Tim Keller, pastor of Manhattan's Redeemer Presbyterian Church, responded to CT concerning the sudden death of Times Square Church pastor David Wilkerson:

“I am deeply saddened to hear this news. David Wilkerson has made an enduring contribution to the ministry of the gospel in New York City. His courageous commitment to follow God’s call can be an example to us all.”

Posted by Trevor Persaud at April 28, 2011 12:55PM | Comments (4)

David Wilkerson, author of The Cross and the Switchblade and founder of World Challenge Ministries, died in a car crash today, Charisma and CBN are reporting. CBN reports that Wilkerson, 79, was driving and was pronounced dead at the scene.

Wilkerson was driving east on U.S. 175 in Texas Wednesday afternoon, and moved into the opposite lane where a tractor trailer was driving westbound. The truck driver saw the car and tried to move out of the way, but still collided with the pastor's car head on, according to Public Safety Trooper Eric Long.

It's unclear what caused Wilkerson to veer into the other lane. His wife Gwen was also involved in the crash and rushed to the hospital, along with the truck driver.

The church that he founded, Times Square Church in New York City, has more than 8,000 members.

In 2009, Wilkerson posted a message warning of riots, fires, and economic collapse in New York City. CT wrote at the time about why Wilkerson's message received so much attention.

Wilkerson has more credibility and name recognition than many other online prophets. He is the author of The Cross and the Switchblade, one of the most popular books in evangelical history. (It ranked #32 in Christianity Today's list of "Top 50 Books That Have Shaped Evangelicals.") His Teen Challenge ministry is very prominent in discussions of drug treatment and social service partnerships between church and government. And Times Square Church, which he founded, reportedly draws 8,000 people weekly and is known for its many social service ministries.

Wilkerson continued to write blog posts until his death.

Update: Details about Wilkerson's memorial service will be posted on Times Square's website, which states that it will be streamed live.

David Wilkerson has been a top 10 trending topic on Twitter tonight, including tweets from Wilkerson's cousin and Joel Houston, leader of the Sydney-based youth worship band Hillsong United.

Rich Wilkerson: "The term LEGEND is often used to describe a person of extreme influence but what about a man that supersedes superlatives..david wilkerson"

Joel Houston: "The cross and the switchblade was the first book I ever read. Seeded NYC in my heart. So grateful for the life and legacy of David Wilkerson"

Posted by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at April 27, 2011 8:48PM | Comments (403)

Prison inmates who are deprived of their religious rights cannot sue states for monetary damages, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday.

Inmate Harvey Leroy Sossamon III said a Texas state prison illegally prevented him from attending religious services. Sossamon had been on cell restriction for disciplinary reasons at the time.

Sossamon alleged that the prison's actions violated the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000, which protects inmates' right to practice their faith.

Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, ruled that under RLUIPA prisoners can sue to change prison policies but not seek financial redress. Texas does not forgo its "sovereign immunity" when it accepts federal money to run its prisons, Thomas said.

After Sossamon filed suit, the prison changed its policies, Thomas noted.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was joined by Justice Stephen Breyer in dissenting from the majority decision, argued that RLIUPA allows prisoners to seek "appropriate relief" for violations of the law.

Without the possibility of monetary damages, Sotomayor said, prisoners will be forced to defend their religious rights "with one hand tied behind their backs."

The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty agreed, saying the high court's ruling leaves prisoners with "an incomplete remedy for vindicating their religious rights."

"We are disappointed in the majority's pinched view of what was a clear congressional intent to provide prisoners broad protection for religious liberty and a robust remedy for its violation, including monetary damages," said BJC Executive Director J. Brent Walker.

Posted by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at April 21, 2011 3:32PM

Editor's note: For the past three years, Stephen Smith has used Twitter's API to take a snapshot of what people say they are giving up for Lent. Each year, the list is a mix of the sincere and the sarcastic, the earnest and the anti-religious. But each year, it results in a fascinating look at American spirituality--especially with the recurrent themes of people tweeting how they plan to give up social networking for the 40 day season of fasting.

Congratulations, I guess, go this year to Charlie Sheen, who came in at both #23 and, with “tiger blood,” at #90. Justin Bieber is up several spots this year, so he hasn’t quite crested yet. The next-highest celebrity, who didn’t make the top 100, is British boy band One Direction.

