Monday Morning Music Ministry

8-20-18

NEWS ITEM: June 22, 2018 –
UN Chief ‘Personally Concerned’ about Return of Christians to Iraq and Syria
“I am fully convinced that after the stability of the situation in Iraq and Syria and the adoption of a certain political decision, it is very important to ensure the return of the Christians, in general, to the religious minorities, and the Yazidis themselves, to their homeland,” António Guterres told Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill yesterday.

NEWS ITEM: June 27, 2018 –
Slaughter of More than 200 People in Plateau State, Nigeria, Shocks Christians
Weekend attacks took place in the predominantly Christian villages of Xland, Gindin Akwati, Ruku, Nghar, Kura Falls, Kakuruk, Rakok, Kok, and Razat, sources said. The villages are in the two districts of Gashish and Ropp in the Barkin Ladi Local Government Area (LGA).

“In Nghar village alone, about 70 corpses of Christians were recovered and the entire village has been burnt down by the Fulani herdsmen,” area resident Thomas Chuwang, 45, told Morning Star News… adding that the victims there were members of the Church of Christ in Nations (COCIN).

NEWS ITEM: June 27, 2018 –
China’s “Underground” Churches Told to “Seek Guidance” from State-Approved Bodies
A newly implemented directive from the Chinese government forces Protestant “house churches” and Catholic “underground” communities to seek “guidance” from recognised religious organisations….

One hundred churches were closed in Nanyang, in central Henan province… “Christians who used their own church building for meetings were targeted, and their buildings closed.” Consequently… Christians had gone back to meeting in homes.

NEWS ITEM: July 10, 2018 –
Twenty Christians Severely Injured in Assault on Prayer Gathering in Northern India
International Christian Concern (ICC) has learned that last Monday, July 2, 20 Christians were seriously injured in an assault on a prayer meeting in Raikashipur village, located in the Pratapgarh District of India’s Uttar Pradesh State. According to local reports, a mob of 35 Hindu radicals stormed the meeting and beat the group of over 150 Christians gathered for prayer. Following the assault, the Pradhan (village president) filed multiple false criminal charges against six of the Christian victims.

NEWS ITEM: July 27, 2018 –
Christian North Korean Defector Speaks Out against Persecution and Indifference
A Christian woman who defected from North Korea said the world cannot “just sit and keep watching” as North Korea persecutes Christians and others.

Ji Hyeona spoke at the US State Department’s Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom event at the Harry S Truman Building this week. She told her story of abuse and torture while trying to escape North Korea.

“Since I first escaped from North Korea in 1998, I have since escaped from the North a total of four times and got repatriated to the North three times until I finally came to South Korea in 2007,” Ji said. “In between, I fell victim to human trafficking and I was also subjected to abortion violently forced on me even with no anesthesia because the North Korean regime couldn’t accept what they call “mixed love”….

“We can not just sit and keep watching what they are doing because indifference is the most tragic tool that puts people to death and kills them,” she said, “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said: ‘The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.’”

NEWS ITEM: July 31, 2018 –
Assault on Christian Leader in Nepal Reflects Growing Threat
Pastor Sagar Baizu, 46, had finished one meeting and had an hour before the next one, so he decided to stop at a café on a major thoroughfare in Kathmandu, capital of Nepal, on July 19.

As he was about to sip a coffee in the crowded café at 2 p.m., six to eight men suddenly attacked the spokesperson and co-general secretary of the Federation of National Christians in Nepal (FNCN) from behind.

“They beat me for a minute and a half and suddenly fled the site,” Pastor Baizu told Morning Star News. “They said, ‘We will blast your church and all the churches with bombs and shoot you and all your leaders.’”

NEWS ITEM: Aug 1, 2018 –
Rwanda Closes More Than 8,000 Churches In Major Crackdown
More than 8,000 churches throughout Rwanda have been closed by the government as part of an alleged crackdown on unsafe structures, although religious liberty advocates say the government is closing congregations that should be considered acceptable.

Christians in the country fear the movement is a cover for the government’s drive toward secularism…. One church was closed during a wedding, with the guests “told to leave the church during the service,” World Watch Monitor reported.

Churches have only 15 days to make the required changes upon being reported by the government. The Rwandan source said in some instances, even house meetings are banned.

