According to some experts, Brazilian Evangelicals could become a majority in the country as soon as 2032.

This phenomenon is particularly strong in the Amazon, where some states have the biggest percentage of Evangelicals in the country.

Four of the six Brazilian States with the biggest proportion of Evangelicals are located in the Amazon, in the northern part of the country.

In Rondônia, which is at the top of the list, there were 734,000 Catholics in 2010 - when the last data were released by the government - and 528,000 Evangelicals.

Ten years before, in 2000, the number of Catholics was 793,000 and there were only 375,000 Evangelicals.

That is one of the many issues the Amazonian bishops will have to discuss at the upcoming Synod for the Amazon region taking place Oct. 6-27 in Rome.

"Until the 1970s, when I arrived in the Amazon, Brazil was almost completely Catholic. But the expansion of the farmlands in the cleared rainforest changed everything," said Italian-born Bishop Flavio Giovenale of Cruzeiro do Sul, in the Amazonian State of Acre.

"It's almost like the Evangelicals had the project of transforming the Amazon into a non-Catholic territory, following the gigantic changes in the region," he said.

Most people avoid selecting one single reason for the increasing presence of Pentecostal and Neo-pentecostal Christians in the Amazon.

"It's a complex phenomenon. But the Evangelicals certainly filled up the spaces we had left open," saod Giovenale.

In major urban areas of the rainforest, such as Belém and Manaus - cities with populations of 1.5 million and 2.1 million, respectively - the process followed the same model as the rest of the country. In the opinion of Giovenale, rural migrants without roots in the city could find a community and a sense of Christianity only with the available pastors.

"The historical districts of most cities in Brazil are full of Catholic churches, while the poor, distant neighborhoods count only Evangelical churches," the bishop said.

In the cities, the so-called Prosperity Gospel theology quickly seduced many poor migrants who had to adapt to their new reality, according to the Italian-born priest Luigi Ceppi, who has lived in the Amazon since the 1980s.

"The poor were put aside. Then appeared a kind of religiousness which promised to satisfy their material needs," Ceppi argued. Continue reading

• Image: Vatican News

Phillip Blair, of Torch of Christ Ministries in America, boarded the busy train at Martin Place on Monday, he quickly began shouting about his religious beliefs.

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Graham was a Southern Baptist evangelical preacher from the United States who was admired by many Catholics.

He died last Wednesday aged 99.

The Archbishop of New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan has paid tribute to Graham.

"As anyone growing up in the 1950s and 1960s can tell you, it was hard not to notice and be impressed by the Reverend Billy Graham," Dolan said.

Even though his family was Catholic, Dolan said they respected and admired Graham for his work in bringing people to God.

"Whether it was one of his famous Crusades, radio programs, television specials, or meeting and counseling the presidents, Billy Graham seemed to be everywhere, always with the same message:

'Jesus is your Savior, and wants you to be happy with Him forever'".

US Council of Catholic Bishops president Cardinal Daniel DiNardo praised Graham for his work spreading the gospel around the country, and said he was thankful for his ministry.

Another tribute has been made by a former Anglican priest who became a Catholic priest. Fr Dwight Longenecker says he met Graham while he was studying at Oxford.

While he can't recall exactly what Graham said, only "the hardest heart" could resist his words. The gist of what Graham said was as follows:

"My friends, I come here feeling a little bit like Paul preaching in Athens. He was surrounded by the greatest minds and philosophers of his day, and he stood up and presented the simple, life-changing gospel of Jesus Christ.

"That's what I feel like. Here you are ... and I'm just a poor country preacher.

"Nevertheless, it is my prayer that you will join me in witnessing to the love of Jesus Christ to this needy world."

In 1981, Graham had the first of several meetings with St. John Paul II, who said that the two were "brothers."

When John Paul II died in 2005, Graham said he believed that the Pope had been "the most influential voice for morality and peace in the world during the last 100 years," and praised his "strong Catholic faith" and perseverance through his illnesses.

Source

• Patheos
• Catholic Herald
• Catholic News Agency
• Image: Chattanooga Times Free Press

"When it comes to how we should deal with evildoers, the Bible, in the book of Romans[13], is very clear: God has endowed rulers full power to use whatever means necessary — including war — to stop evil," Jeffress says.

"That gives the government … the authority to do whatever, whether it's assassination, capital punishment or evil punishment to quell the actions of evildoers.

"In the case of North Korea, God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong-Un.

