The New Right's Blueprint for Building a Christian America

Not going to excerpt this one. It's a longish read.

Southern Baptists Say 'No' to Women Pastors

Orlando, FloridaAP —  Thousands of Southern Baptists overwhelmingly voted Wednesday to advance a formal ban on women pastors in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, sending a clear message that men alone should preach to these conservative evangelical congregations.

The amendment would tighten existing restrictions in the Southern Baptist Convention, which already has a faith statement opposing women pastors.

The vote at the annual meeting was 6,028 to 2,026 — a 3-to-1 margin — which easily exceeded the required two-thirds majority. It will require a similar two-thirds vote at next year’s meeting to become part of the constitution.

The two-day meeting concluded Wednesday after bringing more than 11,000 delegates, or messengers, to a cavernous convention center in Orlando, Florida.

Read the rest here.

Pew Research: Trends in religious conversions

Christianity has experienced some of the largest losses from religious switching of any faith group around the world, according to our 2024 surveys. Religious switching refers to when people identify with a different religion in adulthood than they were raised in as a child.

Within Christianity, however, religious switching has affected the two largest subgroups – Catholicism and Protestantism – differently:

*Catholicism has lost more people than it’s gained in nearly all countries that we surveyed.

*Protestantism has seen a net gain from switching in nearly as many places as it has seen a net loss.

Here we take a closer look at religious switching into, out of, and between Catholicism and Protestantism, based on Pew Research Center surveys in 24 countries...

Read the rest here.

Angels for Sale

America needs to nail 95 theses to the megachurch door.

Last month, Paula White, one of President Trump’s most faithful and powerful evangelical supporters and a senior adviser to his new White House Faith Office, began offering “seven supernatural blessings” for the Easter season.

If you “honor God” during the period of Passover and Easter, “God will assign an angel to you, he’ll be an enemy to your enemies, he’ll give you prosperity, he’ll take sickness away from you, he will give you long life, he’ll bring increase in inheritance, and he’ll bring a special year of blessing.”

The suggested price for these extraordinary gifts is an offering to Paula White Ministries of $1,000 or more, and if health, wealth and an angel weren’t enough, White’s ministry will also give you a gorgeous Waterford crystal cross.

If you think White is alone in her cynical, heretical grift, then let me introduce you to Lorenzo Sewell, another of Trump’s Christian favorites. He’s a Detroit-area pastor who delivered a benediction at Trump’s second inauguration in January.

On the afternoon of Jan. 20, hours after he prayed in the Capitol Rotunda, Sewell posted on X, “The crypto community was kind enough to send me $Lorenzo, so I have permanently locked my tokens into a Liquidity Pool, so that I will never sell on the community but rather just earn fees as our token continues to flourish!”

“Amazing day, all the glory to God,” he added.

Read the rest here.

When non-Denominational Isn't

Contra Sola Scriptura

See also this.

Alice Linsley: Changing the Church by Stealth

The shrinking Episcopal Church welcomes all. It prides itself on diversity and inclusion. In 1976 the General Convention of ECUSA affirmed homosexual behavior when it passed the “we are children of God” resolution.

In 1977, Bishop Paul Moore (NY) ordained the lesbian Ellen Marie Barrett to the priesthood. She served as Integrity's first co-president along with the late Louie Crew.

Most Episcopalians slept through these changes, many of which were launched with great stealth, as Crew admits in this statement from his paper "Changing the Church": "More 'irregular' ordinations of women took place… after our convention. In Washington at the time, on a missionary journey to our new chapters in the east, Jim Wickliff and I yielded to the counsel of friends who advised that our visibility at the ordination might put in jeopardy lesbians among all early ordinands."

However, the consecration of Gene Robinson in November 2003 stirred many to wakefulness, but by then it was too late to reverse the disastrous course of the Episcopal Church.

There is a popular saying Lex orandi, lex credendi. It means that that there is a direct relationship between the law of praying (lex orandi) and the law of believing (lex credendi). Change the prayers of a community and you can change their beliefs. Innovation can direct people's thoughts away from the received tradition. That happened when the Episcopal Church introduced its 1979 prayer book. It should have been called "A Book of Alternative Services" as was done in other Anglican Provinces that introduced experimental liturgies in the 1970s.