Pastors are now required by the government to have degrees from accredited institutions. Bible schools are mandated to teach science and technology in order to teach theology. Among the other rules, access roads to churches must be paved and inside walls and ceilings must be plastered and painted, according to World Watch Monitor.

NEWS ITEM: Aug 16, 2018 –
Atheist Military Group Files Complaint Against Decorated USAF General
CBN reports that the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) has filed a complaint against Brigadier Gen. E. John Teichert this week. The MRFF filed this complaint to Defense Secretary James Mattis requesting an investigation into Teichert, the newly installed commander of the 412 Test Wing at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

The MRFF is claiming that Teichert’s website is violating rule against religious proselytizing that the Air Force and Defense Department have in place. On his website Teichert describes himself in the following way:

“John is an active duty Brigadier General who has served in the United States Air Force since 1994, and who was saved by grace through faith in Christ in 2004. He has commanded at the wing, group and squadron levels, and is currently serving as Air Force commander. The Lord has blessed his career while burdening his heart with the need for our nation to return to its Christian foundation. He serves alongside his amazing wife of 20 years and their three incredible children. It is their desire to fully invest their lives to maximize their impact on people and on our nation for the Lord.”

CBN reports that … the MRFF said Teichert “should be doing time behind prison bars, not commanding a wing wearing general’s stars.” The MRFF continued, saying Teichert was “a fundamentalist Christian tyrant and religious extremist predator.”

NEWS ITEM: Magic Show at Saddleback Church, Lake Forest CA –
Join us at Camp Hope and witness some incredible illusions performed by Scott Tokar. Scott will be performing for about 25 minutes directly following the 4 pm and 6 pm services. This will be a night you and your family won’t want to miss!

NEWS ITEM: “All Is Well” Yoga at Mars Hill Church, Grand Rapids MI –
These classes can assist you on your health, healing, and wholeness path by creating a space where you can encounter God while caring for your physical well-being.

NEWS ITEM: Authentic Manhood Class, Lakewood Church, Houston TX –
Authentic Manhood is a discipleship journey for men. This 24 session curriculum helps men understand their identity and shows them how to pursue authentic manhood. It offers a clear definition of what a man is and challenges each man to develop his own manhood plan. All men are welcome to attend this life changing class.

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Click: The Storm is Passing Over

Also in memory of Detroit’s Aretha Franklin

11-16-15

“Your enemies will be right in your own household!” a prophecy of Jesus, recorded in Matthew 10:36, New Living Translation. In King James language, “there will be foes of your own household.”

The monstrous attacks in Paris this week – coordinated, well-planned, replete with torture, and gunmen praising Allah – will, I fear, someday be looked back upon as mild foreshadows. We already have lists, three-dozen incidents long, of terror attacks on Western buildings, trains, ships, sporting events, restaurants, and schools. These atrocities have largely been perpetrated by Moslems, and have been accompanied, generally subsumed by, bloodier and more vicious attacks on Christians.

Christians all over the world have been targeted by means of displacement, ethnic cleansing, prison, torture, rape, slavery, dismemberment, crucifixions, and beheadings.

Without exception, these barbarities are committed by members of the Islamic religion, followers of Mohammed (blessed be his name). And this is not in the seventh century – I mean, not ONLY in the seventh century – but in the year of our Lord 2015. Last year there were an approximate 16,800 terror attacks worldwide, and approximately 43,000 deaths (State Department figures, therefore probably low).

The recent carnage in the City of Lights, Paris, is different than targeted attacks against military bases or naval vessels. And I can understand the blind rage of populations who have lost their homes and liberty, pushed into, or out of, occupied lands. Another topic, and very important.

But it is a condition, not a theory, that confronts us.

The Christian West is being attacked and eaten at the edges, just as Rome was in its last phase. The self-destructive West (including the United States) is morally flaccid as it refuses to defend its values and heritage. In a paroxysm of folly, however, these days we invite the hordes in. Do you call it madness, the Spirit of Contemporary Western Civilization seems to ask. “Very well, then,” it answers, paraphrasing Walt Whitman; “So I am mad.”

Jesus explained the past and prophesied the future that will usher the End Times: “…it will be like it was in Noah’s day. In those days before the flood, the people were enjoying banquets and parties and weddings right up to the time Noah entered his boat. People didn’t realize what was going to happen until the flood came and swept them all away. That is the way it will be…” (Matt. 24: 37-39 NLT).

