There is a continuum of values between the churches and the general community. What distinguishes the handling of these values in the churches is mainly the heavier dosage of religious vocabulary involved.
There is a continuum of values between the churches and the general community. What distinguishes the handling of these values in the churches is mainly the heavier dosage of religious vocabulary involved
The Church is not segregated by region or cities. That's an antiquated view of the world. We are united with churches all over the world working toward common goals based on shared values. Mosaic is one of the most racially diverse churches on the planet. Our community and extended Church family is global and completely integrated.
I don't have any complaints about homosexuals being married in a civil ceremony. But I don't think that the government ought to require religious organizations, churches, should perform marriages between homosexuals if a local congregation decides otherwise. I believe in the autonomy of individual churches.
The churches that are growing and thriving are churches that I would call evangelical and orthodox for the most part in their beliefs. They are churches that tend to evangelize ... and encourage their people to share their faith. These are the churches that are actually growing. The ones that are shrinking are the ones that are compromising and watering down what the word of God says.
Everyone has values, and values their family, values their health, their sanity, their safety and security, and their families, their parents, their children, their pets, their environments, well-being in general.
Sunday at 11 o'clock is the most segregated hour in America. You have black churches; you have white churches; you have Hispanic churches. It's not really reflective of the world we live in, by and large, in America.
As you know, Sunday at 11 o'clock is the most segregated hour in America. You have black churches; you have white churches; you have Hispanic churches. It's not really reflective of the world we live in, by and large, in America.
One of the reasons churches in North America have trouble guiding people about money is that the church's economy is built on consumerism. If churches see themselves as suppliers of religious goods and services and their congregants as consumers, then offerings are 'payment.'
What James Madison and the other men of his generation had in mind when they wrote the First Amendment was that there should be no official relationship of any character between government and any church or many churches, and no levying of taxes for the support of any church, or many churches, or all churches, or any institution conducted by any of them.
What's happening is that Asian and Latino and other groups without that history are more likely to end up in either black churches or white churches and then make them multiracial churches. I talk about that in the US we have two cultures.
The fault seems to me to have been that men have taken ancient country churches as their models and have failed to discover that between them and churches in towns there ought to be a most distinct and marked difference.
I'm in a mainline church, I'm very aware, especially as I move through community churches and new-start churches that are making real efforts not to associate themselves with traditional denominations - very often they have no history. They have no institutional memory.
For all the venom and fear spewed at members of the 'religious right,' most of today's churches are left alone... the nonreligious tend to look at our churches as benign institutions that create a placid and docile citizenry, having little impact on our culture.
The pastors and ministry leaders came away energized to have voter registration drives at their churches and motivated to encourage their congregations to "vote their values."
Most people just aren't clear-eyed about the rural South. We think that the urban centers are the problem, and the rural areas across the country are idyllic, suffused with good old American values, social values, religious values, moral values. It's what we tell ourselves to keep this political power structure in place, and it's what we see in pop culture, too.
... between government, business, and the public, there is a triangular community of interest. Clearly, it is in business' interest to shape its behavior to prevailing public values; it is more efficient to do so than not to do so. It is also clear that government is the high-cost alternative through which public values are imposed on corporations that do not accurately perceive these values.