Next Friday, the 9th Avenue church of Christ in Haleyville, Alabama, will host her annual youth rally, and you are invited and encouraged to attend.

The theme for the 2007 (does that seem weird?) youth rally is “The Christian and the Media.” We hope to focus on things that are good and bad about the mainstream media. Classes will be available for young people by several different teachers, and there will also be a class series on Saturday for adults taught by Mike Baker from Lewisburg, Tennessee.

Our keynote speaker will be Mike Johnson from Richmond, Kentucky. He will speak on Friday night, Saturday morning and Saturday afternoon.

The rally will begin at 6:00 Friday night, with singing beginning at 6:30. On Saturday, we will begin at 9 AM (if you cannot come on Friday night, please be here by 8:45 Saturday morning) and conclude at 3:00. We are expecting visitors from Kentucky, Tennessee and many congregations in Alabama.

If you need more information, please feel free to email adfaughn@centurytel.net . We hope to see you next weekend.

I know what Time magazine was trying to do, but I just do not understand why they went ahead with it.

If you have not already heard, YOU are Time’s “Person of the Year.” That’s right. YOU are. And so am I. And so is some guy with a webcam in his basement recording himself playing “Life is a Rock” on the banjo. And so is this guy.

You see, Time decided that, with the growth of YouTube, MySpace, Wikipedia and other “social network” sites, as well as the blogosphere, the “common man” has finally taken over the reigns of power in the world.

I’m happy to have this blog, but there are approximately 57million of them. How many of them actually get read? How many actually change people’s minds? I hope we help you think, but I don’t want to be “THE reason” someone changes his/her mind on a subject.

And, if YouTube and MySpace are the way the world is going, we are in trouble! I love YouTube, but it doesn’t change the world in any significant way.

Time obviously wanted to avoid any of the major controversies of 2006, because it seems that all the major candidates had a great amount of controversy attached to them, or they were just out-right hated (such as the President of Iran).

Thanks for what you tried to do, Time. You’ll sell a lot of magazines. But this was a cop-out of the highest degree.

To read the “preview” article on the web, click here. The real issue is not to be released until this weekend.

Sorry for the “rant,” but this really was a blunder in my mind. To see a list of all winners of this award (back to 1927, the first year), click here.

St. Stephen’s Church in Virginia voted to leave the diocese it was in to join another one. This congregation is one of several considering the move, but, so far, just the third to make the move.

Question: where in the Bible does it teach that a congregation can vote for such a thing? In fact, where does the Bible teach anything but autonomy of each congregation under the leadership of elders?

Answer: Nowhere.

Personally, I believe that, until people begin to come back to the Bible way of doing things, we will see more of this. Maybe there is a great chance of “restoration” evangelism as stories like these continue to pile up. Maybe there are some out there who are tired of all these changes and would welcome doing things simply by the Bible.

The following is the article about this decision, as written by Frank DeLano in the Fredricksburg (VA) Free Lance Star.

The congregation of a small Northern Neck church has voted to sever its 125-year-old ties with the Episcopal Church to join a new Anglican organization under the umbrella of an African archbishop.

St. Stephen’s Church at Heathsville joins two large Northern Virginia churches and about 11 other parishes that have left, or are considering leaving, the Virginia Episcopal diocese over differences in church doctrine.

Yesterday’s announcements of church votes were a culmination of conservative outrage at the national church’s ordination of an openly gay bishop in 2003, and its refusal to disapprove same-sex marriages.

“Just as disturbing was the church’s failure to recognize the sovereignty of Holy Scripture –all of it, at all times and not just when it’s convenient,” said Tony Blackstone of St. Stephen’s.

Members of St. Stephen’s staked their own claim to church property. The Episcopal Diocese of Virginia also claims the property.

St. Stephen’s members voted yesterday and last Sunday. During the week, the pine ballot box was locked in the evidence room of the Northumberland County commonwealth’s attorney.

Last Sunday 115 members voted. Seventeen more voted yesterday. In all, more than 70 percent of the 132 voters approved St. Stephen’s departure from the mainstream church.

“The church will now be called St. Stephen’s Church (Anglican). It is anticipated that any residual disputes with the diocese will be resolved through negotiated settlements,” said Ward LeHardy, a St. Stephen’s vestryman.

