Organization of the Week
Throughout the year, Mel Trotter Ministries provides shelter, food, clothing, education, Biblical teaching, computer-based learning, and work training and experience to meet people at the physical and spiritual points of need.
Your gracious donation of $28.80 will provide food and care for 15 hungry, homeless, and hurting people. Men, women, and children are counting on you to provide help and hope.
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Audio Bibles in MP3 format (the only English one available is KJV - but there are a few languages that are available for download, free)
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I have purchased WAY more of this guy's music than I intended...
Please watch this youtube video (Denez Prigent and Lisa Gerrard singing for the soundtrack from "Black Hawk Down"
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Willow Creek discovers that you reach the lost by equipping the saints!
Hawkins says, “We used to think you can’t upset a seeker. But while focusing on that we’ve really upset the Christ-centered people.” He spoke about the high levels of dissatisfaction mature believer have with churches. Drawing from the 200 churches and the 57,000 people that have taken the survey, he said that most people are leaving the church because they’re not being challenged enough.
Because it’s the mature Christians who drive evangelism in the church Hawkins says, “Our strategy to reach seekers is now about focusing on the mature believers. This is a huge shift for Willow.”
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Rice for V.P.?
It should be a profoundly offensive notion to any freedom loving person in a democratic context, that the promotion of an inexperienced new face somehow represents black achievement while the promotion of a sitting Secretary of State, former National Security Advisor, former Stanford University Provost, and chief confidant to the sitting President of the United States should be considered a nasty ploy to garner black votes! Given the comprehensive evaluation we have had of her over the past twenty years but more specifically over the past ten years, she would seem the natural selection – contra wise, Obama and Clinton would seem the nasty ploy to garner black votes.
(...)
However, injecting considerations of race and gender in the case of Condoleezza Rice is incredibly infantile, ridiculous and arbitrary. The time to discuss that with regard to her was nearly a decade ago. Condoleezza Rice is now the most qualified name being explored for the Executive – certainly more qualified then Obama and Clinton with their resume's combined. I am not asking you to vote for the ticket that she may be associated with simply because she is a black woman...contra wise, I am asking you to vote based upon the content of her character and the quality of her leadership alone as judged through her experience and until it is confirmed that she is on the ticket, to dismiss with vehemence anyone who would reduce this possibility to a mere racial and/or gender consideration. Condoleezza Rice represents all that blacks and feminist have been fighting for these many years! Lets not dismiss her simply because she is a conservative: this is the change we've been waiting for – real live personal achievement with slave blood still running through her veins, Jim Crow memories yet playing on the canvas of her mind, and still single – the requisite consequence of female strength and independence.
(HT: Reformed Blacks of America)
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"What is a 'Reformed Church'?"
What is a Reformed church anyway? Why are they called “Reformed”? What do they believe? Where did they come from? What do they do? These are the types of basic questions I hope to introduce here. What I hope I am able to communicate to you here is that Reformed churches are Christian churches—believing that the Bible is the Word of God, that there is only one God who exists eternally as a Trinity, and that Jesus Christ is both God and man. Reformed churches are also Protestant churches—rejecting the claims of the Pope to be the Head of the Church, acknowledging instead that Jesus Christ is the Head of his Church, and that he rules and governs his Church by his Word and Spirit. Finally, Reformed churches are just that, Reformed churches—believing that sinful humans are saved by grace alone, from eternity past to eternity future, and that we experience this grace of God as the Holy Spirit uses certain means that God has appointed in the Church: the preaching of the Word and celebration of the Sacraments.
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and the photo of the week...
From "Michigan in Pictures"