – David Roach

Augustine of Hippo is known by Christians the world over for standing against heresy in the fifth century and laying a foundation for the Protestant Reformation a thousand years later.

Lesser known is the fact that Augustine might never have become a Christian if not for his mother Monnica, who prayed for his salvation for years before eventually sailing from North Africa to Italy to beg her son to attend church. He honored her wishes and was saved when he heard the Gospel under the preaching of Ambrose of Milan.

Monnica — as her name is spelled on her tomb despite commonly being rendered as “Monica” — is one of many noteworthy mothers in church history.

“Some of Christian history’s greatest preachers, theologians and missionaries owe the first fruits of their ministries not to their exegetical insights, homiletic abilities or spiritual zeal, but instead to the faithful prayers of their godly mothers,” Christian George, assistant professor of historical theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, told Baptist Press in written comments. “In the lives of countless Christians throughout the ages, God has often granted second births as a result of those who gave them their first.”

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Persecuted Christians in Middle East send Powerful Salvation Letter to ISIS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5O6Fyl_-Bc

Bethany Blankley : May 4, 2015 : Charisma News

“Love is coming after you! …An army comes, with no tanks or soldiers. But an army of martyrs faithful unto death.

The world is talking about you. Your apocalyptic dreams and spectacular sins are now awakening the Middle East. In your holy war, come to holy ground.

Come, children of Abraham, come. The people of the cross gather at your gates with a message:

Love is coming after you!
Like a rush of wind grazing over the Pacific,
From hills of the Mount of Olives to the desert winds of Jordan,
From the cedars of Lebanon to the silk roads of the East,
An army comes. With no tanks or soldiers,
But an army of martyrs faithful unto death,
Carrying a message of life.
The People of the Cross
Come to die at your gates.
If you won’t hear our message with words,
Then we will show you with our lives
Laid down.

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More & More Arab Youth Are Openly Blessing Israel

David Lazarus : May 4, 2015 : Israel Today

“As an Arab who lives in Israel, it is a great honor for me to live side by side with my brothers the Jews. I bless them and love them and it is a privilege to tell them about my faith in their book, the Bible. There is a real way that we can live together in love, unity and peace, Arabs and Jews—through our Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ.”

Young people from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Yemen and many other Arab countries are turning to social media to tell the world that they love Israel.

The trend began, according to Al-Monitor, a popular pan-Mideast media outlet, when an Israeli Arab Muslim who served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) wanted to convince other Israeli Arabs that the (IDF) are not an “army of evil” and that its soldiers are not as bloodthirsty as they tend to be portrayed in Arab propaganda films.

But instead of messages from the Israeli Arab audience he was targeting, he began receiving messages of peace and love from young Arabs all across the region.

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Earthquakes of Faith

By Brian C Stiller , Global Ambassador, World Evangelical Alliance – April 28, 2015

A shaking is taking place in the Muslim world with tectonic rumblings. Signs are early and evidence is anecdotal, yet stories abound and are persuasive. The unsettling of entrenched Islamic faith is making its way into places and with people we assumed were closed to conversations about the Christian faith.

Returning from the Middle East, a journey I’ve made regularly in the past few years, I spoke with those engaged in Christian witness about some possibilities they would not have verbalized twelve months ago. I begin with a story from meeting with Syrian refugees on the Lebanese side of the border.

A worn, gnarled hand gently stroked the bruised face of her two-year-old granddaughter whose front teeth had been broken and face scraped by a serious fall. I sat next to them in their scrabbled together shack in a Syrian refugee camp in the Beqaa Valley, just over the mountains from Syria. The life of “Fadwa” had been shattered first by her husband having been taken prisoner in Syria. Then her daughter died in childbirth because Syrian soldiers at a checkpoint refused to let her go to the hospital in time. Then to stay alive Fadwa was forced to flee from her home in Lebanon and walk three days over the mountains. Today she cares for five adults and six children in a makeshift abode, the main room curtained off from the sleeping room.

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Homosexual activists speak out against same-sex marriage

"I'm gay and I'm voting No. Here's why." Keith Mills and Paddy Manning give powerful and compelling reasons for voting NO to redefining marriage on May 22. Use your vote.…

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ENDLESS FALSE PROPAGANDA OF WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT IN ISLAM

07 May 2015  Mirza Ghalib – www.islam-watch.org

Islamic propaganda machine succeeded largely in its mission of shadowing the evils of Islam and its prophet. This has unfortunately continued for the past fourteen hundred years. It got a bit of hammering since the invention of the internet. Thanks to our scientists, internet has provided us the opportunity to understand the deceptive political ideology of Islam hiding behind the religious mask.

