Many mainline Protestant churches still struggle to fill the pews, as evidenced by a multi-million dollar advertising campaign from the United Methodist Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

People drop away from church attendance. Young people are not interested.

So how can church improve? What can the church do for you? Or maybe it’s not the church’s problem.

Actually, it may be our own fault.

Veteran missiologist Ralph D. Winter passed away.last Wednesday, May 20. (Hat tips to @jhgrantjr and @edstetzer for alerting us via Twitter.)

According to the US Center for World Mission website, Winter died peacefully at home in Pasadena, California, "surrounded by three of his four daughters, his wife Barb, and a few friends."

Winter had been battling cancer and had been weakened by radiation treatments. He was 84.

In 2005, Winter was named by Time magazine as one of America's 25 most influential evangelicals. His speech at the 1974 Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization is credited with focusing evangelical mission activity on "unreached people groups."

Last Tuesday, the Sinhalese government of Sri Lanka announced the end of a 26-year struggle with the rebel group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The Tamil Tiger leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, two of his key associates had been killed, and the formal conflict was now over.

Every war, however, has an aftermath. And in the case of Sri Lanka, that will involve the resettlement of some 280,000 refugees. According to a report in today’s New York Times, aid groups are encountering government resistance as they attempt to bring relief to the refugee camps.

What will be the challenge for Sri Lankan Christians? What special role can they play? At about 7 percent of the Sri Lankan population, Christians are a small minority compared to the majority Sinhalese Buddhists (about 70 percent of the population) and the high-profile Tamil Hindu minority (about 15 percent). The Protestant evangelical component is quite small, but dedicated to service.

We’ve received some initial comments through friends at John Stott Ministries, which sponsors graduate educations for promising majority world scholars. One of their alums, who wishes not to be identified for security reasons, writes that there are

many years of work … to be done to reconstruct and rehabilitate people involved in the conflict. Thousands of Tamil people have to be resettled in their homes who got caught in the conflict. Most of these … are peasant people. I am told many areas of the North have been landmined and all that … has to be cleared before civilians can move back in to their homes and farms.

The government’s big task now is to create harmony and unity between the Sinhala and Tamil people. The war first started because the Tamil people felt discriminated against by successive Sinhala governments. This problem has gone on for the past 50 years. The Tamil, people especially in the north and east, must feel they are part of the nation. There are many thousands of Tamil-speaking people living among Sinhala people in the south. Many fled south due to the war. Thousands have also left the country.

The Christian church was the only place where Sinhala and Tamil people and in fact all ethnic groups, could safely gather each week. It was a place of unity, love, and understanding. The church could engage in rehab work in the post war period. I believe Hospital Christian Fellowship is already up in the North assessing how they could help.

How can we pray for Sri Lanka? Our John Stott Ministries correspondent suggests that we pray

1. for the ongoing rehab. efforts


2. for open doors to go and meet the civilian refugee population and counsel and care for them. They are presently housed in tents. Many families have lost their loved ones, parents are missing children and can’t find them among the many thousands of displaced people. Some 30 elderly people have died due to starvation it was reported.


3. for the many Christians among the civilian refugee population. Worship and prayer services could be held for them to comfort and encourage them in their predicament.

Yesterday Norwegian scientists unveiled a 47-million-year-old fossil they are touting as a crucial link in the "stem group" from which humans and other mammals came. Jorn Hurum, whose Oslo museum purchased "Ida" in 2007 from a private collector who unearthed it in 1983, has been quick to label the well-preserved, cat-like fossil the "missing link" between mammals and humans, calling it the "Holy Grail" and the "Lost Ark" of science. Following yesterday's media frenzy, a book on Darwinius masillae is releasing today, and a two-hour History Channel special is airing May 25.

What many media are ignoring, save the Associated Press, is that other paleontologists are skeptical of Ida's close link to humans. "We are not dealing with our grand- grand- grand- grandmother but perhaps our grand- grand- grand- aunt," German researcher Jens Franzen said yesterday.

"I actually don't think it's terribly close to the common ancestral line of monkeys, apes and people," said K. Christopher Beard of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. "I would say it's about as far away as you can get from that line and still be a primate. . . . I would say it's more like a third cousin twice removed."

Manoj Pradhan, in jail for leading riots against Christians last year in Orissa, seems to have won a seat in the state assembly in India's general elections.