We all go to bed, get up, manage households, do our jobs, worry about finances, raise kids, follow sports teams, love our favorite entertainers, watch movies, “give in marriage and being given”; and go to bed all over again. Meanwhile the apocalypse is coming. When we are made aware, we wish it away. That is, we wish it goes away.

Our leaders, and our celebrity sheepherders, soothe us into false serenity by telling us that less vigilance will keep us safer. That not calling our enemies by their names will make them go away. That abandoning our faith is the answer to the world’s current crisis of faith.

The extreme predicament, the jeopardy that threatens us and our children and our precious heritage, is not material or geographic or economic; it is spiritual at its core. The only solution, therefore, is spiritual. Not the best response, but the only response.

Many Facebook posts after the Paris bloodbath objected to people who urged prayers for the French and the families of those slaughtered. A common meme: “We need less religion, not more prayers.” “Religion is what fuels all this.” Like rats eating at a rotten corpse, like bacilli devouring a host organism, the foes of our own household want to destroy Christianity and Western Civilization. Few of these who whine are Mohammedans – and, if history provides a pattern, they would be the first to be slaughtered by revolutionaries. Even before the holders of the flames of our heritage. Violent revolutions routinely “eat their babies” first.

As all this continues to play out (and there are few signs that matters will reverse themselves), Islamic radicals flooding Europe display little humility and gratitude, much hatred and bloodlust. On Facebook, the world’s bulletin board, we see numerous promises to rape our daughters, burn our churches, and kill us all.

But these murderers and murderers-in-waiting are second-in-line to receive blame. They are Refujihadis, doing their jobs, after all. They despise Christians, but, if anything, hold secular cultures in more contempt: hence, attacks on France, the US, and Western Europe.

The guilty parties, dear Brutus, are not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings. The contemporary Christian – you and I? – are of the generation that has lost our way, failed to discipline our children, allowed ourselves to be deceived by seditious leaders, numbed by mass entertainment, and… we no longer believe or live by the faith of our fathers. Having, some among us, the form of godliness but denying the power thereof.

Another prophecy: “You live among rebels who have eyes but refuse to see. They have ears but refuse to hear. For they are a rebellious people” (Ezekiel 12:2 NLT).

Foes of our own households.

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A larger view of life, representing our duty to view the world and Christendom, written by Don Moen. Don was, neat coincidence, the college roommate of my friend Michael Cardone. Sung by Robin Mark.

Click: When It’s All Been Said and Done

3-16-15

I have begun reading “A Chronicle Of the Crusades,” a massive 15th-century illuminated manuscript – in translation, believe me – originally titled “Les Passages d’Outremer.” I am interested in history of all eras and all places, so this is not exactly required reading. However, I am also prompted by President Obama’s recent scolding of Christians to “get off their high horses” and realize that many awful acts were committed “in the name of Christ,” citing the crusades of a thousand years ago; and not mentioning atrocities committed by radical Moslems a thousand years ago or – famously – last week either.

It is not mere (and common) self-loathing of Christians and whites to assume that the Crusades were birthed and maintained in Christian brutality, blood lust, and racism. Aggressive educators and supine defenders of our faith have transformed this contention into a “fact of history” – despite its substance being very much in dispute. Rather, historical facts, if they shall become the subtext of our identity and rationale for today’s policies, must be dusted off and honestly viewed.

Christianity had “holy sites,” associated with the person and ministry of Jesus Christ. Islam, a religion founded centuries subsequent to Christianity, determined to seize lands and sites, sometimes desecrating them. Christians sought to restore ownership, if not management, of holy places in the “Holy Land.” Its center of gravity having shifted northward and westward, Christian expeditions were launched to that end. In succeeding campaigns, there were battles, sieges, pillaging, many deaths, and uncountable examples of bravery and brutality on both sides, on all sides.

It is rather useless, and perhaps intentionlly subversive toward a different agenda, to re-ignite those flames of passion. Yet it is being done, and not only by our president. Wars frequently are bad enough in their first incarnations, without declaring and waging them anew. Perhaps the huge book on my lap will teach me some new things, even though, yes, I realize that it was written by Europeans.

I want to pause for a moment, however, over a larger picture – the illuminated manuscript, as it were, of Western Civilization before and after the Crusades, and what once was rightly called Christendom.

