» 2. Commitment to a cause

Will the last Presbyterian please turn out the lights?

The Presbyterian Church USA is hemorrhaging.

According to the number crunchers at denominational headquarters, membership loss for the denomination in 2005 was estimated at sixty-five thousand, followed by an eighty-five thousand projected loss in 2006.

The projected 2006 loss would represent a single-year decline of 3.7 percent, the highest [...]

WesleyBlog asks: Are We Ready For Real Modern Day Circuit Riders?

We may pray that God would raise up a new generation of church planting movements. But would we be comfortable if he answered our request?

Would you have signed up to join the Methodist circuit riders (church planters) who conquered the US frontier over two centuries [...]

I will never give up my faith in Jesus Christ! I will gladly suffer for my Saviour.

Wandaro of Ethiopia
1919-1991Arrested for his faith, flogged for three straight hours, and thrown into prison almost dead, Wandaro of Ethiopia (1919-1991) came out a year later to help lead his country’s fledgling church into enormous evangelistic growth. When missionaries [...]

This crude graffiti cartoon from the early second century, may be the oldest depiction of Christ.

In the drawing we see Alexamenos bowing down before a crucified man with the head of a donkey.

The Greek caption reads “Alexamenos sebete theon” — Alexamenos worships his god.This early graffito (wall-scratching; singular of graffiti) was discovered in 1857 in [...]

Committed people make history.

The second characteristic of dynamic movements in mp3 format. Commitment to the cause.

Movements

The great Christian revolutions come not by the discovery of something that was not known before.
They happen when someone takes radically something that was already there.

Helmut Richard Niebuhr (1894-1962)
Source

While women weep as they do now,

I’ll fight.

While little children go hungry as they do now,

I’ll fight.

While men go to prison in and out in and out,

I’ll fight.

While there yet remains one dark soul without the light of God,

I’ll fight. I’ll fight to the very end.

General William Booth
Salvation Army Founder

My sport in high school was [...]

Despite the devastation of the last thirty or more years (see “Disappearing nuns”), there are some signs of renewal and hope for religious orders. Those signs are evident among the newer orders that have remained true to their spiritual tradition and are still making the traditional demands of religious life. Those orders are successfully recruiting [...]

For over fifteen hundred years, religious orders have been the driving force in the renewal and mission of the Catholic Church. Throughout their history, the orders have sought to maintain high levels of commitment to their cause. That began to change in the 1960’s when the orders sought to enter the modern age following the [...]