Hi y'all - misguided idiots! Send them to me - I'm a prayer slayer.
On Dec 13, 3:15 pm, ornamentalmind <[email protected]> wrote:
> The obvious.
> Orn.
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/
>
> December 14, 2008
>
> Evangelical Article of Faith: Bad Times Draw Bigger Crowds
>
> By PAUL VITELLO
> The sudden crush of worshipers packing the small evangelical Shelter
> Rock Church in Manhasset, N.Y. — a Long Island hamlet of yacht clubs
> and hedge fund managers — forced the pastor to set up an overflow room
> with closed-circuit TV and 100 folding chairs, which have been filled
> for six Sundays straight.
> In Seattle, the Mars Hill Church, one of the fastest-growing
> evangelical churches in the country, grew to 7,000 members this fall,
> up 1,000 in a year. At the Life Christian Church in West Orange, N.J.,
> prayer requests have doubled — almost all of them aimed at getting or
> keeping jobs.
> Like evangelical churches around the country, the three churches have
> enjoyed steady growth over the last decade. But since September,
> pastors nationwide say they have seen such a burst of new interest
> that they find themselves contending with powerful conflicting
> emotions — deep empathy and quiet excitement — as they re-encounter an
> old piece of religious lore:
> Bad times are good for evangelical churches.
> “It’s a wonderful time, a great evangelistic opportunity for us,” said
> the Rev. A. R. Bernard, founder and senior pastor of the Christian
> Cultural Center in Brooklyn, New York’s largest evangelical
> congregation, where regulars are arriving earlier to get a seat. “When
> people are shaken to the core, it can open doors.”
> Nationwide, congregations large and small are presenting programs of
> practical advice for people in fiscal straits — from a homegrown
> series on “Financial Peace” at a Midtown Manhattan church called the
> Journey, to the “Good Sense” program developed at the 20,000-member
> Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., and now
> offered at churches all over the country.
> Many ministers have for the moment jettisoned standard sermons on
> marriage and the Beatitudes to preach instead about the theological
> meaning of the downturn.
> The Jehovah’s Witnesses, who moved much of their door-to-door
> evangelizing to the night shift 10 years ago because so few people
> were home during the day, returned to daylight witnessing this year.
> “People are out of work, and they are answering the door,” said a
> spokesman, J. R. Brown.
> Mr. Bernard plans to start 100 prayer groups next year, using a model
> conceived by the megachurch pastor Rick Warren, to “foster spiritual
> dialogue in these times” in small gatherings around the city.
> A recent spot check of some large Roman Catholic parishes and mainline
> Protestant churches around the nation indicated attendance increases
> there, too. But they were nowhere near as striking as those reported
> by congregations describing themselves as evangelical, a term
> generally applied to churches that stress the literal authority of
> Scripture and the importance of personal conversion, or being “born
> again.”
> Part of the evangelicals’ new excitement is rooted in a communal
> belief that the big Christian revivals of the 19th century, known as
> the second and third Great Awakenings, were touched off by economic
> panics. Historians of religion do not buy it, but the notion “has
> always lived in the lore of evangelism,” said Tony Carnes, a
> sociologist who studies religion.
> A study last year may lend some credence to the legend. In ”Praying
> for Recession: The Business Cycle and Protestant Religiosity in the
> United States,” David Beckworth, an assistant professor of economics
> at Texas State University, looked at long-established trend lines
> showing the growth of evangelical congregations and the decline of
> mainline churches and found a more telling detail: During each
> recession cycle between 1968 and 2004, the rate of growth in
> evangelical churches jumped by 50 percent. By comparison, mainline
> Protestant churches continued their decline during recessions, though
> a bit more slowly.
> The little-noticed study began receiving attention from some preachers
> in September, when the stock market began its free fall. With the
> swelling attendance they were seeing, and a sense that worldwide
> calamities come along only once in an evangelist’s lifetime, the study
> has encouraged some to think big.
> “I found it very exciting, and I called up that fellow to tell him
> so,” said the Rev. Don MacKintosh, a Seventh Day Adventist
> televangelist in California who contacted Dr. Beckworth a few weeks
> ago after hearing word of his paper from another preacher. ”We need to
> leverage this moment, because every Christian revival in this
> country’s history has come off a period of rampant greed and fear.
