Thursday
Jul172008
FEATURED STORY
More than blocks
New techniques, common materials help address housing needs
Story and photos by John Pierce
JEFFERSON, Ga. — Michael Helms has a heart for Liberia that goes back many years. He has helped Liberian students to study in the U.S. and continues to work closely with the resurrected Ricks Institute, a Baptist school ravished along with much else by civil war in Liberia.
Helms, pastor of First Baptist Church of Jefferson, Ga., has written Hoping Liberia …With proceeds from that book and others, he created the Bricks for Ricks Foundation that, along with donations, helps fund needed housing projects in Liberia and beyond.…
While in Monrovia, Helms attended a Rotary Club meeting and met another American who was building an orphanage there. He had imported a large earth-block machine from a company in Texas.
Helms wondered if this construction method might help solve some of the great housing needs in Liberia and other parts of the world. He began to explore the challenges and options.
Print Article Monday
Jan232012
Baptists Today News
Jim Dant leaving pastorate for itinerant ministry
By John Pierce, Executive Editor, Baptists Today
MACON, Ga. — After 15 years as pastor of Macon’s Highland Hills Baptist Church, Jim Dant will become a fulltime partner Feb. 13 with FaithLab (faithlab.com), a creative services company that he co-owns with David Cassady. Dant will be available to churches and other organizations as a speaker, consultant and retreat leader.
“We often rightly credit parents, pastors, teachers and other consistent figures in our lives with having shaped who we are in faith,” said Dant. “However, I am well aware that our faith — individually and corporately — also has been shaped by people who were transient.”
Dant said his own faith was shaped in part by evangelists, youth camp speakers, visiting missionaries, Bible conference leaders and other itinerant speakers. Such voices, along with influential writers, help shape churches and denominations as well, he said.
“Moderate Baptists and mainline-thinking Christians, in general, do not have an abundance of these voices in their midst,” said Dant. “And we, quite frankly, don't trust every person who puts out a shingle and wants to come ‘speak’ to our congregation.
Through his work with Faithlab, Dant said he hopes to fill some of that void by offering “a credible, graceful approach to invigorating faith and church.”
“My style is to engage the difficulties of scripture and life — without ignoring or glossing over them — and find hope and maybe even a little humor there,” he said. “As I said in my resignation sermon, I want to share a Genesis 1 gospel rather than a Genesis 3 gospel. Rather than start with, ‘We are all fallen,” I want to remind people we are all created in God's image. If I’m going down the Roman Road, I want to start in Romans 1 rather than Romans 3 (‘All have sinned’) and remind people that God has been in all places and in all people and in all times, and we just need to look and acknowledge a love that is already there.”
Dant will available for retreats, spiritual renewal events and Bible conferences, as well as writing and consulting with churches in the area of spiritual renewal and relating effectively to a non-church culture.
Baptist historian and Mercer University Minister-at-Large Walter Shurden, in a FaithLab media release, said: “Jim Dant’s move to FaithLab is a genuine gift to the larger church. He brings to this itinerant ministry incomparable years of pastoral ministry, uncanny insights into biblical teachings, and extraordinary powers as a preacher of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Cassady, president of FaithLab, said he is excited to see what emerges when the media skills of the company merge with Dant’s insights and communication gifts.
-FaithLab and Baptists Today are partners in producing the Nurturing Faith Bible study curriculum in the news journal.
Friday
Feb032012
Daily RNS News
Christians report lowest growth rate in Israel
By JUDITH SUDILOVSKY
© 2012 Religion News Service
JERUSALEM (RNS/ENInews) — Christians have the lowest growth rate among the Israeli population, according to a recent report from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics.
According to the Jan. 6 report, the Christian growth rate of 0.9 percent lags behind the Jewish rate of 1.7 percent and the 2.7 percent growth rate among Muslims. Christian Arabs have a growth rate of 1 percent, while the rate among non-Arab Christians is 0.7 percent.
About 154,000 Christians live in Israel, representing about 2 percent of the population, according to the bureau.
The percentage of Christians in Israel has remained relatively stable since the mid-1980s, noted Wadie Abunassar, director of the International Center for Consultations and a consultant for the Jerusalem Center for Jewish-Christian Relations.
About 80 percent of Christians living in Israel are Arabs, with the remainder mainly Christians who immigrated to Israel with Jewish members of their families under the Law of Return, which allows any proven Jewish person to immigrate to Israel.
The estimated birthrate for Christian women is also the lowest among the religious groups. The average number of children expected to be born to a Christian woman is 2.1, compared to a Muslim woman (3.8), a Jewish woman (3.0) and a Druze woman (2.5).
But though their relative numbers in Israeli society are low, Christian
Arab students consistently have the highest success rates on college-entry examinations compared to other sectors of Israeli society.