People use the phrase “the barbarians are at the gates,” applying it to everything from video games to the corporate history of Nabisco to the threats posed by ISIS. Oddly, there is no consensus on the origin of the tocsin “at the gates!” but it seems that Barbarians, generally, were called such by the cultured civilizations of Athens and Rome based on the invading tribes’ purportedly unintelligible language: an approximation of “ba-ba-ba” morphed into “barbarian.” Today, alarmists use the phrase because they feel threatened by forces attacking the virtual gates of our culture.

Alarmists legitimately can be alarmed by legitimate threats, just as paranoiacs sometimes DO have people stalking them. Nevertheless the dominant thrust of Western Christianity’s contemporary cultural attitude is that the so-called challenges to our traditions and heritage are real… but are not threats.

Cultural rebels are in command. Anarchists and nihilists ironically are setting many of the rules in society. “The end of history” has happened: the postulation of Francis Fukuyama that millennia of the world’s cultural traditions have been up-ended, enabling disaster or, at best, an unknown new system. Just as with Nietzsche’s “God is dead” – when a culture no longer recognizes God, He is dead to that culture’s life. “How shall we then live?” was the question asked by Francis Schaeffer in a monumental study almost 40 years ago. It is a question posed by philosophers since Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle… but never losing its relevance. Or, today, its urgency.

The difference today is the exquisite and apocalyptic precipice upon which we teeter. A death-struggle in the twilight of a once-great civilization. Barbarians are past the gates; they have been welcomed, they live amongst us; they are A-list celebrities.

I am not singling out Hollywood, but our Barbarian culture. We have willingly celebrated barbarism. Sometimes this suicidal syndrome is called anti-intellectualism, but is far deeper, of far more serious consequences. It threatens destruction from which survival is impossible. The contemporary morals and mores of Western Christianity (often masquerading as the new sacraments of “tolerance” and “lifestyle choices”) are nothing more or less than the poisoning of our culture’s well.

Our society’s rejection of God, denial of Christ’s divinity and teachings, and demonization of our Western heritage, is not a minor and enlightened bend in the road of progress. It is a complete U-turn, back to… barbarism.

Hilaire Belloc wrote of the barbarian that he “hopes – and that is the mark of him – that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being.

“Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marveling that civilization should have offended him with priests and soldiers…. In a word, the barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this: that he cannot [build anything]; he can befog and destroy, but he cannot sustain; and of every barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization, exactly this has been true.

“We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh.

“But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”

We will revisit this theme, because it has more aspects and should engage us in many ways. But for the moment – to return to those barbarians at the gates of Western Christianity, Western Civilization – the barbarians have overtaken our culture, either incorporating themselves or coldly obliterating us and what we hold precious.

The historian Arnold Toynbee observed that civilizations seldom die from invasions (gates and barbarians notwithstanding) but by suicide. In that sense the ghastly Clash of Civilizations is not so much prompted by Communist states or Islamic terrorists or extremists who work to do us harm. It is the clash of traditional Christianity versus the barbarism of modern Christianity and post-modernism. Western Civilization has lost that clash of values.

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The Litany of St. James, written in the 4th century, sung by Cynthia Clawson.

Click: Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence

2-16-15

President’s Day, 2015. I’m not sure I could have written this a year ago; certainly five or 10 years ago I would have considered even my pessimistic and alarmist self straining credulity. The events of our time; the lack of leadership from the presidency; the transformed nature of our civic culture… remind me of my warning only months ago, now a reality. America looks for wishbones, when we should be finding backbones.

Never have the men who filled the presidential chair seemed more historical – that is, remote.

Regular readers will expect me to invoke Theodore Roosevelt, and I shall. Not a reflexive habit, but I think this year, more than most, he stands in starkest contrast to the current resident of the White House. Also, of TR’s many wise words that thunder down through the years to guide us, two topics he addressed resonate today.

In some ways Roosevelt was very private about his faith – odd for this most extroverted of men – but he nevertheless quoted scripture, referred to God, cited Bible verses, and lived the life of Christian faith as much, if not more, than any other president. When in college he organized Sunday School classes; when he was a young hunter in Maine he slipped out of his camp on early mornings to read his Bible (that spot is now a designated landmark, Bible Point); when he retired from the presidency he shunned lucrative offers from many quarters to serve as an editor of a weekly Christian opinion magazine; he called his most significant speech in the heat of the Bull Moose campaign “A Confession of Faith” (“We stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord!”); he titled two of his books from Bible verses.