"I'm heartened to see that our president — contrary to what we've seen with past administrations who have taken, at best, a sheepish stance toward dictators and oppressors — will not tolerate any threat against the American people.

"When President Trump draws a red line, he will not erase it, move it, or back away from it. Thank God for a President who is serious about protecting our country."

Jeffress, who leads a congregation of more than 10,000 people at the First Baptist Dallas, says he decided to make the statement after Trump said if North Korea's nuclear threats to the United States continue, Pyongyang will be "met with fire and fury like the world has never seen".

Jeffress says there is a difference between Christians and the government when he notes many pacifist Christians will cite Romans: 12, specifically: "Do not repay evil for evil,".

That passage is referring to Christians, not to the government, he says.

He further separates Trump as a Christian from Trump the president, saying: "A Christian writer asked me, ‘Don't you want the president to embody the Sermon on the Mount?'".

"I said absolutely not."

Jeffress released his statement on Tuesday evening US time as tensions between the two nuclear powers escalated.

Source

• Religion News Service
• The Washington Post
• Think Progress
• Image: LobeLog

Now, in The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, Frances FitzGerald answers the recurrent question, "Where did these people [mainly right-wing zealots] come from?"

She says there is no mystery involved. They were always here. We were just not looking at them. What repeatedly makes us look again is what she is here to tell us.

"Evangelicals" is an elastic term, and FitzGerald intermittently shrinks or stretches it. But she does direct us to the right starting point, to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Great Awakenings, major religious events in our early history when the word "evangelicalism" came into wide American use.

Evangelical religion is revival religion, that of emotional contagion. It can best be characterized, for taxonomic purposes, by three things: crowds, drama, and cycles.

Crowds
The first Great Awakening, of the 1730s and 1740s, stunned entire regions by the numbers of people who took part.

The leading preacher in a cadre of them, George Whitefield—who, with John and Charles Wesley, founded the Methodist movement in England—had followings that overflowed the churches and followed him out to streets, plazas, or the nearby countryside.

When Benjamin Franklin went to hear Whitefield preach from the steps of Philadelphia's City Hall in 1739, he measured with characteristic precision the reach of his voice in different directions, and felt that he had verified reports that 25,000 people could hear him preach in a cleared space.

Before he came from England, Whitefield had already become a "field preacher"; the skeptic David Hume, who listened to one of his sermons in Edinburgh, is said to have told a friend, "He is…the most ingenious preacher I ever heard. It is worth while to go twenty miles to hear him."

Any man who could astonish Hume in Scotland and Franklin in America was a preacher beyond any orbit of expectation. The great Samuel Johnson said of Whitefield, "He would be followed by crowds were he to wear a night-cap in the pulpit, or were he to preach from a tree." Continue reading

Sources

• The New York Review of Books, review by Garry Wills
• Image: Theology & the City

"We're walking the length of New Zealand with the cross and sharing the gospel along the way to those who would like to hear," Kim said.

Kim does the walking. Joan takes the couple's campervan and either drives ahead or behind him.

They started last year, only walking during the school holidays. The first part of the journey began in Wellington and they gradually made their way up to Cape Reinga.

Now they are tackling the South Island beginning at Puponga.

The couple are both self-employed and work in between their stints of walking.

By the end of these school holidays they hope to end just out of Blenheim.

Rusden has worked many years with Open Air Campaigners (OAC now called Outreach and Church Ministries).

Members of OAC believe that it is the responsibility of every Christian to be active in sharing their faith.

Source

• www.stuff.co.nz
  churchonvogel.co.nz
• Image: stuff.co.nz

It was an 18th birthday present, and he wanted to wear it straight away. But, as a teenager "mucking around … wasting potential" in west Auckland, he was dressed up with nowhere to go - but church.

"I just turned up. And I pretty much haven't missed a Sunday since."

It's a "funny story", he knows. "But when I got there, it was just real. I was connecting with God, I felt His presence, and I felt that was what was missing. Out of that, faith became personal for me."

But that service was "nothing like this", Cameron agrees, nodding his head towards the source of thumping bass on the other side of the wall.

We're sitting in a changing room at Te Rauparaha Arena in Porirua, which is serving as a makeshift green room - complete with a rider of Phoenix juices and scented candles - before Cameron takes to the stage to give his sermon as lead pastor of Arise Church.

"Sermon" may not even be the right word for it. An Arise service is part rock concert, part variety show, part stand-up gig ("To quote from Bruce Almighty…").