“Trophies,” at #69, refers to the English soccer club Arsenal’s recent defeat, or something.

The later start to Lent this year means that “snow” doesn’t appear on the list–last year, it was #48. Myspace hangs on at #99, dropping 48 places.

This list draws from 85,000 tweets from March 7-10, 2011, and excludes retweets.

Rank	Word	Count	Change from last year's rank
1.	Twitter	4,297	0
2.	Facebook	4,060	0
3.	Chocolate	3,185	0
4.	Swearing	2,527	+1
5.	Alcohol	2,347	-1
6.	Sex	2,093	+3
7.	Soda	1,959	-1
8.	Lent	1,493	-1
9.	Meat	1,352	-1
10.	Fast food	1,303	0
11.	Sweets	1,252	0
12.	Giving up things	778	+7
13.	School	768	+27
14.	Religion	745	+1
15.	Coffee	707	-3
16.	You	675	+6
17.	Social networking	665	+15
18.	Chips	664	+3
19.	Junk food	594	-1
20.	Bread	571	+6
21.	Smoking	555	-4
22.	Candy	541	-8
23.	Charlie Sheen	511
24.	Work	482	+4
25.	Stuff	467	-2
26.	Catholicism	436	-10
27.	Food	395	+3
28.	Shopping	363	+1
29.	Marijuana	358	+31
30.	Beer	346	-10
31.	Fried food	307	-7
32.	Homework	306	+27
33.	Cheese	297	+4
34.	Cookies	293	+11
35.	Red meat	285	-10
36.	Masturbation	285	+8
37.	Virginity	253	+26
38.	Pancakes	252	+20
39.	Rice	236	-5
40.	Booze	235	+2
41.	Coke	234	-3
42.	Boys	229	+24
43.	Sugar	229	-16
44.	Sobriety	226	+10
45.	Procrastination	226	-10
46.	Nothing	219	+21
47.	Winning	219
48.	Ice cream	211	-7
49.	Caffeine	203	-16
50.	McDonald’s	195	+27
51.	Church	188	+28
52.	Wine	188	-3
53.	TV	184	-7
54.	Starbucks	183	-15
55.	Texting	182	-12
56.	Liquor	181	-1
57.	Negativity	180	+26
58.	Carbs	179	+10
59.	Christianity	177	-12
60.	Justin Bieber	176	+9
61.	Pizza	175	-11
62.	French fries	159	+2
63.	Me	157	+9
64.	Losing	155
65.	Men	152	-13
66.	Fizzy drinks	151
67.	Porn	147	+4
68.	Lint	147	-11
69.	Trophies	144
70.	Tumblr	144
71.	Desserts	142	-15
72.	Chicken	140	+15
73.	Pork	139	-3
74.	Cake	132	+8
75.	Tea	127	+19
76.	Sarcasm	127	+14
77.	Diet Coke	119	-16
78.	Laziness	118	-13
79.	Sleep	117	-6
80.	Jesus	115	-4
81.	College	111
82.	Internet	110	-46
83.	Complaining	108	-9
84.	Breathing	103
85.	Takeout	98
86.	Beef	98	-8
87.	People	96	+11
88.	New Year’s resolutions	96	+1
89.	Him	94	-5
90.	Tiger blood	92
91.	Makeup	91
92.	Juice	90	-7
93.	Clothes	89
94.	My phone	88
95.	God	87	-15
96.	Abstinence	85	-15
97.	Stress	84
98.	Chipotle	82
99.	Myspace	81	-48
100.	Eating out	81	-25

This article first appeared at Stephen Smith's OpenBible.info. Used with permission.

Posted by Ted Olsen at April 14, 2011 9:36AM | Comments (1)

Thomas Nelson has announced that Michael Hyatt has stepped down as CEO but will continue to serve as chairman of the board. Mark Schoenwald, who is president and COO, will take Hyatt's place as CEO.

Before he joined the publishing company in 2005, Schoenwald has served as as president of home décor, garden, and gift companies including New Creative Enterprises, One Coast Network, and Kennedy Group, according to Publisher's Weekly. Hyatt wrote on his blog that he plans to spend more time in other areas.

The reason for this transition is that I want to spend more time externally focused: writing, speaking, and pursuing other business interests. This is not a big surprise to my family or closest friends—perhaps not even to you. I love the creative life, and I was finding it increasingly difficult to give expression to my gifts while running a company the size of Thomas Nelson.

