Christian Speakers Quotes

You can lose your MONEY. You can lose your FRIENDS. You can lose your JOB and you can lose your MARRIAGE...and still recover...as long as there is HOPE. Never lose HOPE.

I must admit, that I have learned more from my negative experiences than I have ever learned from my positive one.

Your circumstances do NOT define you. Expect a GRAND finale.

Faith UP! Your purpose is GREATER than all your PROBLEMS.

You start to live when you commit your life to cause higher than yourself. You must learn to depend on divine power for the fulfillment of a higher calling.

With God, you are stronger than your struggles and more fierce than your fears. God provides comfort and strength to those who trust in Him. Be encouraged, keep standing, and know that everything's going to be alright.

A Great Rabbi stands, teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife's adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine - a Speaker for the Dead - has told me of two other Rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I'm going to tell you. The Rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. 'Is there any man here,' he says to them, 'who has not desired another man's wife, another woman's husband?' They murmur and say, 'We all know the desire, but Rabbi none of us has acted on it.' The Rabbi says, 'Then kneel down and give thanks that God has made you strong.' He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, 'Tell the Lord Magistrate who saved his mistress, then he'll know I am his loyal servant.' So the woman lives because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder. Another Rabbi. Another city. He goes to her and stops the mob as in the other story and says, 'Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone.' The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. ‘Someday,’ they think, ‘I may be like this woman. And I’ll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her as I wish to be treated.’ As they opened their hands and let their stones fall to the ground, the Rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman’s head and throws it straight down with all his might it crushes her skull and dashes her brain among the cobblestones. ‘Nor am I without sins,’ he says to the people, ‘but if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead – and our city with it.’ So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance. The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis and when they veer too far they die. Only one Rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So of course, we killed him. -San Angelo Letters to an Incipient Heretic

So much can change from one day to the next, but the one thing that always remains the same is God. Stay focused on Him. In God We Trust.

Never give up. Things may be hard, but if you quit trying they'll never get better. Stop worrying and start trusting God. It will be worth it.

The secret to strong leaders is that strong leaders are strong because they have been tempered by the negative. They have discovered the secret of combining the negative and the positive to PRODUCED their very own POWER plant!

It's funny how after all those years attending youth events with light shows and bands, after all the contemporary Christian music and contemporary Christian books, after all the updated technology and dynamic speakers and missional enterprises and relevant marketing strategies designed to make Christianity cool, all I wanted from the church when I was ready to give it up was a quiet sanctuary and some candles. All I wanted was a safe place to be. Like so many, I was in search of sanctuary.

The real opportunity for success lies within the person and not in the job.

I am a Dalit in Khairlanji. A Pandit in the Kashmir valley. A Sikh in 1984. I am from the North East of India when I am in Munirka. I am a Muslim in Gujarat; a Christian in Kandhamal. A Bihari in Maharashtra. A Delhi-wallah in Chennai. A woman in North India. A Hindi-speaker in Assam. A Tamilian in MP. A villager in a big city. A confused man in an indifferent world. We're all minorities. We all suffer; we all face discrimination. It is only us resisting this parochialism when in the position of majoritarian power that makes us human. I hope that one day, I can just be an Indian in India - only then can I be me.

Having a positive attitude gives you power. This isn't the same kind of power that dictators and warlords seek after, but rather a spiritual power. It's a power that comes to us from God.

Technicality,” Shiro said. “The cigars?” “My Christianity,” Shiro said. “When I was a boy, I liked Elvis. Had a chance to see him in concert when we moved to California. It was a big revival meeting. There was Elvis and then a speaker and my English was not so good. He invited people backstage to meet the king. Thought he meant Elvis, so I go backstage.” He sighed. “Found out later I had become a Baptist.” I barked out a laugh. “You’re kidding.” “No. But it was done, so I tried not to be too bad at being Baptist.