But members of St. Stephen’s who voted against leaving said yesterday that they intend to ask the Virginia diocese to supply them with a new pastor so that they can continue to worship as Episcopalians in the wooden chapel built in 1881.

“A significant number of people voted to remain loyal Episcopalians. We’re going to stay members of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, not St. Stephen’s (Anglican),” said Dawn Mahaffey.

The vote was overwhelming. Ninety-nine members voted for and 33 voted against–leaving the Episcopal Church and joining the Convocation of Anglicans in North America.

Truro Church in Fairfax County and The Falls Church in Falls Church announced yesterday that 90 percent of their combined 4,000 members voted last week to join CANA.

CANA was established by Anglican Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, who has called the growing acceptance of gay relationships a “satanic attack” on the church. Earlier this year, Akinola’s Church of Nigeria consecrated Truro rector Martyn Minns bishop of CANA.

“This has been our spiritual home, so separating is very hard,” Minns said at a news conference yesterday announcing the parishes’ decision. “There’s also the promise of a new day. A burden is being lifted. There are new possibilities breaking through.”

Virginia Bishop Peter Lee called the announcements of the votes “a sad day for the church.”

He said the secessionist churches “have created Nigerian congregations occupying Episcopal churches. We fully intend to assert the church’s canonical and legal rights over these properties.”

The Episcopal Church, the U.S. wing of the global Anglican Communion, has been under pressure from traditionalists at home and abroad since the 2003 consecration of gay Bishop V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.

Nationally, Episcopal researchers estimate that conflicts over Robinson caused the departure of at least one-third of the nearly 115,000 people who left the from 2003 to 2005.

Under Anglican tradition, Akinola’s move into Episcopal territory amounts to an invasion, since archbishops agree not to start churches outside the borders of their own region.

Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori will consult with her advisers on how the denomination should respond, said Bob Williams, the national Episcopal spokesman.

Seven of the 100 U.S. Episcopal dioceses have threatened to break from the denomination, but have so far stayed put.

The closest any have come to leaving was a vote earlier this month in the Diocese of San Joaquin, in Fresno, Calif., endorsing a first step toward seceding. But that diocese must take a second vote next year before they can formalize a split.

The feud has been far more damaging to the 77 million member Anglican Communion. Most overseas Anglicans believe gay relationships violate Scripture and contend liberal interpretations of the Bible are far outside the bounds of mainstream Christian belief.

Struggling to hold the communion together, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the Anglican spiritual leader, has said that the communion may have to create a two-tier system of membership, with branches that ordain partnered gays given a lesser status.

St. Stephen’s member Brooke Read, who described himself as a “cradle Episcopalian,” said, “I feel with a heavy heart that we must go our separate ways.

I’m just thankful my sainted mother is not here to see it.”

An “extensive study” of comet dust is causing evolutionary scientists to rethink how the universe began.

To be an evolutionist, one must conform to the idea that things are uniform. In other words, minerals have been breaking down at the same speed for all time, and things have happened in an orderly fashion for all that time as well. If there were some chaotic event that shook the universe, or a major part of it (like a flood), that would go against the theory of evolution.

Some comet dust has caused scientists to think that things have been chaotic in the “distant” past. If that is the case, then they have two choices. Either they must (1) abandon their theory, or (2) make a case for even more time, so the chaos could be explained. Guess which one they are leaning toward?

How long will this last? Christians need to stand up and shout that the evidence overwhelmingly shows that there is a God and He created the universe in six literal days.

The following is the New York Times article about this story, written by Warren Leary. It is published here in its entirety.

Comets are not all made of interstellar dust and ice, but instead may contain material shot from the heart of the solar system during its tumultuous birth, scientists reported Thursday after examining pristine particles of a comet that were brought back by the Stardust spacecraft.

The evidence suggests that comets did not form in isolation in the outer parts of the solar system as it coalesced from a swirling mass of primal material, the researchers said. Instead, they said, some of the hot material that formed planets around the Sun seems to have spewed off into distant areas and become a component of distant comets.

“Many people imagined that comets formed in total isolation from the rest of the solar system; we have shown that’s not true,” said Donald Brownlee, a University of Washington astronomer who is the lead scientist for the Stardust mission.

“As the solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago,” Dr. Brownlee said, “material moved from the innermost part to the outermost part. I think of it as the solar system partially turning itself inside out.”