But overall, India's Christians have reason to be happy with the election. Dara Singh, who was convicted of leading Graham Staines' murder, was not permitted to run.

More importantly, most of the election results showed a distaste for right-wing Hinduism and support of the non-religious Congress Party. The BJP, a Hindu nationalist party, was defeated quite solidly. The Washington Post reports that they are re-evaluating their support of candidates who support anti-Christian and anti-Muslim violence.

Manmohan Singh, the incumbent, is set for a second term as prime minister. The New York Times reports that India's stock market surged after the announcement the Congress party won 205 of 543 seats in Parliament. A near-majority means the party no longer has to "rely on India's Communist parties to stay in power." Those Communist parties won about 80 seats, and the BJP, 159.

Last week, evangelical creation care entered a new phase as key pastors, scientists, and thought leaders gathered near Atlanta for a "coming out party." That's what Jonathan Merritt called the gathering as he welcomed conferees to Flourish 09, hosted by Cross Pointe Church where Merritt serves on the staff with his father, senior pastor and former president of the Southern Baptist Convention James Merritt.

Like all debutantes, the leaders of Flourish were clearly self-conscious as they tried to forge a new identity in public for the first time. Flourish president and co-founder Rusty Pritchard was the first of many to declare, "I am not an environmentalist." For Pritchard, a natural resources economist who founded the environmental studies program at Emory University, that label is loaded with overtones of judgmentalism and apocalypticism. We don't need environmentalism for us to be perceived as judgmental, said Pritchard. If you want judgmentalism, "just come to my church."

What emerged from Pritchard's keynote talk was not a passion for the environment so much as a passion for people, their health and well-being, and particularly for social justice. If our abuse of the environment raises, for example, the rate of debilitating asthma attacks, then it is a compassion issue for the church.

Columnist Michael Gerson says our verbal nastiness is nothing to laugh at.

The first response to the performer on a public stage wishing the death of a stranger for political reasons was discomfort. Wanda Sykes had "crossed a line" at the White House Correspondents Dinner in accusing Rush Limbaugh of terrorism and treason, mocking his past drug addiction and wishing his kidneys would fail. But a counterreaction soon developed: Humor is often transgressive, and if you can't take it, don't dish it, and let's everyone lighten up a bit, and can't anyone take a joke anymore?

The initial reaction was more human.

Apple rejected an iPhone application that would allow people to put their own image on Jesus' face. The Me So Holy app would enable someone to take a mug shot and crop it to replace Jesus' face. Apple said no to the app, saying it "contains objectionable material," according to Wired.

"Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple's reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users," the iPhone SDK agreement states.

Apple may be tightening its restrictions on its iPhone App Store after it approved an iPhone app called Baby Shaker, a game whose objective was to shake a baby to death. Amid parental outrage, Apple subsequently removed the app, saying its approval was a mistake.

Me So Holy iPhone App from Benjamin Margolis on Vimeo.

Francis Schaeffer influenced (to some degree) almost every future evangelical pastor and institutional leader of my generation. (What generation? you ask. Well, I squeezed the adventures of both high school and college into the '60s, paralleling the Beatles' journey from their early Hamburg recording of "My Bonnie" to their late psychedelic movie "Yellow Submarine.")

Schaeffer was a man of contradictions, but his passion for pursuing truth--and pushing others to do the same--was unflinchingly unambiguous and brought many young adults in an experiential generation back to reason.

Christian social critic Os Guinness was one of those so influenced. To mark the 25th anniversary of Schaeffer's death (coming up next week on May 15), Justin Taylor interviewed Os for his "Between Two Worlds" blog.

Some highlights:

[A] friend took me to hear a strange little man in Swiss knickers, with a high-pitched voice, terms all of his own such as ‘the line of despair,’ and appalling mispronunciations and occasional malapropisms. But I was intrigued and then hooked. Schaeffer was the first Christian I met who was ... capable of connecting the dots and making sense of the extraordinary times that puzzled and dismayed most people. Two years later, I went to the Swiss l’Abri ... [T]he summer of 1967 became the most revolutionary period in my entire life. I have never been the same since.

I have never met anyone with such a passion for God, combined with a passion for people, combined with a passion for truth. That is an extremely rare combination, and Schaeffer embodied it. It is also why so many of his scholarly critics completely miss the heart of who he was, and why his son’s recent portrayal of his father is such a travesty and an outrage.