Unfortunately, the term “identity politics” has been weaponized. It is most often used by speakers to describe politics as practiced by members of historically marginalized groups. If you’re black and you're worried about police brutality, that’s identity politics. If you’re a woman and you’re worried about the male-female pay gap, that’s identity politics. But if you’re a rural gun owner decrying universal background checks as tyranny, or a billionaire CEO complaining that high tax rates demonize success, or a Christian insisting on Nativity scenes in public squares — well, that just good, old fashioned politics. With a quick sleight of hand, identity becomes something that only marginalized groups have. The term “identity politics,” in this usage, obscures rather than illuminates; it’s used to diminish and discredit the concerns of the weaker groups by making them look self-interested, special pleading in order to clear the agenda for the concerns of stronger groups, which are framed as more rational, proper topics for political debate. But in wielding identity as a blade, we have lost it as a lens, blinding ourselves in a bid for political advantage. WE are left searching in vaid for what we refuse to allow ourselves to see.

As I recall, St. Paul stood by and held the coats of the men who were stoning him (Stephen). Apparently he wasn't a believer at the time. In fact, I think he was regarded as the most terrible enemy of the Church. And yet he later repented, didn't he? So I suggest you think of me, not as the enemy of God, but as an apostle who has not yet been stopped on the road to Damascus

What I see here, what I feel here is that people in your world believe spirituality isn't distant. It's close and real. Religion seems born in the home, stays in the home. I mean, the services are even held in the home. And there's not one person in charge, one speaker set above the others. It's farmers and carpenters, and well, just average folk speaking spontaneously about the message they find in the Bible. [...] A message from the heart to the heart.

Thus the pagan notion of a trained professional speaker who delivers orations for a fee moved straight into the Christian bloodstream. Note that the concept of the “paid teaching specialist” came from Greece, not Judaism. It was the custom of Jewish rabbis to take up a trade so as to not charge a fee for their teaching.

Fruitfulness may be a better measurement for success than productivity because it is based more in the evaluations of others as to the meaningful role we have played in their lives then in our own importance determined according to the amount of accomplishments we can list.

What then, is correctness of speech but the maintenance of the practice of others, as established by the authority of ancient speakers? But the weaker men are, the more they are troubled by such matters. Their weakness stems from a desire to appear learned, not with a knowledge of things, by which we are edified, but with a knowledge of signs, by which it is difficult not to be puffed up in some way; even a knowledge of things often makes people boastful, unless their necks are held down by the Lord's yoke.

The sermon of your life in tough times ministers to people more powerfully than the most eloquent speaker.

It is a dangerous trap to believe that our search is over because we have gained all the riches we are going to have.

When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker’s attitude to that object.

Speaker calls the Christian counselor to look at each person as soul embodied with unique challenges that move us. This is not, he says, the first step before we get on to important business but vital in and of itself.

But first let me mention the second aid to understanding provided by science. We know today that in a physical experiment the observer himself enters into the experiment and only by doing so can arrive at a physical experience. This means that there is no such thing as pure objectivity in in physics, that even here the result of the experiment, nature's answer, depends on the question put to it. In the answer there is always a bit of the question and a bit of the questioner himself; it reflects not only nature in itself, in its pure objectivity, but also gives back something of man, of what is characteristically ours, a bit of the human subject. This too, mutatis mutandis, is true of the question of God. There is no such thing as a mere observer. There is no such thing as pure objectivity. One can even say that the higher an object stands in human terms, the more it generates the center of individuality; and the more it engages the beholder's individuality, then the smaller the possibility of the mere distancing involved in pure objectivity. Thus, whenever an answer is presented as unemotionally objective, as a statement that finally goes beyond the prejudices of the pious and provides purely factual, scientific information, then it has to be said that the speaker has here fallen victim to self-deception. This kind of objectivity is quite simply denied to man. He cannot ask and exist as a mere observer. He who tries to be a mere observer experiences nothing. Even the reality "God" can only impinge on the vision of him who enters into the experiment with God--the experiment that we call faith. Only be entering does one experience; only by cooperating in the experiment does one ask at all; and only he who asks receives an answer.