The first results of Stardust, appearing in seven reports published in the Dec. 15 issue of the journal Science, were reported in San Francisco on Thursday at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

NASA launched Stardust in 1999, and the robot spacecraft met comet Wild 2 beyond the orbit of Mars in January 2004. The craft flew within 150 miles of the comet’s nucleus and trapped particles spewing from the body in a light, porous foam called aerogel. After a 2.88-billion-mile journey, Stardust returned to Earth last January with a payload of thousands of tiny particles from Wild 2.

The comet formed more than 4.5 billion years ago and had remained preserved in the frozen reaches of the outer solar system until 1974, when a close encounter with Jupiter shifted its orbit to a path between Jupiter and Mars.

More than 180 scientists from around the world examined some of the samples with specialized equipment to determine what makes up the icy, dusty comets that largely populate a vast area beyond the orbits of Pluto and Neptune.

“Comet dust seems to be a real zoo of things; we see all kinds of particles that are clearly formed at different places, possibly at different times and certainly under different conditions,” said Scott Sandford of the NASA Ames Research Center in California, who was the lead author of one of the papers.

Dr. Sandford said results of Stardust studies so far “all indicate that when the solar system was forming, there was a whole lot of mixing going on.”

Dr. Brownlee estimates that as much as 10 percent of the material in comets came from the inner solar system. “That’s a real surprise,” he said, “because the common expectation was that comets would be made of interstellar dust and ice.”

“It’s not just dust and particles,” he said. “We are working on rocks — some of them igneous rocks, formed by heating and melting. We want to know how these rocks were formed and how they became parts of comets that were formed far out on the edge of the solar system.”

Material from comet Wild 2 has mineral characteristics that appear to be different from those observed in comet Tempel 1. In that case, involving a spacecraft called Deep Impact, a probe crashed into Tempel 1’s surface in July 2005, and the properties of the resulting dust were analyzed by the spacecraft and distant telescope observations. Dr. Brownlee noted that whereas Tempel 1 had been examined from a distance, Stardust had returned actual samples for scientists to study.

“The comets may be different from each other,” he said, “or different observations could simply be a result of the different techniques used to examine them. It is a challenge for us to understand how they are different, and why.”

Michael F. A’Hearn, chief scientist for the Deep Impact mission, said it was too early to say whether there were significantly different classes of comets or whether Wild 2 and Tempel 1 reflected different stages of cometary evolution. Tempel 1 has traversed the inner solar system for hundreds of years, while Wild 2 is a new
arrival, Dr. A’Hearn said, and Stardust gathered surface material while Deep Impact blasted out part of the interior.

“We need more analysis of the data we already have,” he said, “and we certainly need more comet sample missions to fully understand these bodies.”

For several years, the Richland Hills church of Christ in Texas has been the largest church of Christ in the world. With around 6400 members, Richland Hills is more than double the size of the next-largest congregation, Memorial Road in Edmond, Oklahoma.

Sadly, though, the Richland Hills congregation has drifted further and further away from the truth. The minister, Rick Atchley, is a proponent of “getting back together” with the Christian Church, even if no changes are made in worship style or view of the Bible.

Now, the latest. On December 3, it was announced that the congregation would be starting an instrumental worship assembly on Saturday nights. They are simply following the lead of other liberal congregations that have begun similar services on Saturdays or Thursdays.

Christian Chronicle writer Bobby Ross, Jr. wrote the following report:

The Richland Hills church in Texas — the largest of the nation’s 13,000 a cappella Churches of Christ — has decided to add an instrumental worship assembly with communion on Saturday nights.

Jon Jones, an elder and former pulpit minister at the 6,400-member church, told the congregation Dec. 3 that Richland Hills’ elders “fully and completely” endorsed the decision.

“There is unity in our eldership, and we are so thankful for that,” Jones told church members at a combined adult Bible study, according to a video on the church Web site.

Elder Roger Dean characterized the congregation’s overall response as “extremely positive.”

“Frankly, we did not know what to expect,” Dean said. “We felt like it was going to be pretty difficult, but it has not been. … People are truly supporting the leadership and the eldership.”

Senior minister Rick Atchley — a national leader in efforts to foster better relations with instrumental Christian Churches — told the congregation the decision should help ease crowding at Richland Hills’ two Sunday morning services. Moreover, he said, it will allow the congregation to “reach more people who need Christ.”