[H]e had a massive impact on the lives of individuals, including me, but his wider significance was as ... a door opener. When almost no Evangelicals were thinking about culture and connecting unconnected dots, Schaeffer not only did it himself but blazed a trail for countless others to follow. Many who trumpet their disagreements with him today owe their very capacity to disagree to his influence a generation ago. A little man in stature, he was a giant in influence ...

Read the full interview here.

Dawn Herzog Jewell, an evangelical author/friend of mine on Facebook, called my attention to a new White Castle commercial for its new pulled pork sandwich. (See above, PG-13) In the first place, the White Castle marketing department is not too swift in launching an effort like this during the global swine flu 'panic-epidemic.'

But using imagery from a strip club and an exotic dancer-pig crosses the border for me into visual exploitation of women. Exotic dancers are at extremely high risk of drug abuse and prostitution, and a very high percentage of them were abused as children. My friend emails:

If I didn't know that between 65 to 90 percent of women working in strip clubs were sexually abused, the ad might be funnier. It pokes fun at men viewing women as pieces of meat, but I'm afraid it validates more than condones the exploitation of women's bodies. The sexualization of cultures takes place ad by ad, song by song. It will continue if we remain silent.

What a great idea, White Castle, to associate your food products with this social sickness. This past week, New York Times columnist Nick Kristof, a person of much integrity in the mainstream media, wrote about exploitation of woman and prostitution in the United States.

In his May 7 column, 'Girls on Our Streets,' he writes:

I've often reported on sex trafficking in other countries, and that has made me curious about the situation here in the United States. Prostitution in America isn't as brutal as it is in, say, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Cambodia and Malaysia (where young girls are routinely kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured by brothel owners, occasionally even killed). But the scene on American streets is still appalling

Grove City College has placed a student on a one-year suspension for appearing in gay porn after an e-mail with images of him spread across campus.

John Gechter, a senior majoring in molecular biology, earned as much as $11,000 per weekend to film more than a dozen videos in Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles, according to Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Anya Sostek reports that Gechter was charged with sexual misconduct, participation in the public display of pornography and engaging in "conduct that is contrary to the mission and values of Grove City College and likely to bring dishonor to the College."

Grove City released a statement to the Post-Gazette yesterday about Gechter, who says he is bisexual.

"The student's suspension resulted from his involvement in the adult pornography industry. The student acknowledged that he was employed in the adult entertainment industry and that he knew that violated the student code of conduct. Throughout this process, his sexual orientation was not a factor in the decision."

CT's May cover story discusses how the routine monthly giving of millions of evangelicals is keeping ministries afloat during the so-called "Great Recession." The story confirms the magazine's December cover story on why automatic and routine giving is most faithful. (Though it presents the opposite conclusion on the story of American Christian giving.)

But the big givers are still giving during this recession too. The National Christian Foundation announced today that it just passed out its 2 billionth dollar. The organization is a non-profit that provides "donor advised funds" that collect the donations of wealthy individuals to be dispersed at a later date. It has been around since 1982, and the NCF gave out its 1 billionth dollar just three years ago. Since 2006, it's given out another billion.

The $1.5 million gift that put NCF over the top was from "The Green Fund to Reach the Children," a donor-advised fund of Hobby Lobby and its CEO David Green.

Yesterday, Collin Hansen profiled Tullian Tchividjian, the 36-year-old Florida pastor whose church recently merged with Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church (formerly led by D. James Kennedy).

We weren't the only ones talking about Tchividjian yesterday. Popular Reformed blogger Tim Challies reviewed Tchividjian's new book, Unfashionable: Making a Difference in the World by Being Different, and found himself surprisingly in disagreement with large sections of it.

While Challies liked a lot of the book, he thinks Tchividjian has a "theology of God's kingdom that I just was not able reconcile with Scripture ?. He writes about transformationalism, the view that God seeks to redeem and renew not just people but nations and cultures. My concern is that such theology emphasizes the continuity between the world today and the world after the consummation of history and does so at the expense of the kind of radical discontinuity Scripture teaches."

Christianity Today seeks to revitalize the church by helping Christian leaders understand and assess the people, events, and ideas that are shaping evangelicalism's life, theology, and mission. We examine both the culture of the church and the culture in which the church swims.

