Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Christians Start Bible Blitz on Social Networking Sites to reach the lost and inspire others.

MEDIA ADVISORY, Dec. 8 /Christian Newswire/ -- Christians, churches and youth groups of all denominations are working together to fill the USA with God's Word and the truth about God in US history. Participants are doing this in a nationwide outreach called Bible Blitz USA.
Every Monday, a Bible verse and a patriotic God quote are emailed to all signed up to share across America during the week. Free graphics are also included.
Popular ways to Bible Blitz USA are to spread the quotes on social websites like Facebook, Twitter and Christian Chirp, church bulletins, blogs, school papers, dinner conversations, articles, online comments to stories, church newsletters, home schools and videos. People also memorize the quotes each week.
"I feel good sharing about God and our Christian nation. I love the results", said one participant.
To sign up, go to www.PrayDailyAmerica.com/BibleBlitzUSA.html. Pray Daily America is a national ministry uniting the USA in Christ, based on loving God and loving one another.
"Bible Blitz USA is a fun and easy way for entire youth groups to help the USA, while learning about the Bible and US history. It is a powerful tool that God has made available to help every church member to get involved in sharing the Gospel," said one pastor.

to sign up, go to:
www.PrayDailyAmerica.com/BibleBlitzUSA.html

Click to Read Full Article At Christian News Wire

Holy Cow! Connecticut Cow born with Cross on Forehead

Wednesday, December 09, 2009

From the Associated Press

STERLING, Conn.  —  A holy cow in Connecticut, perhaps? Or maybe a divine bovine?

A calf with a white marking on its forehead in the approximate shape of a cross was born last week at a dairy farm in Sterling, a small rustic town on the Rhode Island border.

Owner Brad Davis tells WFSB-TV he thinks the marking may be a message from above, though he's still trying to figure out what that message might be.

The mostly brown calf is half Jersey, half Holstein. Neighborhood children have named it Moses.

The chairman of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Dairy Science tells the Norwich Bulletin newspaper it's not unusual for a Holstein cow to have a white marking on its head. But department chairman Ric Grummer says the cross shape is unique.

Missionary turns 100 years old and still going strong!

Today marks the centennial of Lesslie Newbigin's birthday, who was born December 8, 1909 and died January 30, 1998. Andy Rowell, a doctoral student at Duke University, wrote 10 things you probably did not know about Newbigin. Christianity Today also profiled Newbigin in 1996. Newbigin's The Gospel in a Pluralist Society was included in CT's "Books of the Century" and "The Top 50 Books That Have Shaped Evangelicals."

It was an unlikely adventure to launch a global ministry—a tediously long bus journey from Madras, India, to Birmingham, England. It was an unlikely background for a champion of the gospel to emerge from—the theologically liberal Student Christian Movement. It was an unlikely age at which to unintentionally initiate the emergent and missional church movements—age 66 after 35 years of cross-cultural missionary service. But Bishop Lesslie Newbigin made his most important contribution and did his most profound thinking in his 70s and 80s. Can this man, whose birth centenary was celebrated in December, help today's church navigate a critical period of change?

Newbigin was born 100 years ago on December 8, 1909. After completing theological studies at Cambridge University and working briefly for the Student Christian Movement, he left for India in 1936 to labor as a missionary, evangelist, and apologist. There he was instrumental in bringing together the Congregational, Presbyterian, Reformed, Episcopal, Methodist, Baptist, and Pentecostal churches from India, Pakistan, and Burma into one ecumenical denomination: the Church of South India. On his return to England, he was shocked to find that the West was as urgent a mission field as the East. Refusing to settle into retirement, he wrote prolifically, issuing a clarion call to the Western church to rediscover its missionary mandate.

This was not merely a response to the declining state of the church, but the result of Newbigin's wrestling with the interplay of such enormous ideas as election, modernity, contextualization, the end of Christendom, and missional ecclesiology. Seeing the bigger picture of the gospel has inspired many of Newbigin's readers to grasp more fully the interaction between gospel, church, and culture. Three major themes stand out as particularly pertinent to our time.

Bigger than we think

When I speak with students around the world, I find them confident in their ability to present the gospel. They tell me that God loves me, that I have sinned, that Christ died for me, and that I need to believe in Jesus to get to heaven. Their confidence is reassuring, but their content is worrying. Doctoral students and seminarians often seem to have no deeper grasp of the gospel than do Sunday school children. The gospel they present has been reduced to a personalized product that offers the ultimate bargain—exchanging spiritual poverty for eternal riches. The problem with much of our evangelism is not what we include but what we omit: the Holy Spirit, the church, persecution, obedience, mission, reconciliation, resurrection, and new creation.