“We didn’t make this decision on a Tuesday and announce it on a Sunday,” Atchley said in the adult Bible study, citing much study, prayer and fasting by the elders. “This has been part of about a three-year journey that the leadership has been on.”

Two of the congregation’s 17 elders resigned as a result of the decision, a church member who spoke on condition of anonymity told The Christian Chronicle. Dean, one of the remaining 15 elders, confirmed that he understood the decision
had prompted two elders to resign.

But John Wilbanks, one of the elders who resigned, said the timing was coincidental. Wilbanks said he remains an adult Bible class teacher at Richland Hills, has a “deep appreciation for the leadership” and offers the elders his full support.

“I love Richland Hills,” said Wilbanks, who had no comment on whether he had told members an instrumental service would not occur on his watch.

Elder Mikel Faulkner’s resignation was announced Nov. 19, the same Sunday as Richland Hills leaders first informed members of the decision. The church bulletin praised Faulkner’s “many years of selfless service” and said he had decided it was time to serve in a capacity other than elder.

Faulkner, who remains a member at Richland Hills, declined to comment on the instrumental service, telling the Chronicle, “I have nothing to say about that. Thank you for your call, though.”

Atchley declined an interview request from the Chronicle, saying he didn’t want to discuss the new service until it launches the second weekend of February.

“I do not want to give the rest of the fellowship the idea that I am trying to promote instrumental praise anywhere else,” Atchley told the Chronicle. “What we are doing is a missional decision for our congregation, and while we are not trying to hide our decision, neither do we wish to flaunt it.”

In the Dec. 3 Bible study, Atchley told Richland Hills members that “there has never been a moment’s discussion of changing the name of this church or our affiliation with Churches of Christ.”

But he said Richland Hills must put the kingdom of God and Christ’s mission above concerns that the change might hurt the congregation’s standing or influence among Churches of Christ.

At the same time, he suggested to members that Richland Hills’ decision might “inspire many other Churches of Christ to be courageous in their kingdom efforts, and it could help stem the tide of gifted young leaders who are leaving.”

“My e-mail is flooded with messages from elders and preachers across the country encouraging this church and praising us for the decisions we’ve made,” Atchley told the church. “I know this: If our fellowship stays on the course we’re on, our future looks bleak. Someone has got to be a leader.”

A growing but still small number of Churches of Christ nationwide host instrumental praise gatherings outside of regular worship services where the Lord’s Supper is offered. A few congregations — including the 1,700-member Farmers Branch, Texas, church — have added instrumental services with communion. But Richland Hills is, by far, the largest and most influential congregation to do so.

“I greatly appreciate a cappella praise,” Atchley told Richland Hills members. “There is no intention of this leadership to force anyone to worship any other way if that is their choice. … But I firmly believe that if Richland Hills is to be most faithful to God’s word and Christ’s mission, we must become a both/and church with regard to instrumental and a cappella praise.”

Atchley told the congregation he would address biblical concerns of adding instrumental worship as well as the church leadership’s justification for offering communion on Saturday nights in future Bible lessons planned in December.

But the Dec. 3 study dealt with the nature of churches making tough choices. Too often, Atchley said, churches have looked at decisions as “either/or” — either Christians can worship God with instruments or vocal praise alone is acceptable to God, for example. But many times, questions are “both/and” — meaning Christians can worship God with instruments or with their voices only, Atchley said.

Atchley drew a biblical parallel to Acts 15 and the early church’s debate over whether circumcision should be a requirement for Gentiles to accept the gospel. While circumcision was a longtime tradition of the Jews, the mission of the gospel
required allowing Gentiles freedom in that regard, he said.

He pointed to Acts 15:19, where James said, “It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God.”

Atchley acknowledged that Richland Hills could lose some members to other churches as a result of allowing instrumental worship.

But he said, “We’ve already lost too many over a question that’s way too unimportant.”

It is truly sad that this has to be reported, but as long as people continue to question what God has to say, there will be further apostasy. Pray earnestly for the congregations at which you worship, and pray also for those that have already fallen away. May they see their error and come back to God’s plan for His Church.

I find it particularly sad that this decision cost the congegation two elders. Maybe that should tell the congregation something.

Finally, to the final thought of the story. What’s so “unimporant” about mechanical instruments of music? We need to remember that, when we come together for worship, we are there to do God’s will and praise Him. THAT’S important.

[NOTE: I would like to thank Todd Clippard for sending me the Chronicle article in email.]