We are a magazine of both formation and information, and in both functions we believe in the ability of our readers to think for themselves. We don't muddy the waters simply for the sake of doing so, but we don't believe truth and complexity are opposites, either. As a magazine of reform, we believe many beliefs need to be challenged - but always in service of the biblical truths on which we stand.

To help our readers better understand the world and the church, we use all kinds of journalism. Sometimes people get confused about "what we're trying to say." Occasionally we find ourselves having to explain how different kinds of articles work.

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Our "Joe the Plumber" interview has provoked a lot of comments and questions about why we would interview such a person who is not known as an evangelical leader, and why we did not explicitly state our beliefs about homosexuality, those who struggle with same-sex attraction, and emerging Christian leadership.

The fact is that our views on such matters are quite plainly available for anyone to read. The point of an interview with "Joe the Plumber" was to query someone who has become a household name, who is influential as a speaker and author, and who identifies as an evangelical Christian. Do we agree with everything he said? We believe that you can read what we've written on the subject and come to your own conclusions on that point.

For about the past two years, I have had this hunch that sooner or later the US Supreme Court would be presented with a church-property dispute that would sharply question the role of the judiciary in settling disputes between a Protestant denomination and a local parish or congregation.

It looks like 'sooner' has arrived now.

About noon today (May 5), while Anglicans worldwide are watching events in Jamaica, where top leaders are debating the proposed Anglican Covenant, St. James Anglican, Newport Beach, California, released an press statement saying they would be appealing the decision of the California Supreme Court to the US Supreme Court.

Here's some of what the press statement said:

St. James Anglican Church, at the centerpiece of a nationally publicized church property dispute with the Episcopal Church, announced today that it will file a petition for writ of certiorari with the United States Supreme Court to resolve an important issue of religious freedom: Does the United States Constitution, which both prohibits the establishment of religion and protects the free exercise of religion, allow certain religious denominations to disregard the normal rules of property ownership that apply to everyone else?

I would have to agree the US Supreme Court should address this area. In recent years, the high court has not done as good a job as it might have on mapping the boundaries between church and state.

The issue here from my point of view is state and judicial intervention into the inner workings of voluntary religious organizations (denominations); and, based on the California Supreme Court ruling recently, the court's inappropriate preference for the religious institution versus the individual congregation.

Let's face it. For the vast number of American Protestant congregations, the relationship today with their denomination is mostly a one-way street. Send money to the HQ and get very little in return.

The leaders at St. James Anglican said in their statement:

Under longstanding law, no one can unilaterally impose a trust over someone else's property without their permission.

White supremacists, Islamic clerics, a controversial Kansas pastor and a U.S. talk show host are on a list of 22 people banned from Britain for "stirring up hatred," the British government said Tuesday.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) released its lists of countries that egregiously violate religious freedom and those that it's keeping an eye on. The situation in these countries is not just bad; it must show "intent and a pattern of recurrent affirmative acts of abuse on the part of the government."

The annual report, released today, is put together by a bi-partisan group who send their recommendations to the State Department. Theoretically, this could lead to sanctions if the State Department declares them Countries of Particular Concern (CPCs). However, Condoleeza Rice signed off on the official list of CPC's in January - two years late.

USCIRF named 13 countries this year. Since 2008's list, they have added Nigeria (slightly surprising) and Iraq:

News reports, such as this one from CNN and this one from US News, highlighted yesterday the attitudes of white evangelicals on the issue of torture. According to a survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 18 percent of white evangelicals said use of torture against suspected terrorists can often be justified and 44 percent said it can sometimes be justified. That adds up to 62 percent. Compare that solid majority to the often/sometimes number for white non-Hispanic Catholics (51 percent, a bare majority) and white mainline Protestants (46 percent). Because of problems with the sample size, the Pew study was unable to peg a percentage for other groups, such as African-American Protestants or Hispanic Catholics.

One more factor to consider: attendance at religious services. Fifty-four percent of those who attend religious services at least weekly say torture against suspected terrorists can be often/sometimes justified compared to 51 percent of those who attend monthly or a few times a year and 42 percent of those who attend seldom or never.

The immediate impression is that religion - especially religion characterized by active commitment - makes people bloodthirsty. Or something like that.

What can we say about this picture?