Sunday, October 22, 2006

The word "God"

I have been thinking why whenever the word "God" is mentioned, non-believer would usually feel annoyed or irritated by it. I have come to believe that this is because they believe that if God exists, He will help to solve all the problems and messes in this world, and their own problems. If God exists, they would see the glory of God with their own eyes. But, to them, none happens and so to them either God is dead or God is a man-made notion to explain the purpose of everything. This is similar to the story of the boy "crying wolf is coming" three times.

However, the bible gives us the assurance that suffering is inevitable in this present world, not until the old rule of system will give way to the new rule of system in future. There is something which I still have not understood: that is God's overall plan - why does He allows suffering to happen and why does He wants to use suffering to build us up for the better. Is there really no other way?

The bible also tells us that we will not see God until we breath our last and definitely in the eternal future. A parable tells us that the Master was away for a long journey, leaving his servants at his house. The Master will return unexpectedly, punishing the servants who are "fooling around" and rewarding servants who are obedience.

There are greater reason to believe in God and His plan. Yes, His plan is in progress and we can be impatient at times. Around 2000 years have passed since the "last hour" kicks in.

I can understand why non-believers find it hard to believe in a Creator but His word left in the bible gives us the confidence that there is a God. I really hope they would spend some time to study the bible. The bible, on the whole, is difficult to refute, otherwise the faith will not withstand for so long. So our enemies wanted to deceive the world that the bible is corrupted and not worth believing and so on. Well, if one care to put in effort to study and understand the whole picture, one would find it hard to deny the word in the bible. The choice is yours.

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Sunday, October 15, 2006

Nationwide Church Attendance In The United States Less Than Half Of Previous Estimates

Surprising Stats in New Church Research
Nationwide Church Attendance In The United States Less Than Half Of Previous Estimates

By Dan Wooding
Founder of ASSIST Ministries

ST LOUIS, MO (ANS) -- Attendance at American churches is less than half of what we have believed in the past, according to Dave Olson, director of church planting for the Evangelical Covenant Church, and director of the American Church Research Project.

According to a news release from Mission America Coalition, Olson addressed the Mission America Coalition annual conference on its closing day with groundbreaking new research about the state of the American church. Instead of relying on limited survey data which is then extrapolated to the entire population, Olson has worked for years to build a database of actual recorded attendance in over 300,000 churches across America.

His vision was to present a much more accurate picture of what is really happening to the American church at both the national and local levels, and with information refined down to individual zip codes.

“I'm not relying on what people say, I'm measuring their actual behavior,” he told nearly 170 national church, ministry, and lay leaders gathered.

The released continued, “According to Olson's research, overall church attendance is virtually unchanged from 15 years ago, even though the United States population has grown by 52 million people -- mostly unchurched. The northeast U.S. is the only region where the church is growing faster than the population, and no state has seen a net increase in the percentage of church attendance in the last five years. Even in the southern states, the traditional Bible Belt, the population is growing faster than the church.”

Jim Overholt, executive director of the Coalition said, “Having information about actual attendance at churches in individual communities is a significant leap forward by itself, but even more important is that we can now overlay the church data with census and other demographic information to tell us more about the dynamics of change within income, education, and other key sociological indicators that are also available by zip code.”

Olson's research revealed a number of surprising and often counter-intuitive statistics. For example: the evangelical church is growing fastest among the higher income, college-educated, suburban population, and declining fastest among the least educated, and in areas with the highest poverty rates.

“The evangelical church is becoming suburban, affluent, and educated,” Olson said.

“We live in a world today that is post-Christian, post-modern and multi-ethnic, whether we realize it or not,” he added. To reach this “new world” with the gospel, the church needs to change, he told the leaders gathered, echoing one of the key elements in the Coalition’s new initiative, Calling God’s People Together to Love Our Communities to Christ.

“The church needs to have an attitude of brokenness, humility, and repentance,” he said, admonishing that as evangelical Christians we tend to have an attitude of triumph--that we are right and the world should live like us. That attitude will keep us from reaching the lost for Christ, he said. He emphasized that the world simply acts the way it is supposed to -- as unbelievers. “This is the way it's always been, this is the way it's described in the Bible. The problem is that the church has not been acting like the church.”

“The Christian community needs a restoration of its understanding of the message and mission of Jesus. It needs to be less self-righteous, individualistic, and materialistic. It needs to be more biblical, Christo-centric, and holistic.” He said that when the Church talks about Jesus, it often does so in a second-hand way. “In a Christian world we can get away with that,” he says. But not in the emerging 21st century culture.

Olson's data and presentation to the Mission American Coalition annual meeting will be available to access online as of Oct. 17 at: www.theamericanchurch.org.

