Man Gives his Life to Christ at New York City's Bowery Mission Chapel

Thursday, November 26, 2009
By Lauren Green

James Foresteire made good money trading diamonds. He had money, cars and a nice home.

"I wanted for nothing," he says.

But after a family tragedy, he soothed his pain with drugs and alcohol. Eventually, he lost everything.

"I ended up on a friend’s couch with 50 cents in my pocket, too afraid to spend it," Foresteire says.

James Macklin tells of a life of searching for excitement that his successful business didn’t provide.

"I began to smoke that crack cocaine," he says. "Boy, I tell you. That was the beginning of my end."

Click here for video.

Though Foresteire and Macklin came from very different cultures, they fell victim to the same addictions. But for both of them, the end turned out to be another beginning.

They found redemption at the same place on New York’s Lower East Side: the Bowery Mission Chapel.

Now celebrating its 100th anniversary, the Bowery Mission Chapel has changed little in the last century. Hymn-singing, a sermon and a free meal provide food for the body and nourishment for the soul.

"It really started out as a prayer movement on Wall Street," says Pastor Reggie Stutzman, who works full time at the Mission and gives several sermons a week at the chapel. "A hundred years later, their work through prayer and seeking God … we’re still doing it."

click to read full article at Fox News

Church Apologizes to Native Americans After 400 years

Friday, November 27, 2009

 

NEW YORK —  Members of one of America's oldest Protestant churches officially apologized Friday — for the first time — for massacring and displacing Native Americans 400 years ago.

"We consumed your resources, dehumanized your people and disregarded your culture, along with your dreams, hopes and great love for this land," the Rev. Robert Chase told descendants from both sides. "With pain, we the Collegiate Church, remember our part in these events."

The minister spoke on Native American Heritage Day at a reconciliation ceremony of the Lenape tribe with the Collegiate Church, started in 1628 in then-New Amsterdam as the Reformed Dutch Church.

The rite was held in front of the Museum of the American Indian in lower Manhattan, where Dutch colonizers had built their fort near an Indian trail now called Broadway, near Wall Street.

The Collegiate Church was considered the "conscience" of the new colony, whose merchants quickly developed commerce with the world in fur and grains — till then the turf of the natives.

Surrounded by Lenape Indians, the Dutch colonists "were hacking men, women and children to death," said Ronald Holloway, the chairman of the Sand Hill band of Lenapes, who lived here before Henry Hudson landed 400 years ago.

The Indians dispersed across the country, eventually ending up on government-formed reservations. On Friday, some came from as far away as Oklahoma.

During the ceremony, Chase embraced Holloway and, as symbolic gestures of healing, the two sides exchanged wampum — strings of beads used by North American Indians as money or ornament. A boy representing the Lenapes and a girl from the Collegiate Church put necklaces on each other.

While Friday's ceremony exuded warmth and openness, accompanied by an Indian drumming circle and the haunting sound of a wooden flute, the feelings leading up to the reconciliation were mixed.

"After 400 years, when someone says 'I'm sorry,' you say, 'Really?' " Holloway said before the ritual. "There was some kind of uneasiness. But then you've got to accept someone's sincere apology; they said, 'We did it. We ran you off, we killed you.' "

In New York City, the Collegiate churches are composed of four congregations including the landmark Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue led by the late Rev. Norman Vincent Peale.

The church plans to sponsor educational activities and exhibits to teach children history — including the Indian reverence for preserving the purity of the land taken over by the Dutch colonists.

University outlines 're-education' for those who hold 'wrong' views

Posted: November 27, 2009
9:15 pm Eastern

By Bob Unruh
© 2009 WorldNetDaily

University of Minnesota president Robert Bruininks

A program proposed at the University of Minnesota would result in required examinations of teacher candidates on "white privilege" as well as "remedial re-education" for those who hold the "wrong" views, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

The organization, which promotes civil liberties on the campuses of America's colleges and universities, has dispatched a letter to University of Minnesota President Robert Bruininks asking him to intervene to prevent the adoption of policies proposed in his College of Education and Human Development.

"The university's general counsel should be asked to comment as soon as possible," said the letter from Adam Kissel, an officer with The FIRE. "If the Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group achieves its stated goals, the result will be political and ideological screening of applicants, remedial re-education for those with the 'wrong' views and values, [and] withholding of degrees from those upon whom the university's political reeducation efforts proved ineffective."

By any "non-totalitarian" standards, he wrote, the the plans being made so far by the school are "severely unjust and impermissibly intrude into matters of individual conscience."

Kissel wrote that it appears that the university "intends to redesign its admissions process so that it screens out people with the 'wrong' beliefs and values – those who either do not have sufficient 'cultural competence' or those who the college judges will not be able to be converted to the 'correct' beliefs and values even after remedial re-education."

"These intentions violate the freedom of conscience of the university's students. As a public university bound by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, the university is both legally and morally obligated to uphold this fundamental right," he wrote.

WND messages left with the university requesting comment did not generate a response today.

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Among the issues discussed in the plans are requirements that teachers would be able to instruct students on the "myth of meritocracy" in the United States, "the history of demands for assimilation to white, middle-class, Christian meanings and values," and the "history of white racism."

The demands appear to be similar to those promoted earlier at the University of Delaware.

As WND reported, the Delaware university's office of residential life was caught requiring students to participant in a program that taught "all whites are racist."

School officials immediately defended the teaching, but in the face of a backlash from alumni and publicity about its work, the school decided to drop the curriculum, although some factions later suggested its revival.

FIRE, which challenged the Delaware plan, later produced a video explaining how the institution of the university pushed for the teachings, was caught and later backed off:

Click to read full article at World Net Daily