Even so, he was private about aspects of his faith. Yet to his diary he confided after the death of his father: “Nothing but my faith in the Lord Jesus Christ could have carried me through this.”

TR soft-pedaled theology, and stressed the personal and social benefits, of church attendance in an article for Ladies’ Home Journal. Here is my point: imagine an American president today writing in a high-circulation magazine, urging church attendance. These were his words:

There are enough holidays for most of us that can quite properly be devoted to pure holiday-making. Sundays differ from other holidays, among other ways, in the fact that there are 52 of them every year. On Sunday, go to church.

Yes, I know all the excuses. I know that one can worship the Creator and dedicate oneself to good living in a grove of trees, or by a running brook, or in one’s own house, just as well as in church. But I also know as a matter of cold fact the average man does not thus worship or thus dedicate himself. If he strays away from church, he does not spend his time in good works or lofty meditation. He looks over the colored supplement of the newspaper.

He might not hear a good sermon at church. But unless he is very unfortunate, he will hear a sermon by a good man who, with his good wife, is engaged all the week long in a series of wearing, humdrum, and important tasks for making hard lives a little easier.

He will listen to and take part in reading some beautiful passages from the Bible. And if he is not familiar with the Bible, he has suffered a loss.

He will probably take part in singing some good hymns.

He will meet and nod to, or speak to, good quiet neighbors. He will come away feeling a little more charitably toward all the world, even toward those excessively foolish young men who regard churchgoing as rather a soft performance.

I advocate a man’s joining in church works for the sake of showing his faith by his works.

Church work and church attendance mean the cultivation of the habit of feeling some responsibility for others and the sense of braced moral strength, which prevents a relaxation of one’s own moral fiber.

The man who does not in some way, active or not, connect himself with some active, working church misses many opportunities for helping his neighbors, and therefore, incidentally, for helping himself.

In the actual world, a churchless community, a community where men have abandoned and scoffed at or ignored their religious needs, is a community on the rapid downgrade.

“On Sunday, go to church.” Good advice for TR’s time, our time, all the time.

Another contemporary topic where Roosevelt’s words thunder through the years, grabbing our attention, are from his book – note again the title – “Fear God and Take Your Own Part” (1916):

“Christianity is not the creed of Asia and Africa at this moment solely because the seventh century Christians of Asia and Africa had trained themselves not to fight, whereas the Moslems were trained to fight. Christianity was saved in Europe solely because the peoples of Europe fought. If the peoples of Europe in the seventh and eighth centuries, and on up to and including the seventeenth century, had not possessed a military equality with, and gradually a growing superiority over, the Mohammedans who invaded Europe, Europe would at this moment be Mohammedan, and the Christian religion would be exterminated.

“Wherever the Mohammedans have had complete sway, wherever the Christians have been unable to resist them by the sword, Christianity has ultimately disappeared. From the hammer of Charles Martel to the sword of Jan Sobieski, Christianity owed its safety in Europe to the fact that it was able to show that it could and would fight as well as the Mohammedan aggressor.

“The civilization of Europe, American and Australia exists today at all only because of the victories of civilized man over the enemies of civilization… The Christians of Asia and Africa proved unable to wage successful war with the Moslem conquerors; and in consequence Christianity practically vanished from [those] two continents… During [a] thousand years, the Christians of Europe possessed the warlike power to do what the Christians of Asia and Africa had failed to do – that is, to beat back the Moslem invader.”

The lessons of Roosevelt’s history were hard; the truth often is. Today, evangelists have done what warriors did not: advance the gospel in Africa and Asia, bringing light to millions. But, of course, they sustain persecution, torture, and murder in their defense of Christian faith.

But on President’s Day 2015 we must come face to face with the possibility that Western Civilization – “Christendom” – has lost that pride of heritage and reverence for the traditions of our faith, for the first time in 1500 years. Are we to bear the shame, invite the obloquy, of all those previous brave and faithful generations?

Our precious communities and nations, claimed for the gospel and open to its free exercise, were sometimes established amidst strife, and sometimes were opened freely to believers. All, however, tell inspiring stories. Can this all be slipping away in our lifetimes, so quickly before our eyes? Where is our responsibility? Is this not the Land of Beulah?

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Click: Is Not This the Land of Beulah? / Beulah Land