666 Church Motion Doomed

A motion calling for the disestablishment of the Church of England appeared on the House of Commons order paper today - bizarrely numbered 666, the number associated with the Antichrist.

Pregnancy Outsourced

Every night in this quiet western Indian city, 15 pregnant women prepare for sleep in the spacious house they share, ascending the stairs in a procession of ballooned bellies, to bedrooms that become a landscape of soft hills. A team of maids, cooks and doctors looks after the women, whose pregnancies would be unusual anywhere else but are common here. The young mothers of Anand, a place famous for its milk, are pregnant with the children of infertile couples from around the world.

Philanthropy Rising Among Kids

In lieu of presents at her 12th birthday party this year, Maddie Freed of Potomac asked her friends to bring money, and she raised $800 for Children's Hospital.

Unitarians Put Faith in Advertising

As a melting-pot faith that holds no creed and welcomes all comers, the Unitarian Universalist church hasn't always seen much need to evangelize. But as the atheists, Christians, humanists and Buddhists in its pews grow older and with the church growing only at a trickle, Unitarians are experimenting with a different approach.

Do Good to All

The first principle of the Hippocratic Oath is "do no harm." That is the standard by which our physicians are judged. But Christians are held to an even higher standard. "Do good to all especially those of the household of faith" (Galatians 6:10). You would think Paul's exhortation unnecessary. Jesus equated "love of God" and "neighbor love" as the summary of the greatest commandments. John, the beloved apostle not only quotes Jesus' words shared in the shadow of impending crucifixion, "By this all will know that you are my disciples, that you love one another as I have loved you" (John 13:34-35) but goes on to say in his later epistle that if we fail to love one another we can't claim to love God, (1 John 4:20). Love is so easily sentimentalized and trivialized that Paul's practical word, "do good" may be more helpful. The "good" Paul has in mind is that which builds up, encourages and helps us become all God has called us to be. Sometimes in our busyness of serving God we forget to treat each other as if we were responding to Christ. This can be especially true of those outside our immediate circle of friends. Yet if we are children of God, and brothers and sisters in Christ, then our responses to one another should reflect the way we would treat the Lord Jesus Himself, as if He were among us. Indeed, He is among us in the manifestation of His body, the Church. Christ is among us in one another. Anytime we are rude, abrupt, condescending, or judgmental toward a brother or sister in Christ we are, in fact, responding to Christ himself. If we cannot see Christ in our brothers and sisters in Christ, certainly no one is seeing Christ in us. To be sure, we also must learn to respond to the "little hurts" of life with the spirit of the Christ who forgave those who crucified Him. Even at their worst, the indignities we sometimes visit upon one another in haste and anger are in no measure comparable to Christ's suffering and sacrifice for all of us. No one contr

Young are Ready for Revival

While preaching at Rockharbor, my home church in Costa Mesa, California, where thousands of students and young adults attend, I quoted the old Puritan John Owen on the need for personal holiness-not exactly the hottest topic today: "There is not a duty we perform for God that sin does not oppose. And the more spirituality or holiness there is in what we do, the greater enmity to it. Sin never wavers, yields, or gives up no area of one's life indeed is secured without a struggle."

HIV Test Raises Privacy Issue

New Jersey this week launched one of the most ambitious efforts in the country to control mother-to-child transmission of HIV, making screening tests mandatory for all pregnant women in the state beginning next year.

Morality Without God?

"We should recognise and celebrate good wherever we come across it, while being ready to acknowledge and counter the darker side of human nature" (from the story).

Tony Blair Converts

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair's decision to join the Roman Catholic Church might be of little interest to Americans, except for Anglophiles and students of ecclesiastical politics, but his "conversion" offers a timely opportunity to compare and contrast the relationship between religion and politics in the United Kingdom and the United States.