I feel that this is the perfect time to make this transition. We finished our fiscal year on March 31st with very strong momentum. We currently have several books on the bestseller lists, including Heaven Is for Real, which has been #1 on the New York Times list for 10 straight weeks. The company is healthy, vibrant, and poised for growth. We have a talented and proven successor in Mark, who can lead the company forward.

Heaven is For Real is about a boy who says he died and went to heaven, a book that has sold quite well for Thomas Nelson. In 2008, the company cut about 10 percent of its workforce. Last year, the private equity firm Kolberg & Co. led a group of investors to acquire a majority stake in the company.

Posted by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at April 12, 2011 3:36PM | Comments (6)

One of the largest unregistered Protestant churches in Beijing plans to risk arrest by worshipping in the open air this Sunday (April 10) after eviction from the restaurant where they have met for the past year.

The owner of the Old Story Club restaurant issued repeated requests for the Shouwang Church to find another worship venue, and authorities have pressured other prospective landlords to close their facilities to the 1,000-member congregation, sources said. Unwilling to subject themselves to the controls and restrictions of the official Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM), the congregation has held three services each Sunday in the restaurant for more than a year.

Church members have said they are not opposed to the government and are not politically active, but they fear authorities could find their open-air worship threatening.

“Normal” (state-sanctioned) religious assembly outdoors is legal in China, and even unregistered church activity is usually tolerated if no more than 50 people gather, especially if the people are related and can cite the gathering as a family get-together, said a source in China who requested anonymity. Although the congregation technically risks arrest as an unregistered church, the primary danger is being viewed as politically active, the source said.

“For a larger group of Christians to meet in any ‘unregistered’ location led by an ‘unregistered’ leader is illegal,” he said. “The sensitivity of meeting in a park is not being illegal, but being so highly visible. Being ‘visible’ ends up giving an impression of being a political ‘protest.’”

The congregation believes China’s Department of Religious Affairs has overstepped its jurisdiction in issuing regulations limiting unregistered church activity, according to a statement church leaders issued this week.

“Out of respect for both the Chinese Constitution [whose Article 36 stipulates freedom of worship] and Christian conscience, we cannot actively endorse and submit to the regulations which bid us to cease all Sunday worship activities outside of [the] ‘Three-Self Patriotic Movement’ – the only state-sanctioned church,” according to the statement. “Of course, we still must follow the teachings of the Bible, which is for everyone to submit to and respect the governing authorities. We are willing to submit to the regulations with passivity and all the while shoulder all the consequences which . . . continuing to worship outside of what is sanctioned by these regulations will bring us.”

The church decided to resort to open-air worship after a prospective landlord backed out of a contractual agreement to allow the congregation to meet at the Xihua Business Hotel, the church said in its statement.

“They had signed another rental contract with another property facility and announced during the March 22 service that they were to move in two weeks,” the source said. “In spite of the fact that they had signed a formal contract, the new landlord suddenly called them on March 22 and refused to let them use the facility.”

The landlord offered various excuses for reneging on the contract, according to church leaders, and that disappointment came after 15 months of trying to obtain the key to another property the church had purchased.

“The space in Daheng New Epoch Technology building, which the church had spent over 27.5 million RMB [US$4.2 million] to purchase, has failed to hand the key over to the church for the past year and three months because of government intervention,” the church said in its statement. “For the past year, our church has not had a settled meeting place.”

Beginning as a house church in 1993, the Shouwang Church has been evicted from several rented locations. It also met outside after its last displacement in 2009. The congregation does not believe its calling is to split up into smaller units.

“For the past several years the church has been given a vision from God to be ‘the city on a hill,’” the source said. “Especially since 2009, when they officially began the church building purchase, they have been trying to become a more officially established status. At this point, they feel that they have not completed the journey in obedience to God.”

The number of Protestant house church Christians is estimated at between 45 and 60 million, according to Yu Jianrong, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Rural Development Institute. Yu and others have concluded that house churches are a positive influence on society, but the government is wary of such influence.

Yu estimated another 18 to 30 million people attend government-approved churches – potentially putting the number of Christians higher than that of Communist Party members, which number around 74 million.

