Until the Western church learns to read sacred Scripture as it was meant to be understood, the traditional church will continue to lose members and attendance. The GOOD NEWS though is that whatever "religious loses" there may be. George Barna confirms that there is a greater offset in "spiritual gains".

People want SPIRIT-not LAW. People want LIFE- not LECTURES.

The Christian Bible was written in an EASTERN

Jesus was not a Westerner nor Roman or Greek. Jesus was from an Aramaic environment and he thought with Eastern pictures, parables, and symbolism. It doesn't matter if Jesus spent some of the "lost years" in India or Tibet or not, he was Eastern in thought. Nicolas Notovitch, and others, claim that Jesus spent several years at the lamasery or monastery of Hemis in Ladakh. For me that is irrevelant to the point I am making.

Is say "Biblical re-ORIENT-ation" because ORIENT ...

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1 John 4:7-12

Sometimes even as Christians we tend to be judgmental or critical of someone who is not a believer or isn't as far in their Christian walk as others. We may look at a person's behavior in scorn. We may not even realize we do it, for we have no intention of hurting them.

Even though my sons have been raised in the church and brought up in a Christian home, at ages seventeen and twenty-one, God is definitely not finished with them yet. They're not perfect. They are also at a vulnerable age where they are questioning their faith, the Bible, and the beliefs which they have been taught.

Thank God, we attend a church that is very kind and tolerant. The truth is preached, but sinners are welcomed, not condemned. I'm so glad, because right now it is an effort to ...

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In these trying economic and social times, many men and women are looking to the church in order to find peace of mind and answers to a great many questions. People that have previously been uninterested in hearing about God are now curious about what He has to say. Leaders and churchgoers alike are finding themselves swamped with inquiries from their friends and acquaintances alike as to the nature and character of God. The Modern Church vs. the Acts Church In the book of Acts, we see what the church was originally intended to look like. As soon as the 120 were filled with the Holy Spirit in the upper room in Chapter 2 of Acts, the church explodes.

Many people are saved and a community develops in which all goods are shared, all sicknesses are healed and the spiritual gifts are in use. The church today looks drastically different ...

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If you are active in the service of the lord, you may know how much we are often tested in his divine service. Our own ministry, for many years, had to preach out of a storefront, with barely enough money from our poor congregation to pay the rent to the building owner, much less the fund to build a church.

Those were some hard times, times that even tested the faith of many in the congregation, with the economy on the ropes, and many local families almost knocked out through the drugs, crime, and poverty that stalked the inner city where we did the work of the lord. But God showed us through the hardest of times, and now rather than fighting to keep our ministry running, we are finally building a church.

It is not just poverty that tries men's souls. Success can do the same. Building a ...

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