By comparing the ECUSA/TEC prayer book to the Book of Common Prayer 1928 one sees the degradation of orthodox theology and the exultation of TEC's social justice agenda. Even advocates of the 1979 prayer book recognized that it presents heterodox theology, what Urban T. Holmes termed a "differentiated" theology. An Episcopal priest and theologian, Holmes understood that the liturgical revisions of the 1970s drew more on Process Theology and modern philosophy than on Scripture, Tradition, and the Church Fathers. In reference to the Episcopal Church 1979 Prayer Book, he wrote, "It is evident that Episcopalians as a whole are not clear about what has happened. The renewal movement in the 1970s, apart from the liturgical renewal, often reflects a nostalgia for a classical theology which many theologians know has not been viable for almost 200 years. The 1979 Book of Common Prayer is a product of a corporate, differentiated theological mind, which is not totally congruent with many of the inherited formularies of the last few centuries. This reality must soon ‘come home to roost’ in one way or another."

Holmes added, "The church has awakened to the demise of classical theology."

Holmes admitted that the 1979 prayer book is not orthodox, and it does not align with what Anglicans have always believed and how they have always prayed.

Read the rest here.

Presbyterian troubles

And then there is this.

The Methodists Go Hard Left After Schism

The Presbyterian Church of Scotland is in Catastrophic Decline

William Lefroy: The English Church Crisis

This article opens with a serious assumption. It accepts as proved the existence of a crisis in the Church of England. The reality of this is asserted by one who up to a short time since was popularly regarded as the leader of the opposition in Parliament. It is admitted by the First Lord of the Treasury, by the Prime Minister of England and by His Grace the Lord Primate. Nor is it an exaggeration to say the opinion has been expressed by all sorts and conditions of men. It is now indisputable that England is moved by what is termed, alike by friend and foe, "the crisis in the Church."

Read the rest here. 

An increasingly secular Scotland is losing its churches

At first sight the lichen-covered sandstone slab seems to be a doorstep for Morham church in East Lothian. Yet four rusting iron rings set into the stone hint at the slab’s true purpose.

Once the slab is lifted by those four iron rings, stairs lead down into a crypt which hold the remains of some pivotal figures in Scottish history. Their presence is delaying the sale of the church overhead, in a controversy that raises significant questions about the ramifications of one of the biggest property selloffs of modern times.

The Church of Scotland, once one of the most powerful forces in Scottish life, is disposing of hundreds of churches, manses, halls and cottages over the next five years as it faces up to a “perilous” transformation in its fortunes and its place in Scottish society.

Congregations are in steep decline, its clergy are ageing and its finances are in disarray. Like hundreds of other churches earmarked for sale, Morham church should be on the market but that has been halted by an unprecedented row over the fate of the nine people interred there more than 300 years ago.

Morham was once the family church of the Dalrymples, a dynasty that built Newhailes House, a Palladian mansion nearby. Interred in the crypt are the remains of Sir David Dalrymple, the lord advocate who oversaw the union of Scotland’s parliament with Westminster in 1707, and his grandson Lord Hailes, an eminent historian and contemporary of Adam Smith and David Hume.

Adam Fergusson, a former Conservative MEP descended from the Dalrymples, is preparing to take the church to court in February unless it drop its plans to disinter his ancestors and cremate them to clear the way for a sale. “I think the coffins should stay in the church, as their final resting place,” he said. “It’s setting a precedent.”

DJ Johnston-Smith, director of Scotland’s Churches Trust, believes there are up to a dozen similar situations around the country. “Scotland has changed remarkably in our lifetimes, in social attitudes and outlook,” he said. “But these building are anchors in our landscapes and in our collective history.”

The row at Morham illustrates a remarkable trend: the retreat of organised religion in Scotland. Churches of all denominations are being sold across Scotland as congregations dwindle, donations plunge and clerics retire.

The Church of Scotland’s property page advertises one of its most prominent churches in Inverness, the Old High Church, for offers over £150,000, with others in Ballachulish near Glen Coe, Orkney, Shetland, Edinburgh and, in Glasgow, St Columba’s, the city’s last Gaelic church.

The data suggests Scotland’s two largest Christian faiths, Presbyterianism and Catholicism, may be in terminal decline.

In 1982 the Church of Scotland had nearly 920,000 members; last year, that stood at 270,300, a decline of 70%. The average age of its congregants is now 62, and only 60,000 worship in person.