The Mission America Coalition is a network of national church leaders, representing denominations, ministries, and other key Christian leaders with a shared vision to collaborate in prayer, evangelism, and revival. Since its inception, leaders from 81 denominations, over 400 ministries and dozens of ministry networks have been involved in the Coalition. Mrs. Vonette Bright (Campus Crusade for Christ), Dr. Billy Graham (Billy Graham Evangelistic Association), and Dr. John Perkins (Christian Community Development Association) serve as honorary co-chairs.

For more information about Mission America Coalition or the “Loving Our Communities to Christ” initiative, www.missionamerica.org.


Errr....... really coming le la.... when it really comes, everything will kick off very fast .....

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Monday, October 09, 2006

'In 20 years, there will be no more Christians in Iraq'


'In 20 years, there will be no more Christians in Iraq'


Three years after the invasion of Iraq, it is believed that half the Christians in the country have fled, driven out by bomb attacks, assassinations and death threats. So why haven't the coalition forces done more to protect them? Mark Lattimer reports

Friday October 6, 2006
The Guardian

Three members of his family had already been murdered before Shamon Isaac decided to leave Baghdad. First, his son-in-law Raid Khalil was shot dead in January 2005 as he fled gunmen who had tried to pull him and his father into a minibus. Like many Christians, Khalil had received a death threat signed by the Islamic Army in Iraq. He left behind a widow and a baby girl, who is now nearly two.

Four weeks after Khalil was killed, Isaac's brother was stopped at a checkpoint by seven men in Iraqi army uniforms as he was on his way to collect passports to take his own family out of the country. "People in the neighbourhood shouted to his daughter that her father had been assassinated," Isaac said, "and she came out and found his body in the street." Then last August Isaac's brother-in-law was shot dead in his shop by three gunmen.

Finally Isaac and his family had no choice. When in January this year cars started to circle the family home in al-Dora with men shooting in the air, they escaped to another Baghdad neighbourhood, al-Jediya. But major demonstrations were taking place throughout the Muslim world in response to the Danish cartoons and on January 29 bombs ripped through seven churches in Baghdad, Mosul and Kirkuk, killing 16. Then one day a man walked into the small shop that the family had just opened next to their new home, bought some cigarettes and walked out, but not before he had left a letter on the counter. On opening it, they found it contained a single word: "Blood."

The mechanisms of terror in the new Iraq have uprooted families from every community, including Sunni and Shia, Arab and Kurd. But although Christians made up less than four per cent of the population - fewer than one million people - they formed the largest groups of new refugees arriving in Jordan's capital Amman in the first quarter of 2006, according to an unpublished report by the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). In Syria, which has a longer border with Iraq, 44% of Iraqi asylum-seekers were recorded as Christian since UNHCR began registrations in December 2003, with new registrations hitting a high early this year. Fleeing killings, kidnappings and death threats, they come from Baghdad, from Basra in the zone of British control and, disproportionately, from Mosul in the north. The Catholic bishop of Baghdad, Andreos Abouna, was quoted recently as saying that half of all Iraqi Christians have fled the country since the 2003 US-led invasion.

Yet their exodus has gone largely unreported, despite the fact that both George Bush and Tony Blair have spoken about how their own Christian beliefs have informed their policies in Iraq. In one of his first speeches after 9/11, the US president described the fight against terrorism as a "crusade", a characterisation that he wisely dropped but which is habitually repeated by critics of US foreign policy, including al-Qaida and other insurgent groups in Iraq. Many Christians have been accused of association with the multinational force, or of supporting the west. Now Iraqi Christian leaders are bitter that the west has done so little to protect them.

When Isaac fled Baghdad with 11 of his family it was, naturally enough, to the ancient home of Iraqi Christianity that they came - to the plains of Nineveh. I met them there three weeks later, huddled in a room in Bartallah, outside Mosul, part of the great fertile flatland on the banks of the Tigris where nearly every village has its church, and each church now has an armed guard. The plains are among the longest continually habited places on earth. It was to save Nineveh that the Biblical God delivered up Jonah from the belly of the whale, and the Assyrian Christians here still speak Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, the language Jesus Christ spoke with his apostles.

But Nineveh's unique place in Christian heritage counts for little today beside its strategic value in the geo-ethnic endgame of the Iraqi conflict. Situated between Iraqi Kurdistan and the insurgent strongholds west of Mosul, the Nineveh plains are central to the security of both, and to the territorial ambitions of Kurds and Sunni Arabs alike. Travelling in Iraq as part of a human rights mission coordinated by the charity Minority Rights Group International, in association with the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (Unami), I was told that no aid workers had been able to operate here since May 2004, when four Americans from a Baptist charity were killed in an ambush on the Mosul-Erbil road.

