DAVID CLOUD'S "WAY OF LIFE" RECENT ARTICLES
SEE: https://www.wayoflife.org/friday_church_news/20-45.php; republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
ABOVE: Blaine Adamson, owner of Hands on Originals
KENTUCKY SUPREME COURT RULES IN FAVOR OF PRINT SHOP OWNER WHO REFUSED TO PRINT MESSAGES VIOLATING HIS BELIEFS
(Friday Church News Notes, November 8, 2019, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Supreme Court Rules in Favor, Daily Wire, Oct. 31, 2019: “On Thursday, the Kentucky Supreme Court issued a unanimous 6-0 ruling in favor of a Lexington-based print shop owner who refused to print messages that violated his deeply held religious beliefs. The case dates back to 2012, when the Gay and Lesbian Services Organization (GLSO) filed a complaint with the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Human Rights Commission against print shop owner Blaine Adamson, who, citing his Christian beliefs, declined a request to print shirts promoting the Lexington Gay Pride Festival. Adamson reportedly declined politely and referred the organization to another printer who was willing to print the shirts. The GLSO complained that Adamson was discriminating against LGBT customers by refusing to promote the event. In 2014, the commission ruled that Adamson must print messages conflicting with his religious convictions. The court system subsequently ruled repeatedly against the commission’s order, until the case eventually made its way to the state’s highest court. The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), who helped represent Adamson in the case, maintained that the business owner has demonstrated that he ‘serves all people, including LGBT customers,’ as he did when his shop, Hands On Originals, printed promotional materials for an openly lesbian singer who performed at the Lexington’s 2012 Pride festival. Adamson also has taken a consistent stand on the issue of free speech, ADF underscored, refusing to print other messages that likewise conflict with his Christian beliefs, including shirts advertising a strip club, shirts containing violent messages, and ‘pens promoting a sexually explicit video.’ ... The ruling by Kentucky’s highest court, ADF argues in the release, ‘highlights why the U.S. Supreme Court should take up the important First Amendment issue at the heart of the case and decide whether governments may force creative professionals who serve everyone to print messages or create art that violates their beliefs.’”
YOUNG PEOPLE WHO LEAVE CHURCH NO LONGER RETURNING LATER
(Friday Church News Notes, November 8, 2019, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following research is confirmed by the many Southern Baptist and fundamental Baptist churches that are populated predominately by elderly people. The young people are gone. This is excerpted from ‘Young People Who Leave Church,’ Christian Post, Oct. 23, 2019: “While pastors have long banked on social science showing that young people who leave church generally return when they're older, a recent analysis of that trend suggests it might be over. In his analysis of data from the General Social Survey of five-year windows in which individuals were born spanning from 1965 to 1984 and published by the Barna Group, Ryan Burge, an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and pastor of First Baptist Church of Mt. Vernon, Illinois, shows that younger generations raised in the church aren’t typically returning to church when compared with members of the ‘Baby boomer’ generation born between 1945 and 1964. In Burge’s analysis of the boomer generation, four different five-year cohorts reflected the ‘trademark hump’ supported by traditional social science ‘when each birth cohort moves into the 36–45 age range. That’s exactly what the life cycle effect would predict: People settle down, they have kids, and they return to church.’ When he examined data for the younger cohorts 1965-1969, 1975-1979 and 1980-1984, the data show a fading of the life cycle effect. While the hump is still there in the cohort measured from 1965-1969, a shift in the life cycle effect begins to emerge by around 1970. ‘That trend line is completely flat—those people didn’t return to church when they moved into their 30s. You can see the beginnings of a hump among those born between 1975 and 1979, but in the next birth cohort the hump is actually inverted. That trademark return to church—which pastors and church leaders have relied on for decades—might be fading,’ Burge said. For anyone concerned with church growth, Burge says ‘this should sound an alarm.’” CONCLUDING NOTE FROM BROTHER CLOUD: Of course it should “sound an alarm,” but the young people shouldn’t be leaving churches in the first place, and we do not believe this is a lost battle by any means. The book Keeping the Kids: How to Keep the Kids from Falling Prey to the World, is filled with practical biblical help for homes and churches on this important subject. It is available as a free eBook from www.wayoflife.org.
