by | Jun 8, 2023 | Uncategorized
With CBN, “The 700 Club,” Regent, the Christian Coalition, and a run for president, he changed evangelicals’ place in public life.
Across six decades in front of the camera, Pat Robertson brought his Pentecostal sensibilities and conservative politics into millions of living rooms as the pioneer of Christian television and the leader of the Christian Coalition.
The outspoken broadcaster died Thursday at age 93 in Virginia Beach, Virginia, home to his Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) and Regent University. Robertson signed off as host of CBN’s flagship program The 700 Club in 2021 at age 91, though he continued to appear on monthly Q&A segments.
During his TV career, the one-time Republican presidential candidate hopeful interviewed five US presidents and dozens of global leaders; prayed for millions of viewers; offered political predictions; and stirred controversy with his off-the-cuff commentary characterizing disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes, and the 9/11 attacks as God’s judgment.
Although his controversial remarks garnered a lot of attention in his later years, Robertson was also among the most influential evangelicals of the 20th century, with an entrepreneurial spirit and a willingness to do whatever he sensed was God’s will.
“Robertson has shaped three major religious developments: the charismatic renewal, Christian TV, and evangelical politics,” CT wrote in a 1996 profile of Robertson. “Together, these developments helped transform evangelicalism from a small, defended backwater to the leading force in American Christianity.”
Before CBN became the broadcasting powerhouse it is today—with a $300 million annual budget and a reach across 174 countries—it was a defunct Virginia television station and a call from God.
There was no successful model for Christian TV when Robertson bought …
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by | Jun 7, 2023 | Uncategorized
The Duggar documentary reminds Christians that we are the generation not of Joshua but of Jesus.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
The Amazon Prime docuseries Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets explores the reality-television homeschooling family and the system that shaped them—Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles—along with the fundamentalist mindset behind it.
Much of what it discusses felt nauseatingly familiar given all that we’ve seen in the last several years. One phrase, however, particularly struck me: the Joshua Generation.
Such was the language used by some sectors of the homeschooling and other movements to indicate the “long game” of training up those who could restore national greatness and steer the country back to a “Christian America.” And as Alex Harris, who was interviewed in the series, points out, some aspects of this idea became a reality.
There’s nothing wrong with preparing students for places of influence in politics (or medicine or business), but the Christian nationalism mixed up in much of the Joshua Generation rhetoric betrays a bigger question: the nature of real power. It seems the Joshua Generation came from a generation that did not know Joshua.
The language in the Book of Joshua alludes to the transition from Moses to his successor. Moses led the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt—and could see the Promised Land from a distance but didn’t enter it. On the other hand, Joshua led the people across the Jordan to defeat the Canaanites and take over the territory God had given them. The modern implications are clear: One generation of American Christians offers up a vision of a Christian America, and the next makes it happen.
Note that …
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by | Jun 7, 2023 | Uncategorized
Supporters see it as win for religious freedom and school choice, while opponents are gearing up to challenge its constitutionality.
US courts have long wrestled with the extent to which government funding can be used at private religious schools. And on June 5, 2023, Oklahoma’s five-person Statewide Virtual Charter School Board pushed this much-debated question into new territory by approving plans for a religious charter school—the first in the nation.
Under the proposed charter, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School plans to open in the fall of 2024 with up to 500 K-12 students from across the state. The school would be run by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa, but, like all charter schools, would be paid for with taxpayer dollars.
School choice advocates have won key cases at the Supreme Court in recent years, opening up more ways for public dollars to support faith-based education. A charter school—privately operated, but publicly funded—would be the most dramatic of these challenges to how the separation of church and state applies to education.
“The approval of any publicly funded religious school is contrary to Oklahoma law and not in the best interest of taxpayers,” Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond said in a statement after the Monday vote, warning that the board and state will likely face legal challenges.
The key question is not whether a charter would help or harm local education, but whether explicitly religious instruction at charter schools is constitutional, given the First Amendment’s protections against government establishment of religion. Moreover, Oklahoma law requires charter schools to be nonsectarian.
Recent trend
Advocates of expanding public funding to faith-based schools have been encouraged by three recent Supreme Court cases that …
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by | Jun 7, 2023 | Uncategorized
With shootings on the rise, more churches are dropping no-firearms policies and turning to gun-carriers in their flock, survey finds.
Most churches have some type of security measures in place during worship services. Pastors point to intentional plans and armed church members more than other measures, but compared to three years ago, fewer say they have plans and more say they have gun-carrying congregants.
Numerous fatal shootings have occurred at churches in recent years. In March, an armed assailant killed six people at The Covenant School, a Christian school in Nashville, Tenn. Shootings have also occurred at other places of worship like Jewish synagogues and Sikh temples.
When asked about their protocols when they gather for worship, around 4 in 5 US Protestant pastors (81%) say their church has some type of security measure in place, according to a study from Lifeway Research. Still, more than 1 in 6 (17%) say they don’t use any of the seven potential measures included in the study, and 2 percent aren’t sure.
“Churches are not immune to violence, disputes, domestic disagreements, vandalism and burglary,” said Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research. “While loving one another is a core Christian teaching, churchgoers still sin, and non-churchgoers are invited and welcomed. So real security risks exist whether a congregation wants to acknowledge them or not.”
Security measures
In terms of security specifics, pastors are most likely to say their congregation has an intentional plan for an active shooter situation (57%). Additionally, most (54%) also say armed church members are part of the measures they have in place.
Around a quarter (26%) use radio communication among security personnel, while 1 in 5 say they have a no firearms policy in the building where they meet (21%) or armed …
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by | Jun 6, 2023 | Uncategorized
“She knew how to tell a story with power.”
Few evangelicals know Elizabeth Sherrill’s name. But because of her, they know David Wilkerson, Brother Andrew, Corrie ten Boom, and dozens of other modern men and women who overcame by faith. Working closely with her husband John, she reported, wrote, and edited some of the most compelling, popular, and widely influential accounts of contemporary Christians on bookshelves today.
Sherrill had “an uncanny knack for always touching the heart strings,” according to the late Pentecostal leader Jack W. Hayford. She wrote more than 2,000 articles for Guideposts and coauthored more than 30 nonfiction titles. She founded Chosen Books with her husband and edited and published numerous Christian bestsellers, including Chuck Colson’s Born Again, Don Basham’s Deliver Us from Evil, and Bilquis Sheikh’s I Dared to Call Him Father.
Sherrill died in Massachusetts on May 20. She was 95.
“I marveled at the way the books she touched … inspired readers toward belief,” Jeff Crosby, president of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, told Publishers Weekly. “Elizabeth’s gifts as a manuscript stylist, editor, and publisher were enormous. She knew how to tell a story with power.”
Sherrill “found a perfect calling,” according to Rick Hamlin, former executive editor of Guideposts, “in coaxing stories out of others and then helping them share their highly personal accounts of God at work in their lives.”
She was born Elizabeth Schindler in Los Angeles, California, on February 14, 1928. She was raised in Scarsdale, New York, in what she recalled was a cold, nonreligious home with parents who got upset when she had any emotions. Her father, a private …
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