In Mosul city, both the Ba'athists and the Islamist groups had deep bases of support that enabled them to control whole neighbourhoods and, periodically, the city's police. "They stopped a Christian woman from Mosul university, took her away and cut off her head," the manager of a women's welfare organisation told me, her face flushed with the imagining of it. "They said that if anyone comes to college without hijab, they will be killed."

"The poor security situation covers all communities in the city," explained Dr Yousef Lalo, the assistant governor of Mosul. "But as a minority, the Christians are particularly vulnerable. They are also often more affluent than other communities, so people try to extract money from them." A former psychology lecturer, Lalo's habitual companions are no longer students but the bodyguards that testify to his status as the only remaining Christian in the city's senior administration.

"Many churches were bombed in 2004 and 2005 but the multinational force and the Iraqi national army did not find out who was responsible; they didn't even do a proper investigation. It got worse and few people turned up even for Christmas and Easter celebrations. Now the Christians protect their own churches."

Lalo couldn't provide a number for how many Christians had left Mosul, but said that "thousands" had emigrated to Jordan, Syria and Turkey. "Half the Christians in Mosul have left since 2003 and the rest are planning to leave if they can. Many of my family have emigrated to Australia and Sweden and become refugees."

But this softly spoken professor was staying to fight. "This is my land, and the land of my father and grandfathers, and I will not leave. I have also forbidden my three sons to emigrate."

That morning, Lalo had his first meeting with the multinational force commander for Mosul and eastern Nineveh, Colonel Michael Shields. Although "meeting" is perhaps not quite the right word for an encounter that began when four US soldiers in full battle dress came through the front door unannounced, the commander demanding: "Who's the leader? Where's the leader?" But once the Americans had put down their weapons and body armour, the exchange that followed was polite enough. I knew Lalo was bitter that the US had supported the appointment of a Muslim mayor in a predominantly Christian area and Shields told me he was working hard to improve contacts with local officials. He explained: "Nineveh province is an ethnically challenging area. If the governor shows favouritism, that creates problems." Lalo ventured bluntly that Shields' predecessor had been "bad for the Christians". "That," the colonel said, "is water under the bridge."

The Christians' last hope in Iraq may just lie, according to Lalo, with Sarkis Aghajan, minister of finance in the Kurdistan regional government and, until last May, Kurdish deputy prime minister. It is he who has been channelling money to Nineveh to pay for armed guards.

In his palatial residence in Ankawa, a Christian neighbourhood in Iraqi Kurdistan, he talked about his community as he sat between a picture of the crucifixion and the statue of an eagle. "As Christians," he said in Syriac, "we regard Nineveh as our region. Throughout history our people have been obliged to leave and live elsewhere." This included those who had fled Saddam Hussein's campaign to "Arabise" Kurdish and Christian areas in the north, when land was redistributed by force to Arab settlers. But now, he explained, about 3,500 families had come from Mosul and Baghdad to settle in the Nineveh plains.

"More than 30 Christian villages have been restored. But people will not return unless they feel their national rights are protected. Before, people were kidnapped on a daily basis. We increased the number of armed guards and now there are thousands. We are not threatening any other party, but the Kurds look out for the Kurds, the Arabs for the Arabs, so we have to protect ourselves too."

But Aghajan's ambitions go further. He is convinced that the only way to secure protection in the longer term is for an autonomous region, a safe haven, to be established covering Nineveh's Christians, as well as smaller minority communities there such as the Yezidis and the Shabak. "This special region would help us to maintain Christian history in that place. In that way, there would be no way for Kurds or Arabs to intervene. This would encourage the Christians living outside to come back, and it would be an example in the Middle East."

Aghajan is also sure that such an autonomous region should be part of an enlarged Kurdistan, prompting some politicians from Nineveh to accuse him of serving a Kurdish agenda. One, who fears the prospect of Kurdish control as much as a return by the Ba'athists, described him as "prime minister Barzani's loyal Christian". But Aghajan insists that the Nineveh plains would "get a fairer share" from the Kurdistan administration than from the central government. He praised Barzani's leadership. But he also knows that many Christians are already voting with their feet for the relative safety of Kurdistan.

Then he decribed how his people had been betrayed. "It was easy for the Americans and the British to have supported us when the churches were bombed - it was a historic opportunity - but they did nothing. If they had supported us financially, for example, we could have protected all the Christian families in Mosul."

Asked if he thought the Americans might be afraid to be seen to support the Christians, because that might be perceived as partisan or anti-Muslim, he waved his arm impatiently. "They didn't have to do it publicly - they could have done it through the Kurdistan Regional Government or through individuals. Now the Christians in Mosul are being made to change their religion. They are forced to pay money for jihad. If you hear the stories of those people, you will understand the tragedy. I am not talking about one of two families, or even a thousand, but about a nation.

