Diablo Valley pastors and churches offer iLent events beginning, Feb 6
February 5, 2008
Diablo Valley pastors and churches are sponsoring a 40-day, iLent Project that includes a web site, a booklet with daily devotional written by local pastors, a pastor swap, YouTube videos, online dialog, discussion of featured videos and more, all during Lent, beginning Feb 6 thru Easter, March 23. In association with Churches Without Shoes, the 20+ congregations are exploring ways they can work together to better serve God and Community.
- February 10 will see Diablo Valley churches swap pastors during Sunday services
- A 5-Fold Ministry Conference is planned for February 22-23, at St Matthew’s on Wiget Lane
- March 17, 40-hrs of prayer thru Maundy Thursday at Hills Vineyard Community Center
- March 20, Community Wide Communion at Walnut Creek Presbyterian in Walnut Creek
Additional community service and teaching events are planned for April and May. Stay tuned.
Faith and the Presidency
January 20, 2008
Here’s an interesting article by Jim Skillen that looks at the recent hub-bub about the religious claims from the various presidential candidates that places them squarely in the mainstream of American Civil Religion, more than anything else.
Skillen concludes:
…Separation of church and state is boilerplate. To express personal faith as a mode of character-witness and as a motivation for service is no longer unusual. To locate one’s faith within America’s civil religion is obligatory. But after that it is a quick and disconnected flight to most public policy issues.
What we have, then, in the campaign rhetoric is civil religion as ground for moral values and morality as ground for self-government. Yet as we know, the policy proposals offered by the candidates are as diverse as what liberal Democrats, conservative Republicans, and those in the middle have always offered. The common values of liberty, equality, and service open onto the familiar disputes about how much (or how little) government the self-governing people want.
What is missing from the candidates’ professions of Christian (and Mormon) faith is a philosophy of the political community that clarifies the responsibilities of government in relation to the responsibilities that belong to all the other institutions, organizations, and relationships of human society. What we need is a Christian public philosophy that connects directly to office holding, policy formulation, and governing. Americanism and the liberal political tradition do not generate such a philosophy, and that is why we have what we have.
Advancing religious freedom for non-profits
December 28, 2007
I know critical social issues are of no matter to Republicans who want to “Just Win Baby.” Which is how we got to Governor Schwarzenegger, by the way. Anyways here is an important update about how the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA) can be used to protect faith-based social service agencies working with federal, state, and local governments, allowing them the right to hire employees that share their mission and values, just like secular social services and political activists can.
Local Church offers free childcare for holiday shoppers, Dec 14 & 21
December 9, 2007
Faith Christian Fellowship, located in Walnut Creek on Bancroft off Treat near David and Minert, is offering free childcare to busy holiday shoppers during the evenings of December 14 and 21, between 6:00 and 10:00 p.m.
Highly qualified childcare volunteers will provide games, crafts, and movies for the older children, and loving care for infants and toddlers in a toy-filled nursery.
Space is limited, so please call 925-324-2099, download the flyer and pass along to a friend, or e-mail info@faithfellowship.com.
Religious freedom under fire in Congress
October 25, 2007
The Coalition to Preserve Religious Freedom has issued and ENDA Alert as the House of Representatives will soon vote on HR 3685, The Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA), which does not adequately protect the employment practices of faith-based organizations.
Most faith-based organizations would be exempt. However, faith-based schools (k-12 and higher education) are included in the exemption only if they are controlled by a church or denomination or are dedicated to propagating religion. K-12 schools and liberal arts higher education would thus be exempt only if they are controlled by a religious body. But many religious schools, colleges, and universities are themselves religious–they aren’t religious because they are controlled by some other religious organization. Read more
Concord churches celebrate World Communion Sunday at Todos Santos Plaza, Oct 7
October 1, 2007
The public is invited to a community wide worship service to be held at Todos Santos Plaza in Concord, on Sunday, October 7, beginning at 5:00 p.m. The service celebrates World Communion Sunday. The event is organized by over 20 churches in the greater Concord area.
Religious bigots in Congress use Head Start to dismantle Civil Rights Act of 1964
June 24, 2007
House Democrats recently voted to discriminate against faith-based groups that participate in Head Start by disallowing the ability of care providers to hire and fire staffers based on religious grounds.