I think there is a mixture of truth and falsehood in the admiration of "nature" which it is important to disentagle.  To bein with, what is "natural?" Roughly speaking, anything to which the speaker was accustomed in childhood.

In 1 Corinthians 14:13–17, Paul mentioned that the gift of tongues was used in public prayer for the purpose of edification. Charismatics, however, have tried to redefine the gift of tongues as a special mode of supernatural expression for their personal devotions and private prayers. But notice how different Paul’s description is from that of modern tongues-speakers. First, Paul was not commending any form of gibberish, since he had already established that the real gift consisted of speaking in translatable foreign languages (vv. 10–11). Second, Paul would never extol prayers that bypass the mind, as many charismatics do. That was—and still is today—a pagan practice. In the Greco-Roman mystery religions, ecstatic utterances were commonly employed as a way to circumvent the mind in order to commune with demonic entities. So it is likely that Paul’s words in these verses include a sarcastic tone, as he rebuked the Corinthian Christians for their attempt to imitate the mindless practices of their pagan neighbors.

During my years of teaching I know that I have developed idiosyncrasies. I am certain that I am unaware of some of them, but one that I do know about is my invariable reaction the chapel speaker who begins his message something like this: 'Now today, young people, I'm going to be very practical in my message. I'll leave the doctrine to your teachers and the classroom - I just want to be practical.' By this time I have already tuned the speaker out, for he has made a fundamental mistake in disjoining doctrine and practice. All doctrine is practical, and all practice must be based on sound doctrine. Doctrine that is not practical is not healthy doctrine, and practice that is not doctrinal is not rightly based.

If someone publicly charges that ‘Mormonism is a cult,’ it is impossible to say that the claim by itself is mistaken or untrue. However, if the speaker says that heaven is a real place but that you will not get there if you are Jewish, or that Mormonism is a cult and a false religion but that other churches and faiths are the genuine article, then you know that the bigot has spoken.

There is one class of persons to which one speaks with difficulty, and another to which one speaks in vain. The second, more numerous and obstinate than may at first appear, because it represents a state of mind into which we are all prone through natural sloth to relapse, consists of those people who cannot believe that things will ever be very different from what they are at the moment. From time to time, under the influence perhaps of some persuasive write or speaker, they may have an instant of disquiet or hope; but an invincible sluggishness of imagination makes them go on behaving as if nothing would ever change. Those to whom one speaks with difficulty, but not perhaps in vain, are the persons who believe that great changes must come, but are not sure either of what is inevitable, or of what is probable, or of what is desirable.

Religious imagery and symbolism were the common idioms that all speakers employed when making rhetorical points. Rather than indicating a level of personal piety, the frequency of religious discourse indicates the high degree of biblical literacy and the common use of popular idioms. That one can find references to God or scripture in the political writings of the era is thus unremarkable (even less remarkable when one examines the political sermons of the period).