The government-commissioned study by Yu and associates suggested that officials should seek to integrate house churches and no longer regard them as enemies of the state. The study employed a combination of interviews, field surveys and policy reviews to gather information on house churches in several provinces from October 2007 to November 2008.

Yu’s team found that most house or “family” churches fit into one of three broad categories: traditional house churches, open house churches or urban emerging churches. Traditional house churches were generally smaller, family-based churches, meeting in relative secrecy. Though not a Christian himself, Yu attended some of these meetings and noted that the focus was not on democracy or human rights but rather on spiritual life and community.

The “open” house churches were less secretive and had more members, sometimes advertising their services and holding public gatherings, he found. Urban emerging churches functioned openly but independently of TSPM churches. In some provinces such as Wenzhou, these churches had constructed their own buildings and operated without interference from local officials.

While some house churches actively seek registration with authorities to avoid arrests and harassment, they would like the option of registering outside the government-approved TSPM structure, as they disagree with TSPM beliefs and controls. Many unregistered evangelical Protestant groups refuse to register with TSPM due to theological differences, fear of adverse consequences if they reveal names and addresses of church leaders or members or fear that it will control sermon content.

Posted by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at April 8, 2011 11:39AM | Comments (3)

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a challenge to an Arizona school tuition credit program critics contend was principally benefiting religious institutions.

The 5-4 decision, combined with a 2007 ruling rejecting a similar challenge to the Bush administration's faith-based office, seems to solidify the court's skepticism toward attempts to derail government funding of religious programs.

Monday's decision was hailed by supporters of religiously based education and makes it tougher for taxpayers to challenge such scholarship programs by claiming they violate church-state separation.

The Arizona tax credit, enacted in 1997, allows participants to receive dollar-for-dollar tax credits for donations to so-called "student tuition organizations," or STOs, of up to $500 for individuals and $1,000 for married couples.

The Arizona Department of Revenue reported that two STOs -- the Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization and the Catholic School Tuition Organization of the Diocese of Phoenix -- received 38 percent of the total donations in 2009. Court documents showed the total percentage of religiously affiliated STOs was 67 percent that year, down from 94
percent in 1998.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court's conservative majority, said the taxpayers who filed suit lacked legal standing to challenge the program because they incorrectly viewed the tax credit as a form of government spending.

"While the state, at the outset, affords the opportunity to create and contribute to an STO, the tax credit system is implemented by private action and with no state intervention," he wrote.

The decision echoed the court's 2007 ruling in a case filed against the White House office by an atheist group; in that case, too, the justices said challengers did not have standing.

"In an era of frequent litigation, ... courts must be more careful to insist on the formal rules of standing, not less so," Kennedy concluded in the Arizona decision.

In a strongly worded dissent, the court's freshman member, Justice Elena Kagan, argued that taxpayer standing should not be based on whether the money subsidizing religion comes through a tax break or a direct grant.

"Either way, the government has financed the religious activity," she said. "And so either way, taxpayers should be able to challenge the subsidy."

She was joined in her dissent by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. Kennedy was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito.

The Alliance Defense Fund, which argued for the Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization, hailed the "national precedent" that will limit similar suits in federal courts.

"The court's reasoning is sound," said ADF senior counsel David Cortman. "The government does not own 100 percent of every American's paycheck. The donations are private money, not government money."

Americans United for Separation of Church and State agreed the decision could prevent federal court action on the issue in the future, but vowed to continue the fight in state courts.

"This is not a good day for the wall of separation," said the Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United. "A few more bricks are out of it."

He called the twin decisions "disturbing roadblocks to litigation" set up by the high court. "Certainly it's one more hurdle to jump, and these hurdles are getting pretty big," he said.

Nathan Diament, director of public policy for the Orthodox Union, said the decision not only protects programs that exist in several states -- and have benefited Jewish students with scholarships -- but will help pave the way for more of them.

"We will ramp up our efforts to replicate the Arizona education tax credit program in other states," he predicted.

The decision leaves in-depth court review of the merits of voucher programs to state courts, said Ira Lupu, a church-state expert at George Washington University Law School. There, lawyers could argue whether such programs violate state or federal constitutions because state courts don't follow the same rules on legal standing as federal courts.

"The questions about the validity of the Arizona program remain unresolved," he said.

Posted by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at April 4, 2011 4:44PM | Comments (1)