The gospel according to Newbigin challenges this thinking in two distinct ways. First, he calls us back to a gospel that brings personal reconciliation with God, but also a gospel that connects us with God's reconciling purposes in conscience, culture, church, creation, and cosmos. Second, he calls us back to a gospel that is more than a series of bullet points, a story that centers on the flesh-and-blood character of the divine Christ.

Newbigin's call is earthed in his careful exposition of John's gospel, but it draws as well on thinkers such as Martin Buber, Michael Polanyi, Hans Frei, and Alasdair MacIntyre, synthesizing their reflections into a powerful, unwittingly postmodern-friendly apologetic. Newbigin encourages us to tell the stories of the gospel as part of the grand sweep of the biblical drama. This is vital if an increasingly biblically illiterate generation is going to hear the gospel for the first time. We must explain that the stories of Jesus, true both historically and experientially, are the only way to understand how our individual stories make sense, and we must demand a personal decision to follow the Lord of all history.

As Newbigin explained in 1994, "The true understanding of the Bible is that it tells a story of which my life is a part, the story of God's tireless, loving, wrathful, inexhaustible patience with the human family, and of our unbelief, blindness, disobedience. To accept this story as the truth of the human story (and so of my story) commits me personally to a life of discernment and obedience in the new circumstances of each day."

As we tell the Jesus story, we draw people to him as a person worthy of allegiance rather than as a proposition to be evaluated.

Newbigin the evangelist's own lifelong commitment to church unity throws down the gauntlet. Whatever we need to do to help this generation to hear the gospel, we need to do together.

As Newbigin wrote, "I have been called and commissioned, through no merit of mine, to carry this message, to tell this story, to give this invitation. It is not my story or my invitation. It has no coercive intent. It is an invitation from the one who loved you and gave himself up for you. That invitation will come with winsomeness if it comes from a community in which the grace of the Redeemer is at work."

click to read full article at Christianitytoday.com

North Korean Children Starving to death in the streets

By Worthy News Correspondents Eric Leijenaar reporting from the Netherlands and Stefan J. Bos

Many children die in North Korea of starvation, aid workers and local Christians say.ps say.

Many children die in North Korea of starvation, aid workers and local Christians say.

PYONGYANG/AMSTERDAM (Worthy News)-- Christians in North Korea said Wednesday, November 25, a massive famine has broken out in their autocratic-ruled nation with many children "dying" while security forces send malnourished people to labor camps for allegedly refusing to join the "100-Day Battle."
"In the province Hwanghae it is again normal to see dead children lying on the streets," local Christians added in statements distributed by Open Doors, a Netherlands-based group supporting persecuted Christians in North Korea and other countries.
North Korean Christians blamed a nation-wide production-drive imposed by the regime of the country's leader Kim Jong-il, known as the "100-Day Battle", for the apparently worst famine in years.
"The people don't get the chance to keep themselves alive," Christians said in comments obtained by Worthy News and its partner agency BosNewsLife. Those seen as not working for the country's interests are immediately send to labor camps, where inmates have been tortured, Christians said.
The new '100-Day Battle', will take the total length of the mobilization period up to the end of the year, and possibly even into early 2010, pro-North Korean media reported.
MORE BATTLES
The publication of the General Association of North Korean Residents in Japan, Chosun Shinbo, reportedly said the latest battle followed  the '150-Day Battle' when "many units have been achieving fruitful results."
"Without slowing down a bit, [the North Korean people will] keep up their vigor during the '100-Day Battle'."
Christians said the latest developments proof that Kim Jong-il is not able to provide enough food to the population. The current famine is becoming similar to the famine of the 1990s when at least an estimated one million people died of starvation, suggested Open Doors spokesman Jan Vermeer. Some estimates speak of "millions" of people.
"We have learned from our contacts [in North Korea] that parents die or leave their children because they can no longer see how their sons and daughters are dying of hunger," he told Worthy News.
"There are whole groups of children roaming through the country. If they are detained by police, they are brought to overfull orphanages where they die. To keep themselves alive, North Koreans are trading at night at illegal markets. The next day they have to report themselves again at their [state] working places," Vermeer added.

Click to read full story at Worthy News