According to former White House staffer, Stanley Carlson-Thies, now with the Center for Public Justice,
“Under the 1964 Civil Rights Act of 1964, it is not “discrimination” when a
faith-based organization ensures that its employees respect its religious
identity. To become inclusive, Head Start must accept religious organizations for whom a faith perspective is a legitimate job qualification—just as many secular groups check applicants’ political or environmental views.”
Would Congress pass a law that would prohibit extreme liberals like George Miller from hiring like-minded staffers? Should we force Planned Parenthood to hire Right-to-Life zealots? It’s past dangerous (and constitutional) when elected officials start deciding which viewpoints are acceptable in the public square based on partisan politics.
Time to reread banned books like the Bill of Rights and the 1st Amendment to the Constitution. Congress’s action borders on establishment of secularism as official State religion and should be challenged immediately in court.
If the public purpose of Head Start is education, and recipients have the right to choose some other provider, Congress should not foist such a plainly bigoted view point on a program that has a hard enough time justifying its mission and outcomes to Congress and the American public.
2008 Presidential campaign rhetoric will not bring us together
January 21, 2007
You can tune out now. It won’t make a difference. All the veiled Biblical references from candidates promising to create a “new politics” and to “bring America together” is baloney.
False prophets if you will.
For example, in his speeches and in his best-selling book, The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama tells Americans that he wants to transcend “the smallness of our politics” and lead a “project of national renewal.” In his web-site announcement on January 16, he identified himself with those who are hungry for “a different kind of politics.” He is expected to formerly announce his campaign on Feb 10.
Even New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, on announcing his presidential campaign exploratory committee, told AP that, “The country is looking for somebody to bring the country together — a unifier, a healer.”
It is not clear, however, what Obama or Richardson, or any other Democratic politician seeking to manipulate images of hope means by a “new politics.” They sound like a good ideas, but their voting records reveal only traditional liberal Democrat mumbo-jumbo.
These guys, Hillary, too, plus Republicans including McCain, Romney, Guiliani, as well as Brownback’s family vaules, must do more than spout platitudes about the critical condition of our national electoral and legislative systems. As Jim Skillen at the Center for Public Justice argues, “The reason today’s politics is so “bitter and partisan, so gummed up by money and influence” (as Obama says in his book), is that interest-group politics, congressional management, and the electoral system reinforce one another to produce the outcomes we experience.”
Obama, Richardson, Clinton, Sharpton, McCain, Guiliani, Romney, Brownback— any of those knuckleheads winning an election will change none of this.
Let me repeat for emphasis.
Obama, Richardson, Clinton, Sharpton, McCain, Guiliani, Romney, Brownback— any of those knuckleheads winning an election will change none of this.
As president they each will have little power to advance a new politics unless during the campaign they declare their intention to reform the electoral system and then, after victory, lead Congress to make substantial changes.
But you and I both know this is not going to happen, and American voters will again—and quickly—wander off searching for some fresh new face who will blather on about “redeeming” the nation come the 2012 electoral cycle.
Two OpEds to meditate on this Sunday
January 14, 2007
Two OpEds that appeared in prestigious national newspapers made headlines last Sunday. Both dealt with tough topics concerning the state of religion in America.
In last Sunday’s USA Today, Oliver “Buzz” Thomas writes about the role of religion in his One Country, Many Faiths. Thomas describes the lay of the land: “We have a big group on the far right and a big group on the far left, and both groups plan to stick around. How, then, do we live together with such deep differences? Better still, how do we remain “one nation, indivisible?” Is there any real hope for finding common ground?”
Meanwhile, in the Washington Post, the Rev. Yates and Os Guiness explain, Why We Left the Epsicopal Church. These leading lights of American Protestantism explain that: “The American Episcopal Church no longer believes the historic, orthodox Christian faith common to all believers. Some leaders expressly deny the central articles of the faith — saying that traditional theism is “dead,” the incarnation is “nonsense,” the resurrection of Jesus is a fiction, the understanding of the cross is “a barbarous idea,” the Bible is “pure propaganda” and so on. Others simply say the creed as poetry or with their fingers crossed.”
I suppose the lesson is this: while faith communities (either religious or secular) may wage internicene battle, the Public Square must accommodate us all. This of course goes against the teaching of the secular left as well as the religious right, as both extremes attempt to show the true heathen the chapel door. In the end, faith communities, whether environmental or theological, can excommunicate while governments are public-legal communities that cannot.