It's hard at times - like a five-minute tangent when Cameron pulls a pastor on stage for an impromptu rendition of the Frozen theme - to pinpoint just how and where the Bible fits into this slick, enormous production.

There are volunteers to guide you to a car park and a seat in the stadium; a 14-piece band, featuring seven enviably confident and well-dressed young singers; a camera crew, a smoke machine, a big screen.

God works in mysterious ways, and many of them demand a multi-plug. Continue reading.

Source: The Wireless

Image: Arise Church

Dr Paula Gerber says "The church is a very broad term. There is certainly some religious bodies that are very anti-homosexuality, and others that are more supportive."

She says lot of the churches that have been in the Pacific for a long time are quite tolerant of homosexuality and transgender.

But, she says, pastors coming from churches outside of the Pacific region are telling families that "if they've got a transgender child, or a gay son or daughter, that they should reject them in order to comply with God's will if you like."

Gerber said the UN has a sort of monitoring role of all countries and their human rights records, and they do this through reviews every three to five years in a process called the universal periodic review.

Some Pacific Island countries have told the UN they are happy to look at repealing the laws of criminalised homosexuality, others have indicated that they will do exactly the opposite.

The countries who say they are willing to change the law are Palau, Nauru and the Cook Islands.

The countries that have said they will not do so are Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands and Tonga.

Associate Professor Paula Gerber is President of Kaleidoscope Australia Human Rights Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation committed to promoting and protecting the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people in the Asia Pacific region.

Source

• Radio New Zealand International
• GaystarNews
• Image: monash.edu

Smuggling the drugs was out of character, Justice Barr said, for a woman who had spent many years working in the church, ministering first to young people in New Zealand before migrating to Australia and organising food parcels for the needy in western Sydney.

The pastor who ordained her in NZ found that the youth she worked with "would likely have finished up as life dropouts. Instead, I saw many of these young people grow into stronger, hard-working, useful students and citizens with a deep faith in God which gave them the motivation to change their lives". Continue reading

"Protestants can be very arrogant when pointing to Catholics," said Boz Tchividjian, a grandson of evangelist Billy Graham and executive director of Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment (GRACE).

Too many Protestant institutions have sacrificed souls in order to protect their institutions, he said. "We've got the Gospels backwards."

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Its president says people who have not experienced persecution firsthand "cannot fully understand what it means to receive threats against your life, to have your house destroyed, your own rights violated and your loved ones taken away from you and imprisoned; and all this because of your faith in Jesus Christ".

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Collectively, those gatherings have generated crowds in excess of 15 million people, making World Youth Day the Olympic Games of world religion: the largest regularly held international religious event on the planet.

"World Youth Day" is, of course, one of those charming bits of Catholic vocabulary that endures despite having thoroughly outlived its accuracy.

It was a single day back in 1985, but it's morphed into a week-long jamboree composed of pilgrimage and devotion, catechesis, liturgies and the sacraments, and even Lollapalooza-style pop festivals. (The lineup includes "PriestBand," an all-priest septet associated with the Emmanuel Community, which only performs at World Youth Days.)

"Evangelical Catholicism" is a term being used to capture the Catholic version of a 21st century politics of identity, reflecting the long-term historical transition in the West from Christianity as a culture-shaping majority to Christianity as a subculture, albeit a large and influential one.

I define Evangelical Catholicism in terms of three pillars:

• A strong defence of traditional Catholic identity, meaning attachment to classic markers of Catholic thought (doctrinal orthodoxy) and Catholic practice (liturgical tradition, devotional life, and authority).
• Robust public proclamation of Catholic teaching, with the accent on Catholicism's mission ad extra, transforming the culture in light of the Gospel, rather than ad intra, on internal church reform.
• Faith seen as a matter of personal choice rather than cultural inheritance, which among other things implies that in a highly secular culture, Catholic identity can never be taken for granted. It always has to be proven, defended, and made manifest.

I consciously use the term "Evangelical" to capture all this rather than "conservative," even though I recognise that many people experience what I've just sketched as a conservative impulse. Fundamentally, however, it's about something else: the hunger for identity in a fragmented world.

Historically speaking, Evangelical Catholicism isn't really "conservative," because there's precious little cultural Catholicism these days left to conserve. For the same reason, it's not traditionalist, even though it places a premium upon tradition. If liberals want to dialogue with post-modernity, Evangelicals want to convert it - but neither seeks a return to a status quo ante.

Continue reading John Allen's article on the Big picture at World Youth Day: 'It's the Evangelicals, stupid!'