Saturday, March 06, 2004

(AgapePress) - It was a strange headline that appeared two years ago in The London Times: "Christianity Almost Beaten in Britain, says Cardinal."

The stunning statement was made by the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, when he addressed a gathering of Roman Catholic clergy in England in 2001.

And who could blame him for his pessimism? Christianity in the West appears to be in the process of retreating everywhere under the advancing assault of secularism and New Age spirituality.

What should encourage believers everywhere, however, is a phenomenon that is developing, for the most part, outside the notice of much of the Western press. In what is called the "Global South" -- Africa, Latin America and Asia -- Christianity is growing in staggering fashion, promising in the next 50 years or so to eclipse the West as the spiritual home of the faith.

Relocation and Rebirth
This is not what Western elites in the media or on college and university campuses thought was happening. "For over a century, the coming decline or disappearance of religion has been a commonplace assumption of Western thought, and church leaders have sometimes shared this pessimistic view," says Philip Jenkins, distinguished professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University, in his book, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity.

That secularists expected the demise of Christianity is not hard to understand. After all, they viewed that faith as a Western religion, and Jenkins admits that "[u]ntil recently, the overwhelming majority of Christians have lived in White nations ...."

If Christianity were mainly a religion of the peoples of Europe and North America, as secularists have always thought, then Jenkins says it made sense that "the growing secularization of the West [could] only mean that Christianity is in its dying days."

However, a strange thing has been happening: rather than dying, Christianity has spread in unexpected ways. Mark Hutchinson, chairman of the church history department at Southern Cross College in Australia, says that "what many pundits thought was the death of the church in the 1960s through secularization was really its relocation and rebirth into the rest of the world."

Jenkins says, "We are currently living through one of the transforming moments in the history of religion worldwide .... The era of Western Christianity has passed within our lifetimes, and the day of Southern Christianity is dawning." More...

Thursday, March 04, 2004

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)--Great Hills Baptist Church in Austin, Texas, began planning for "The Passion of The Christ" last fall when the congregation organized a lay-led ministry team to develop a plan for maximizing the impact of the film.

One of the major components of the effort was to rent a theater and pass out decision cards to everyone who attended the showing of The Passion. During an early showing the church secured the day before the movie officially opened, 59 people indicated on the decision cards they had accepted Jesus as Savior after watching the film and listening to a Gospel presentation.

During another showing Feb. 28, another 31 people accepted Christ, for a total of 90.

Brian Devany, a member of Great Hills and one of the laypeople on the Passion ministry team, said the results may be due in part to the "bring a buddy" program the church promoted. Members were encouraged to purchase a ticket for themselves as well as lost friends, and some members bought as many as 10 tickets at a time. The ratio of nonbelievers to believers who saw the film with the church was probably 3-1, Devany said. More...

Wednesday, March 03, 2004

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)--Two recent polls regarding parents' views on sex education have produced conflicting results, with one poll saying the vast majority of American parents want their children's sex education classes to emphasize abstinence until marriage and the other saying most parents believe the most appropriate approach is something called "abstinence-plus."

The first poll, conducted by Zogby International and Focus on the Family, found that parents strongly oppose the values and messages of comprehensive sex education, which assumes teens will become sexually active and therefore must be given easy access to condoms and contraception.

The second poll, conducted by National Public Radio, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, found that while only 7 percent of Americans say sex education should not be taught in public schools, a plurality believes the most appropriate approach is to teach that abstinence is best. But with those parents registering doubt whether all teens will abstain, they said students also should be taught about condoms and contraception.

The NPR poll also found that 30 percent of the principals of public middle and high schools where sex education is taught reported that their schools teach abstinence only. NPR said 47 percent of the schools taught abstinence-plus -- an approach that teaches abstinence first but also includes condoms and contraception -- and 20 percent taught that making responsible decisions about sex was more important than abstinence. More...