CHINA’S STATE-SANCTIONED ORGAN HARVESTING
(Friday Church News Notes, November 8, 2019, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Survivors and Victims,” Fox News, Oct. 26, 2019: “[Forced organ harvesting is] the stuff of nightmares. And it has been buried from public view, hard to prove, and shrouded beneath the cloak of silence for almost two decades. ... After 12 months of independent assessment of all available evidence, the seven-person China Tribunal panel – which was initiated by the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC), an international human rights charity--delivered its final findings in June. The tribunal, chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC who led the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic in the International Criminal Trial for the former Yugoslavia, stated with ‘certainty’ that ‘in China, forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practiced for a substantial period of time.’ ‘Forced organ harvesting has been committed for years, and Falun Gong practitioners have been one--and probably the main--source of organ supply,’ the report concluded, pointing to the growing transplant industry already worth more than $1 billion. The report underscored that there were ‘extraordinarily short waiting times for organs to be available for transplantation,’ and numerous websites advertised hearts, lungs, and kidneys for sale--suggesting an on-demand industry. The Tribunal concluded that the commission of Crimes Against Humanity against Falun Gong and Uighurs had been committed. Witness testimonies provided to the tribunal, and interviewed by Fox News, paint the picture of an unfathomably callous trade often performed when the victims are still alive. ... Moreover, the China Organ Harvest Research Center (COHRC), which also testified before the China Tribunal, published its own incriminating report in July after years of underground research and analysis, deducing that the ‘on-demand killing of prisoners of conscience is driven by the state, run on an industrial scale and carried out by both military and civilian institutions.’ ... According to the COHRC, there are mountains of money to be made. Data from 2007 shows that hospitals charged more than $65,000 for a kidney transplant, $130,000 for liver, and more than $150,000 for lung or heart. Desperate patients might make a high-price ‘donation’ for a new organ at top-speed. The practice is alleged to have started in the 90s on a small-scale, but kicked into high gear around 2000 and focused on the Falun Gong. It was initially characterized as targeting the forcible removing of organs of prisoners on death row.”
A SOUTHERN BAPTIST SEMINARY HIRES “GAY AFFIRMING FEMINIST” WHO SAYS ABORTION ISN’T MURDER
(Friday Church News Notes, November 8, 2019, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from Pulpit & Pen, Oct. 25, 2019: “Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forrest, a seminary belonging to the Southern Baptist Convention, just hired a radical leftist and gay-affirming feminist to its faculty. Karen Swallow Prior’s days at Liberty University were limited after promoting her pro-gay book on Liberty’s campus only months ago and her increasingly brazen liberal stances becoming more apparent since Pulpit & Penbegan to report on her shocking liberalism since 2015. Our first post on this exceedingly wicked woman aged exceedingly well, and over the years, verified on every point beyond a question of a doubt. That article, Gay Affirming Research Fellow at ERLC, Shocking Liberalism, laid out how Prior repeatedly uses affirming language toward the LGBTQ ... attended pro-LGBTQ fundraisers, supported pro-LGBTQ ad campaigns, and back-peddled and soft-handed abortion while pretending to have been a pro-life advocate (various claims about her past activism cannot be substantiated). Radical animal rights activists saw Prior as an ‘ally and resource contributor’ to ‘invade right-wing evangelical institutions with an animal-first agenda’ as far back as 2007. Prior said in Christianity Today that abortion is not murder and defended abortionists from the accusation of being ‘murderers.’ Prior said that calling abortion murder is unchristlike. ... Prior has been hired by Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, which has reverted to a pre-1979 liberalism every bit as progressive as it was prior to the Conservative Resurgence.”
