John Stonestreet, Radio Host and Director of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview
Many churches have shut their doors in the face of Covid, but one large church in Denver hasn’t just shut their doors; they’ve sold them. According to Christianity Today, “The Potter’s House Denver will sell its property in Arapahoe County and continue to worship exclusively online.”
We often hear that because the Church isn’t a building, it doesn’t matter whether it meets in one. But trading in-person worship for an online experience misses what the Church actually is. It isn’t just a place for individual contemplation on “spiritual things.” That’s not the Christianity of the Bible but the pietism of Gnosticism. Embodied worship is an essential part of a Christian worldview.
If our faith is the sort of thing we can live out alone, never needing the presence of others, then are we truly still the Church? The Church is the ecclesia, the called ones, the gathered ones, the community of the saints of God. If we aren’t a “we,” we are not the Church.
Copyright 2022 by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Reprinted from BreakPoint.org with permission.
A horrifying new survey found the number of pre-adolescent children in the U.S. who admit to sharing nude images of themselves more than doubled last year.
Fourteen percent of kids aged 9-12 say they have shared inappropriate pictures of themselves. This is up from just six percent in 2019. Of that number, over a third said they shared those images with someone they believed to be 18 or older.
As WORLD notes, this spike in dangerous behavior coincides with the pandemic, which meant increased screen time for many folks. An obvious takeaway is that preteens are not mature enough to handle all that comes with unsupervised smartphone use. The more time they spend alone with their devices, the more opportunity for pornography and predators.
At the very least, we must take active roles in our kids’ tech use. Quarantining with screens is more dangerous for kids than COVID ever was. It may keep the virus at bay, but for children especially, it lets in things far worse.
Copyright 2022 by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Reprinted from BreakPoint.org with permission.
Above: The religious exemption attestation form that Conway Regional Health System rolled out in September.
Attorneys for Conway Regional Medical Center have asked a judge to dismiss most of the allegations raised in a religious discrimination lawsuit brought against the hospital in October.
Research and development for the COVID-19 vaccines used cells that originated from aborted babies. As a result, some pro-lifers have objections to the COVID-19 vaccines, because of the vaccines’ connection to abortion.
In September Conway Regional made headlines after the hospital announced that employees who wanted a religious exemption because of the COVID-19 vaccine’s connection to abortion would also have to sign a form attesting that the employees would not use other medicines — such as Tylenol and Tums — that have been tested on aborted fetal tissue.
According to the lawsuit, all six of the plaintiffs are Christians who have religious objections to the COVID-19 vaccine.
In an amended complaint filed on December 9, attorneys for the six plaintiffs provided the court with emails from Conway Regional’s CEO regarding the vaccine mandate.
The amended complaint alleges that one of the emails from Conway Regional’s CEO “equated employees who request religious exemptions from [the medical center’s] mandatory COVID vaccine policy with draft dodgers.”
Time will tell whether or not the court decides to dismiss any part of the religious discrimination lawsuit against Conway Regional Medical Center.
In September the Arkansas Legislature passed two identical laws addressing COVID-19 vaccine mandates. The laws require employers to provide certain accommodations for employees who decline to get vaccinated.
The Arkansas Attorney General’s Office also has joinedmultiple lawsuits against the Biden Administration’s federal vaccine mandates.
We don’t oppose immunizations, but we do believe people’s rights of conscience ought to be respected when it comes to getting vaccinated. Our laws should protect people from being forced to violate their conscience.
