Tag Archives: Religion

Revival at Rodeo Barn set for tonight

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WILLIAMS – Williams churches have joined together and decked out the Rodeo Barn to present the First Annual Revival Celebration with music and seven local pastors providing messages.

Pastor Joe Oswald from the First Baptist Church pointed out in one of his sermons that a revival is to revive the spirit of Christians. Anyone is welcome, however, and there will be alter calls and baptisms at the services. After the services there will be Christian fellowship. The services run from 5:30 to 8 p.m. tonight through Sunday September 16.

The Schedule for the event is as follows:

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 14TH

5:30PM
WELCOME Pastor Mary Piotrowski-St. John’s Episcopal/Lutheran Church
PUPPET PRESENTATION Martha Simoneau -1st Baptist Church
MUSIC
1ST MESSAGE. …. Pastor Mary Piotrowski – St. John’s Episcopal/Lutheran Church
MUSIC
2nd MESSAGE Pastor Jeff Kennedy – 1st Missionary Baptist Church (Flagstaff)
Altar Call and Baptism service
REFRESHMENTS AND FELLOWSHIP—–BRING SOMEONE NEW TOMORROW!

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 15TH

5:30PM
WELCOME Pastor Dave Remender – Calvary Chapel
PUPPET PRESENTATION Martha Simoneau -1st Baptist Church
MUSIC
1ST MESSAGE Pastor Dave Remender – Calvary Chapel
MUSIC
2nd MESSAGE Pastor Tim Milner – Family Harvest Church
Altar Call and Baptism service
REFRESHMENTS AND FELLOWSHIP —— BRING SOMEONE NEW TOMORROW!

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 16TH

5:30PM
WELCOME Mike Rioux – SUPPORTED BY HOPE FOR THE WORLD
PUPPET PRESENTATION Martha Simoneau
1st Baptist Church
MUSIC
1ST MESSAGE Mike Rioux – SUPPORTED BY HOPE FOR THE WORLD
MUSIC
2nd MESSAGE. Pastor Fred Brane – Holiness Congregation
Altar Call and Baptism service
REFRESHMENTS AND FELLOWSHIP

Route 66 Good Friday procession this Friday

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WILLIAMS – This Friday the churches of Williams gather to carry a cross down Route 66 (Railroad Avenue) in the annual Route 66 Good Friday Procession. The group will gather at the Mustang on the east end of town and travel west to Memorial Park.The churches start gathering about 5 p.m. with the procession beginning at 6:45 p.m. The Stations of the Cross will be held at 7:30 p.m. at the Family Harvest Church on Grant and 7th Avenue across the street from Safeway.

The Williams PD ensures the safety of the procession each year.

The procession is sponsored by the Williams Churches, but anyone is invited to join in on the event that leads up to Easter. The churches of Williams also hold a combined worship service in the evening of the last Sunday of the month.

New Geological Analysis Greatly Bolsters Probability Tomb of Jesus has Been Found

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300-4JERUSALEM /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — A recently completed study by an Israeli geologist has greatly increased the probability that an ancient tomb on the outskirts of Jerusalem is the final resting place of Jesus of Nazareth and his family.

The new findings by Dr. Aryeh Shimron have linked an ossuary, or bone box, inscribed with the phrase “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus” by its chemical “fingerprint” to a tomb encased in a rose garden between a group of nondescript apartments in Talpiot, a Jerusalem suburb. The tomb, discovered during construction in 1980, housed a remarkable collection of ossuaries upon which were inscribed several names associated with the family of the New Testament Jesus.

Although the names in the Talpiot Tomb, (which included “Jesus, son of Joseph,” “Maria,” “Mariamene,” “Yose,” and others) were common in first-century Jerusalem, a cluster of names associated with Jesus in one location is statistically compelling, and unique in the archeological evidence of his life. If yet another name associated with the New Testament family can now be sited at Talpiot, it becomes a kind of statistical snowball and creates a near-certainty that the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth has been found.

“I think I’ve got really powerful, virtually unequivocal evidence that the James ossuary spent most of its lifetime, or death time, in the Talpiot Tomb,” Shimron told the New York Times.
Continue reading →

Doctor refusing to treat child of gay couple not Biblical

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6764771_GDETROIT — According to a report by FOX Dertroit, a Dr. Vesna Roi apparently “prayed” and decided that she could not act as the pediatrician for the baby of a lesbian couple in Detroit in February.