If a question is put to an average Muslim about Muhammad’s married life, one will get an immediate answer about his first wife Khadija, a 40-year-old widow and the rich entrepreneur of Mecca. But no Muslim will mention about his third wife, the 6-year-old Aisha, whom he married at the age of 52. This is the unbeaten success of their propaganda.

Average Muslims know that Muhammad had a ‘few’ wives, not more than four, since that is maximum mentioned by Allah in the Quran (4:3). But they don’t know that Muhammad had married at least fifteen wives, as recorded in the hadiths and biographies of Muhammad. Muslim scholars and Imams intentionally keep those hadiths in the shadow.

Common Muslims will quickly tell you that all of Muhammad’s wives were all aged and widowed, but they don’t knows that all of them were married young girls and Muhammad himself had made them widows by killing their husbands, took them captive, and raped them on the same day of their husband’s murders.

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Three Things I Oppose: Youtube Link of Ps Daniel

Dear family and friends in Christ, RUAP National President Daniel Nalliah speaks out on three things he opposes; two depopulates a Nation, while one populates a nation and tries to…

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Australian police disrupt jihad mass murder bomb plot In Melbourne

May 8, 2015 By Robert Spencer – Jihad Watch

How did this young adherent of the Religion of Peace get “provoked”? Is someone drawing Muhammad in Melbourne?

“Australian Police Say They Disrupted Bomb Plot In Melbourne, Associated Press, May 8, 2015 (thanks to Kenneth):

Police arrested a 17-year-old and accused him of plotting to detonate three homemade bombs in the Australian city of Melbourne, officials said on Saturday, in the latest terrorism scare blamed on a teenager.

The teen was arrested on Friday afternoon in a joint federal-state police counterterrorism operation at his home in the upmarket suburb of Greenvale where the explosive devices were found, Australian Federal Police Deputy Commissioner Mike Phelan said. The bomb squad rendered the devices safe, he said.

Melbourne is Australia’s second largest city and is the capital of Victoria state.

Last month, five Australian teenagers were arrested on suspicion of plotting an Islamic State group-inspired terrorist attack at a Veterans’ Day ceremony also in Melbourne that included targeting police officers.

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Why can’t Muslims laugh at Mohammed?

David P. Goldman May 5, 2015

In Mel Brooks’ comedy “History of the World Part I,” Moses is shown descending from Mount Sinai with three stone tablets in hand. As he declares, “I give you the Fifteen Commandments,” one falls and breaks, and Moses corrects himself, “er, Ten Commandments.” Jews, including the observant, find this funny rather than offensive. As we learned once again in Garland, Texas, Muslims do not laugh at jokes about Mohammed, the purported author of the Koran (as Moses is the author of the Torah). Two wannabe Jihadists with assault rifles and body armor were no match for an off-duty Texas traffic cop with a sidearm, but the incident might have turned into a massacre worse than the murder of the Charlie Hebdo staff in January.

Why do Jews as well as Christians–but not Muslims–laugh at jokes about the founders of their faiths?

The answer is that radically different deities are in question. Judaism begins with a covenant between God and human beings–Abraham and his descendants–that is a partnership in which God is normally, but not always, the senior partner. As Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks observes, the Jewish sages of antiquity envisioned Moses acting as a judge for God, permitting God to annul his earlier vow to destroy the Jewish people after the sin of the Golden Calf. This is unimaginable in Islam, just as unimaginable as the Christian God who humbles himself on the cross.

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Doing Church on the Streets of Baltimore

May 05, 2015 – The New York Times – Ron Nixon and Scott Shane

The Rev. Warren Savage, a former gang member, is trying to persuade members of several gangs to direct their energy away from violence. (Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times)

For the past few days, as a rare national media spotlight has shined on this city’s troubles, the Rev. Warren Savage has taken the opportunity to meet with self-described members of the gangs that many residents blame for some of those woes: the Crips, the Bloods and the Black Guerrilla Family.

He has found them on the streets, sat down with them in churches, and talked to them about their anger and their aspirations, urging them to redirect their energy from crime and violent feuding to more productive ends — including tamping down unrest that followed the death of a young black man, Freddie Gray, who suffered fatal injuries in police custody two weeks ago.

In Ferguson, Mo., community leaders seemed unable to come together to stem the violence after the police killing of Michael Brown in August. But in Baltimore, an array of pastors, politicians, community leaders and even gang members have repeatedly taken to the streets to calm crowds, effectively helping the police impose a curfew so far.

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Say NO to legalising ‘Gay Marriage’ in Australia / Live webcast 31st May

Dear family & friends in Christ, 1) It seems like many nations are rapidly slipping away from God’s divine order of marriage between a man & woman, and embracing gay…

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