Following the resignation of Mark Driscoll as senior pastor of the Mars
Hill church network, and the disbanding of the network, a large group of elders
from Mars Hill church have written a public letter of apology to two former
elders. The two were removed from Mars Hill’s board in 2007 for “lack of trust and
respect for spiritual authority.” The letter says, “We now believe that you were grievously sinned against in that termination.
We believe that the termination meeting’s content and tone was abrupt, one
sided, and threatening. ... By failing to intervene, we enabled a growing trend
of misuses and abuses of power and authority that would be feared and tolerated
by the rest of the church’s eldership. We now understand that these sorts of
overpowering actions against elders were some of the very concerns that you had
each expressed … It is tragic that you were proved right by your own
experiences.”
A Christian couple in Pakistan
have been beaten to death and then burned after being accused of blasphemy by
the mullah of the local mosque for allegedly burning pages of the Koran. Police
took no action to prevent the killings, even though the wife was imprisoned for
two days before it happened, but have arrested 44 people in connection with the
incident There are indications that the alleged blasphemy was preceded by a
dispute about money or employment. A senior human rights activist in Lahore described
the incident as another case of misuse of the blasphemy law.
A woman who is a performance
poet, the author of five books, dramatist and broadcaster has spoken about how
she was given just three weeks to live at birth because of her multiple
disabilities. “No disability is without hope… Every child deserves life,” she
said. She encouraged mothers who are told their foetus is too disabled to
survive to carry the baby to term anyway, so that even if the baby doesn’t
survive, they can say “I gave it life in me for nine months.”
Nigel
Dodds, an MP from the Northern Irish DUP, has slammed the Equality Commission’s
“relentless pursuit” of a Christian bakery. He said, “The Equality Commission
have lined up the might of their organisation against a family run bakery. This
bakery does not question the sexual orientation, religion or political opinion of anyone who enters their shop
to purchase a product. They simply wish to follow their conscience in relation
to a slogan in favour of same sex marriage. The Commission will spend
tens of thousands of pounds of public money pursuing this action which would
undermine freedom of religion and freedom of conscience. Those principles
should be the cornerstone of any free society, but instead we have a public
body pursuing intolerance in the name of equality.”
A US federal appeal court has overturned decisions by lower courts in
four US states to permit gay marriage. “Changes to such a fundamental social
institution should be left to the American people and the democratic process,” said
one of the judges.
A number of Hollywood film starts have recently spoken out about their
Christian faith. Shia LaBoeuf has continued to hold to the profession of faith
he made while filming “Fury”; he has been joined by Matthew McConaughey, Gwen
Stefani, and Chris Pratt (of “Guardians of the Galaxy” fame). Stefani spoke of
how her young son prayed for a baby brother or sister every night, and gasped
in surprise when she discovered she was pregnant just four weeks after he
started. And Pratt described how he and his wife turned to fervent prayer when
their son was born nine weeks premature; “It restored my faith in God, not that
it needed to be restored, but it really redefined it.”
In sport news, one of the eleven teams competing in the Formula 1 world
championship has collapsed; 200 staff have lost their jobs. Marussia had had
almost no success on the track, and had lost one of their two drivers to a
life-threatening head injury at the end of the Japanese Grand Prix. Another
team, Caterham, has had its assets seized by bailiffs and is widely expected to
collapse as well. The blame has been placed on the way prize money for Grand
Prix races is allocated.
In technology news, this week police in 17 countries arrested at least
17 website administrators, vendors and cybercriminals who were operating on the
“Dark Web.” More than 400 Dark Web
domains were taken offline as police seized control of the servers.
Irish police not only arrested two men but found around ₤150,000 worth of
illegal drugs, and computers which contained accounts for drug sales and links
to offshore bank accounts.
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