In 1982, the Catholic church conducted 4,870 marriages and had 273 men training to be priests. In 2021, there were just 812 Catholic marriages, with just 12 seminarians in training; it attracted only two new recruits this year. It no longer trains priests in Scotland and this year sold off its most famous seminary in Rome, the Pontifical Scots college, moving into another institution.

Read the rest here.

What is the difference between Roman Catholicism and liberal Protestantism?

At the rate things are going, I'd say about ten years. This needs to be said plainly; what Francis has unleashed in the Catholic Church, is not reform. It's revolution. 

Archbishop of York: Our Father is problematic

The archbishop of York has suggested that opening words of the Lord’s Prayer, recited by Christians all over the world for 2,000 years, may be “problematic” because of their patriarchal association.

In his opening address to a meeting of the Church of England’s ruling body, the General Synod, Stephen Cottrell dwelt on the words “Our Father”, the start of the prayer based on Matthew 6:9–13 and Luke 11:2–4 in the New Testament.

“I know the word ‘father’ is problematic for those whose experience of earthly fathers has been destructive and abusive, and for all of us who have laboured rather too much from an oppressively patriarchal grip on life,” he said.

His comment – a brief aside in a speech that focused on the need for unity – will divide members of the C of E, a body whose differences on issues of sexuality, identity and equality have been highly visible for years.

Read the rest here.

One in five United Methodist congregations in the US have left the denomination

More than 6,000 United Methodist congregations — a fifth of the U.S. total — have now received permission to leave the denomination amid a schism over theology and the role of LGBTQ people in the nation’s second-largest Protestant denomination.

Those figures emerge following the close of regular meetings in June for the denomination’s regional bodies, known as annual conferences. The departures began with a trickle in 2019 — when the church created a four-year window of opportunity for U.S. congregations to depart over LGBTQ-related issues — and cascaded to its highest level this year.

Church law forbids the marriage or ordination of “self-avowed, practicing homosexuals,” but many conservatives have chosen to leave amid a growing defiance of those bans in many U.S. churches and conferences.

Many of the departing congregations are joining the Global Methodist Church, a denomination created last year by conservatives breaking from the UMC, while others are going independent or joining different denominations.

Read the rest here.

The State of American Protestantism and the Decline of the Mainline

This is a pretty good overview of where things are and seem to be going. On which note, I've seen a number of this young man's videos and generally found them to be both informative and interesting.

Texas: More than 500 Methodist churches have left the UMC

Hundreds of Texas churches have voted to split from the United Methodist Church denomination this year for deviating from scripture on abortion, homosexuality and other issues.

On Saturday, representatives of the Northwest Texas Annual Conference of United Methodist Churches voted to allow 145 churches to disaffiliate from the UMC in a special session in Lubbock.

Because the conference represents 200 congregations, about 75 percent of which are leaving, the conference likely will dissolve next year, The Texas Tribune reports. The vote was 261-24.

Additionally, 294 churches also voted to leave the denomination on Saturday at the Central Texas Annual Conference in Houston, according to the report.

In total, 546 Methodist churches in Texas (about 45 percent) voted to disaffiliate this year, The Week reports. UMC churches in other states also are leaving.

Read the rest here.

On this date in 1638

Anne Hutchinson was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony as part of the resolution of the Antinomian Controversy. 

The Southern Baptists Sever Ties with Four Churches

The Southern Baptist Convention’s executive committee voted on Tuesday to expel four of its member churches, ousting two for policies that “affirm homosexual behavior” and the others for employing pastors who are convicted sex offenders.

Read the rest here.

Mexico: Evangelical Protestants are gaining ground

The Catholic majority in Mexico is slipping, as Protestants surpassed 10 percent of the population in the country for the first time ever.

According to recently released data from Mexico’s 2020 census, the Protestant/evangelical movement increased from 7.5 percent in 2010 to 11.2 percent last year.

The Catholic Church has historically dominated the religious landscape across Latin America, but especially in Mexico, which ranks among the most heavily Catholic countries in the region. Today, though an overwhelming majority of Mexicans still identify as Catholic, declines are accelerating.

It took 50 years—from 1950 to 2000—for the proportion of Catholics in Mexico to drop from 98 percent to 88 percent. Now, only two decades later, that percentage has slipped another 10 points to 77.7 percent.

Read the rest here.