Not long ago, I blogged the news that it’s better to give than to receive. Now comes the news that going to church is good for you. It’s almost like there was some kind of supernatural agency that wanted us to know how we could have better lives. (I blogged this on the web site at my church, but the original article was in the NY Times.)
I’ve been too busy to follow the GA closely, but I’ll post a few items that I noticed over the weekend.
(By the way: the only way to get timely information about GA seems to be by following Twitter or the RSS feeds for the Christian Post. Our denomination’s official sources are either unnavigable or updated at a tempo that is rather, umm, leisurely.)
The big news, of course, is that GA did not approve the committee’s redefinition of marriage. The defeat was by a narrow margin, however, and is probably only a matter of time, however, with the continuing exodus of more-conservative congregations.
In other news, GA:
I stumbled on Kate Shellnutt’s Believe It Or Not blog at the Houston Chronicle. She’s doing a good job of curating interesting articles, albeit with a Texas emphasis.
The pressure is getting to Iran’s clerics, so they’ve started lying about what they’re doing:
“His crime is not, as some claim, converting others to Christianity,” said Gholomali Rezvani, deputy governor of Iran’s Gilan province, where the persecuted pastor was sentenced to death by hanging. “He is guilty of security-related crimes.”
Those crimes, claimed Rezvani, in remarks reported by Fars news agency (the Iranian government’s unofficial mouthpiece), include rape and extortion. “No one is executed in Iran for their choice of religion,” he insisted.
The Iranian provincial governor’s explanation of Pastor Nadarkhani’s death sentence does not square with court records of the trial, conviction and appeal of the leader of 400 Christian house churches – whom Rezvani disparagingly described as a “Zionist” criminal.
“Does not square” is a very mild way of stating the obvious: the provincial governor is lying. What a great political system they have there, that the governor has no compunctions about lying in describing the charges against someone.
The clerics may yet kill Pastor Nadarkhani, but the fact that they’vee changing their stories, and are now providing a different rationale is a sign that the pressure is getting to them. Remember what Jesus said: all that do evil hate the light (John 3:20).