Apparently, when the gay couple arrived at the pediatrician’s office, they claim:

“The first thing Dr. Karam said was ‘I’ll be your doctor, I’ll be seeing you today because Dr. Roi decided this morning that she prayed on it and she won’t be able to care for Bay,” Jami said.

This is an example of someone who has not studied their Bible. The question here is who is the sinner?

It is perfectly Constitutional and legitimate to refuse service to homosexual couples for a Christian. To not participate in so-called “marriage” ceremonies between such couples by providing photographic, bakery, flowers and other such services and the use of true Christian property is perfectly in compliance with the First Amendment. It should be noted that it does not matter if man calls this “marriage.” It is not. Only God sanctifies marriage and he has clearly defined the conditions.

The child of a homosexual couple is another matter entirely. Would you refuse to treat the baby of a couple who engages in identity theft? Would you, as a doctor, refuse to treat the brother, sister, mother or father of a homosexual couple? Yes, it is exactly the same thing.

Some point to Deuteronomy 5:9 which reads:

You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, and on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me,

You see, they say. God punishes the generations of sinners.

The observant of you may notice the comma at the end of this making it clause taken out of a greater thought. It continues in Deuteronomy 5:10:

And showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments.

God is not the author of confusion. The second clause means that if a child of a sinner turns to God, he—or she—will certainly be accepted. A child can break the curse of the parents. Indeed, even the parents can be saved should they chose to be.

There have been instances of children brought up in the home of a homosexual couple rejecting their “parents” lifestyle, in fact.

This is expressed in Ezekiel 18:20:

The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.

Dr. Roi might well believe that she is following the dictates of God, but I believe it not to be so. The Bible is as clear on this matter as it is on the sin of homosexuality. Particularly with children who have not reached the age of discernment.

St. John’s Shrove Tuesday dinner a success

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640150217-050WILLIAMS – St. John’s Episcopal-Lutheran Church in Williams held a successful Shrove Tuesday pancake dinner to kick off the season of Lent. There were problems with the electrical, but volunteers successfully maneuvered around the difficulty.

If you missed it, Shrove Tuesday will be on February 9 in 2016.

This leads to the first day of Lent known as Ash Wednesday. Today is a day of fasting for those who hold this season faithful. On this day there will be services for the faithful in which they will have an ash cross placed on their forehead. If your organization is holding a service for Ash Wednesday, make sure you get your ash in Church.
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Meriam Ibrahim: Sudan ‘apostasy’ woman freed again

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bbc-interviewA Sudanese woman whose death sentence for renouncing Islam was overturned has been released from jail again, after she was detained at Khartoum airport on Tuesday.

(BBC News) – Meriam Ibrahim’s lawyer, Muhannad Mustafa, said that she was currently in the US embassy with her family.

Mrs Ibrahim had been detained on charges of falsifying ID documents.

She was first released on 23 June when an appeals court lifted her death sentence for renouncing Islam.

Her sentencing in May to hang for apostasy sparked an outcry at home and around the world.

Mrs Ibrahim, 27, had been held at a police station in the capital, since Tuesday, when she was prevented from leaving the country along with her husband, Daniel Wani, and their two children.

Daniel Wani is a Christian from South Sudan and is a US citizen.

Read more and see interview at BBC News

Meriam Ibrahim’s Brother Blocked Escape from Sudan to US: Report

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300pix-Al-Samani-Al-Hadi-_2931922bA Christian mother trying to flee Sudan for the United States was stopped at the airport following a tip-off from her own brother.

Meriam Ibrahim spent months on death row on charges of apostasy – the crime of abandoning or disrespecting Islam – before she was freed Monday following international outcry. Amid continuing fears over her safety, she planned to fly to the United States with her husband — who is a naturalized American citizen.

But this plan failed at the last minute when Ibrahim was re-arrested at the airport by agents from Sudan’s shadowy security service. She was transferred to police custody where her lawyer told NBC News she remained early Thursday.

Authorities said she had been stopped because her travel documents were illegitimate. But in an interview with a Sudanese newspaper, her brother claimed he tipped off police that she had been “kidnapped” by her husband who planned to take her to the U.S. against her will.

Read more at NBC News

Meriam Ibrahim and the Persecution of Christians

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The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has found that Christians are persecuted in more places today than any other religious group, suffering formal or informal harassment in three-quarters of the world’s countries.