"If our friends don't help us now, their friendship will be worth nothing in future. If it continues as it has, Baghdad and Mosul will be emptied of Christians."

As he spoke, I recalled Bush's words, over three years ago, from the decks of the USS Abraham Lincoln, announcing "the end of major combat operations" in Iraq. The president is fond of using biblical quotations in his speeches and he ended this one with a stirring message from the prophet Isaiah: "To the captives, 'Come out!' and to those in darkness, 'Be free!'"

In May, Iraq's first full-term government since the fall of Saddam Hussein was approved in Baghdad. Wijdan Mikha'il, a town planner and member of the secular Iraqi National List, was appointed as the new minister of human rights - a hard job, she remarked to me ruefully, in a country where "the people hardly have any rights". Mikha'il is also a Christian, the only one in the government. When she got the job, she moved her family, including her three young boys, from their spacious Baghdad house to live in a hotel behind the concrete blast walls of the Green Zone. Over supper there one evening she talked to me about the sectarianism that has poisoned Iraqi society.

"I have always seen myself as an Iraqi first, and then a Christian. Before, we all lived together, we never thought that someone was a Sunni and the other was a Shia, or a Christian, but now it is different." She has held discussions with the Iraqi Council of Minorities, a new umbrella group that is pushing for amendments to the constitution to improve human rights protection. When I asked Mikha'il about how many Christians were leaving, she said: "The process started before the war but it has accelerated. In the schools the children now say that a Christian is a kaffir, that he is different from the Muslims. And that means he can be treated differently. In 20 years there will be no more Christians in Iraq."

As she talked, two men and two women, dressed mainly in black, walked into the hotel restaurant and sat down in a corner. The minister lowered her voice: "They are Saddam's witnesses." The trial of Saddam Hussein was in session that week, stumbling from one adjournment to the next, and Mikha'il listed some of the atrocities for which the former dictator should still be tried, including the genocidal Anfal campaign against the Kurds, in which many Christians were also killed.

So was it worse before, or now, from the point of view of the Christian community? She replied immediately: "It's worse now. Not just for my community - for all Iraqis. Of course, what is happening now, Saddam partly created. We have gone in one year to a situation we would have reached after 15 years if Saddam was still in power: the lack of security, the breakdown of society . . ." Suddenly she laughed, for the first time that evening. "So maybe it is better to get there in one year, so we can start the process of improvement."

Would she herself still be here in 20 years' time? This time she hesitated. "I don't think so. I love Iraq. I had so many opportunities to leave, but I always stayed. But I don't want my children to live here"

I am convince that we are indeed living in the last stage of human history. The world is more aware of Christianity. Though more and more have heard of the Gospel, the hatred towards Christianity is increasing. The world belief and the Church belief contradicts. I believe the day will come when the world will not tolerate the teaching of Christianity and wanted to ban the bible. As more and more people of other tribes and tongues have heard and believe in the Truth, falsehood screams louder and louder. Wait and see. Truth will always endure.

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Saturday, October 07, 2006

Lamentation

I am born with a pentium II processor and a ram of 256MB. The society wants me to overclock to fit into their demands. I overclock and seems to become a pentium 4 processor but the ram remains. Now the society requires us to become pentium 6 whereby the maximum I can overclock is pentium 4. My CPU is burning hot. Good for those who managed to overclock to pentium 6.

Perhaps I could comfort myself with a church song. The title I forget but there is a line but never forget: 。。。。。 感谢上帝玫瑰有刺 。。。。。 Maybe that is why God makes me so imperfect. (Those who don't understand can try approaching me.)

Haiz... the higher I go up, the thinner the air is. How far up do we need to go before we can't even grasp for air?

I am tired of this society and the world. I am sick of their ever-changing policy; errors and mistakes made because of the sinful nature - especially pride.

I am so sick sometimes I feel that to be non-existent is better than struggling in this world. But on second thoughts, I have not found the rib that God took it from me. Perhaps God really did not take it?

Sometimes I feel frustrated at waiting for Him to come back and restore everything. I know I have no choice because it is God's will. I know He will come back but the waiting part is really not easy to endure. Sometimes the devil would tempt me with the fruit and I give in. Sometimes I shout to the devil "GET LOST!". The struggle for following the Truth really has a price to pay. I could rather join the world and lost myself in this fallen world - if only God is dead. I believe otherwise.

The world is indeed degenerating. I believe everybody who still desire to do good and response to their conscience would feel it. How long and far can God tolerate the world? I don't know. The bible tells us that this generation will become like the days of Noah. How corrupted were the days of Noah I don't know. One thing I know is that we are slowly if not accelerating towards this state.

I can't understand God's way of doing things. Some says He is dead. However, there are stronger reasons to believe otherwise.

To all who still want to listen: Grasp to the faith and the truth when the wave of evil is marching in.

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