> That’s what we’re in today — the time of fear and greed.”
> Frank O’Neill, 54, a manager who lost his job at Morgan Stanley this
> year, said the “humbling experience” of unemployment made him cast
> about for a more personal relationship with God than he was able to
> find in the Catholicism of his youth. In joining the Shelter Rock
> Church on Long Island, he said, he found a deeper sense of “God’s
> authority over everything — I feel him walking with me.”
> The sense of historic moment is underscored especially for
> evangelicals in New York who celebrated the 150th anniversary last
> year of the Fulton Street Prayer Revival, one of the major religious
> resurgences in America. Also known as the Businessmen’s Revival, it
> started during the Panic of 1857 with a noon prayer meeting among
> traders and financiers in Manhattan’s financial district.
> Over the next few years, it led to tens of thousands of conversions in
> the United States, and inspired the volunteerism movement behind the
> founding of the Salvation Army, said the Rev. McKenzie Pier, president
> of the New York City Leadership Center, an evangelical pastors’ group
> that marked the anniversary with a three-day conference at the Hilton
> New York. “The conditions of the Businessmen’s Revival bear great
> similarities to what’s going on today,” he said. “People are losing a
> lot of money.”
> But why the evangelical churches seem to thrive especially in hard
> times is a Rorschach test of perspective.
> For some evangelicals, the answer is obvious. ”We have the greatest
> product on earth,” said the Rev. Steve Tomlinson, senior pastor of the
> Shelter Rock Church.
> Dr. Beckworth, a macroeconomist, posited another theory: though
> expanding demographically since becoming the nation’s largest
> religious group in the 1990s, evangelicals as a whole still tend to be
> less affluent than members of mainline churches, and therefore depend
> on their church communities more during tough times, for material as
> well as spiritual support. In good times, he said, they are more
> likely to work on Sundays, which may explain a slower rate of growth
> among evangelical churches in nonrecession years.
> Msgr. Thomas McSweeney, who writes columns for Catholic publications
> and appears on MSNBC as a religion consultant, said the growth is fed
> by evangelicals’ flexibility: “Their tradition allows them to do
> things from the pulpit we don’t do — like ‘Hey! I need somebody to
> take Mrs. McSweeney to the doctor on Tuesday,’ or ‘We need volunteers
> at the soup kitchen tomorrow.’ ”
> In a cascading financial crisis, he said, a pastor can discard a
> sermon prescribed by the liturgical calendar and directly address the
> anxiety in the air. “I know a lot of you are feeling pain today,” he
> said, as if speaking from the pulpit. “And we’re going to do something
> about that.”
> But a recession also means fewer dollars in the collection basket.
> Few evangelical churches have endowments to compare with the older
> mainline Protestant congregations.
> “We are at the front end of a $10 million building program,” said the
> Rev. Terry Smith, pastor of the Life Christian Church in West Orange,
> N.J. “Am I worried about that? Yes. But right now, I’m more worried
> about my congregation.” A husband and wife, he said, were both fired
> the same day from Goldman Sachs; another man inherited the workload of
> four co-workers who were let go, and expects to be the next to leave.
> “Having the conversations I’m having,” Mr. Smith said, “it’s hard to
> think about anything else.”
> At the Shelter Rock Church, many newcomers have been invited by
> members who knew they had recently lost jobs. On a recent Sunday, new
> faces included a hedge fund manager and an investment banker, both
> laid off, who were friends of Steve Leondis, a cheerful business
> executive who has been a church member for four years. The two
> newcomers, both Catholics, declined to be interviewed, but Mr. Leondis
> said they agreed to attend Shelter Rock to hear Mr. Tomlinson’s sermon
> series, “Faith in Unstable Times.”
> “They wanted something that pertained to them,” he said, “some comfort
> that pertained to their situations.”
> Mr. Tomlinson and his staff in Manhasset and at a satellite church in
> nearby Syosset have recently discussed hiring an executive pastor to
> take over administrative work, so they can spend more time pastoring.
> “There are a lot of walking wounded in this town,” he said.
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