BN-DL196_howall_D_20140626143917By Charlotte Allen
A 27-year-old Sudanese woman named Meriam Ibrahim seemed likely to become a 21st-century Christian martyr in May when she was sentenced to death by hanging because of her faith. Then this week Ms. Ibrahim was saved when a court overturned her conviction for apostasy from Islam—her father was a Muslim, and under Islamic law she is automatically a Muslim too. (She had also been sentenced to public flogging for adultery because her husband, Daniel Wani, is also a Christian, and Islamic law doesn’t recognize marriages between Muslim women and non-Muslim men.) But the day after her release on Monday, Ms. Ibrahim was arrested again. While the Associated Press reported Thursday that she had again been released Thursday, her future remained uncertain.

Her story is harrowing. Ms. Ibrahim was eight months pregnant with her second child when she was convicted in a Khartoum court on April 30 under the Islamic Shariah law that has governed Sudan since 1989. On May 27, while in prison awaiting execution, Ms. Ibrahim gave birth to her daughter, Maya. Mr. Wani reported that his wife was shackled to the floor during labor. Their year-and-a-half-old son, Martin, had been jailed along with her.

Ms. Ibrahim was re-arrested on Tuesday by a government security force as she, Mr. Wani and their two young children tried to leave Sudan for the U.S. The Sudanese-born Mr. Wani has been an American citizen since 2005. The new charges against Ms. Ibrahim—which are reported to carry penalties of up to seven years in prison—consist of falsifying the family’s travel documents, which were issued by the embassy of South Sudan, the largely Christian territory that seceded from overwhelmingly Muslim Sudan in 2011 after a decades-long civil war. Mr. Wani hails from what is now South Sudan.

Ms. Ibrahim’s story bears uncanny parallels to another Christian story involving young African mothers who did become Christian martyrs, during the early third century: the story of Felicitas and Perpetua, executed for their faith in the Roman port city of Carthage in today’s Tunisia. …

Read more at The Wall Street Journal

Nigeria: One-Religion Ticket Can Win

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Opinion By Mahmud Jega, 28 April 2014

There are 26 political parties in Nigeria today, so there will be several Muslim and several Christian presidential candidates. It depends therefore on whose vote is split the most.

nigeriaThe political actors and newspaper columnists who rushed in the last two weeks to say that a presidential election ticket made up of two adherents of the same religion cannot win in Nigeria have not thought about this matter very carefully. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have written about religion and politics because I, for one, will not cast a vote for or against anyone on religious grounds. However, I am intellectually provoked by the firm assertion of some commentators that a one-religion ticket cannot win an election in Nigeria. It can, under some circumstances.

The flurry of commentaries was sparked off by a newspaper story which said the opposition APC is planning to field what in Nigerian politics is called a “Muslim-Muslim” ticket in 2015, i.e. General Muhammadu Buhari and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu. “Religious balancing” is a very sensitive matter in Nigerian politics. It is taken for granted that the presidential ticket of every major political party must include one adherent each of the two major religions. Given this sensitivity, I was personally amazed that APC did not vigorously deny the story. Its tepid response allowed Femi Fani-Kayode, for one, to say that APC is trying to promote one religion over another. Some other commentators worsened matters by saying there is nothing wrong with a Muslim-Muslim ticket. Well, I am not saying it is a good thing or a bad thing. All I am saying is that in theory such a ticket or its obverse, a Christian-Christian ticket, can win an election in Nigeria.

The first reason for saying a one-religion ticket can win an election in Nigeria is because it has happened before. Usually, the best evidence that something can happen is if has happened before. Many Nigerians appear to believe that this scenario will not happen precisely because it happened before. Soon after the ill-fated June 12, 1993 election, the Christian Association of Nigeria [CAN] did say that it would not condone a Muslim-Muslim ticket again. It did not however say if it will tolerate a Christian-Christian ticket. No one can say for sure that the extraordinary combination of circumstances that produced the Abiola-Kingibe ticket in 1993 will never happen again in Nigeria.

Read more at All Africa

High court ruling favors prayer at council meeting

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MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press

council-prayerWASHINGTON (AP) — A narrowly divided Supreme Court upheld decidedly Christian prayers at the start of local council meetings on Monday, declaring them in line with long national traditions though the country has grown more religiously diverse.

The content of the prayers is not significant as long as they do not denigrate non-Christians or try to win converts, the court said in a 5-4 decision backed by its conservative majority.

Though the decision split the court along ideological lines, the Obama administration backed the winning side, the town of Greece, N.Y., outside of Rochester.

The outcome relied heavily on a 1983 decision in which the court upheld an opening prayer in the Nebraska Legislature and said prayer is part of the nation’s fabric, not a violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religion.

Read more at WTOP 103.5 FM, Washington