What we feel and how we feel is far more important than what we think and how we think. Feeling is the stuff of which our consciousness is made, the atmosphere in which all our thinking and all our conduct is bathed. All the motives which govern and drive our lives are emotional. Love and hate, anger and fear, curiosity and joy are the springs of all that is most noble and most detestable in the history of men and nations. The opening sentence of a sermon is an opportunity. A good introduction arrests me. It handcuffs me and drags me before the sermon, where I stand and hear a Word that makes me both tremble and rejoice. The best sermon introductions also engage the listener immediately. It’s a rare sermon, however, that suffers because of a good introduction. Mysteries beg for answers. People’s natural curiosity will entice them to stay tuned until the puzzle is solved. Any sentence that points out incongruity, contradiction, paradox, or irony will do. Talk about what people care about. Begin writing an introduction by asking, “Will my listeners care about this?” (Not, “Why should they care about this?”) Stepping into the pulpit calmly and scanning the congregation to the count of five can have a remarkable effect on preacher and congregation alike. It is as if you are saying, “I’m about to preach the Word of God. I want all of you settled. I’m not going to begin, in fact, until I have your complete attention.” No sermon is ready for preaching, not ready for writing out, until we can express its theme in a short, pregnant sentence as clear as crystal. The getting of that sentence is the hardest, most exacting, and most fruitful labor of study. We tend to use generalities for compelling reasons. Specifics often take research and extra thought, precious commodities to a pastor. Generalities are safe. We can’t help but use generalities when we can’t remember details of a story or when we want anonymity for someone. Still, the more specific their language, the better speakers communicate. I used to balk at spending a large amount of time on a story, because I wanted to get to the point. Now I realize the story gets the point across better than my declarative statements. Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. Limits—that is, form—challenge the mind, forcing creativity. Needless words weaken our offense. Listening to some speakers, you have to sift hundreds of gallons of water to get one speck of gold. If the sermon is so complicated that it needs a summary, its problems run deeper than the conclusion. The last sentence of a sermon already has authority; when the last sentence is Scripture, this is even more true. No matter what our tone or approach, we are wise to craft the conclusion carefully. In fact, given the crisis and opportunity that the conclusion presents—remember, it will likely be people’s lasting memory of the message—it’s probably a good practice to write out the conclusion, regardless of how much of the rest of the sermon is written. It is you who preaches Christ. And you will preach Christ a little differently than any other preacher. Not to do so is to deny your God-given uniqueness. Aim for clarity first. Beauty and eloquence should be added to make things even more clear, not more impressive. I’ll have not praise nor time for those who suppose that writing comes by some divine gift, some madness, some overflow of feeling. I’m especially grim on Christians who enter the field blithely unprepared and literarily innocent of any hard work—as though the substance of their message forgives the failure of its form.

Anya's final sweep of the bow was as if she had delivered the coup de grâce in a sword duel. The last note reverberated around the empty theatre until only the white noise from the speakers remained, lapping back in like a gentle wave. It was probably the most beautiful rendition I had heard her perform, but there was no applause; there was only silence. I flicked my eyes across to Malcolm, the theatre director, but his gaze was transfixed on a particular seat. Even Anya, rigid and breathless with the violin at her side, was staring at that same seat.

The modern church by and large is focused on self. We see a proliferation of self-help, self-improvement, and generally self-centered books lining the shelves of Christian book stores, and climbing to the top of best-seller lists. Many Pastors have become little more than “life coaches” and motivational speakers. We see men of God who at one time thundered out calls to repentance and holy living, now proclaiming that their people have a “champion” inside them. We see shepherds who should be feeding the sheep, now having to entertain the goats. There has been without a doubt, a shift from the Church at Philadelphia to the Church at Laodicea.

Will you dare to say so?–Have you never erred?–Have you never felt one impure sensation?–Have you never indulged a transient feeling of hatred, or malice, or revenge?–Have you never forgot to do the good you ought to do,–or remembered to do the evil you ought not to have done?–Have you never in trade overreached a dealer, or banquetted on the spoils of your starving debtor?–Have you never, as you went to your daily devotions, cursed from your heart the wanderings of your heretical brethren,–and while you dipped your fingers in the holy water, hoped that every drop that touched your pores, would be visited on them in drops of brimstone and sulphur?–Have you never, as you beheld the famished, illiterate, degraded populace of your country, exulted in the wretched and temporary superiority your wealth has given you,–and felt that the wheels of your carriage would not roll less smoothly if the way was paved with the heads of your countrymen? Orthodox Catholic–old Christian–as you boast yourself to be,–is not this true?–and dare you say you have not been an agent of Satan? I tell you, whenever you indulge one brutal passion, one sordid desire, one impure imagination–whenever you uttered one word that wrung the heart, or embittered the spirit of your fellow-creature–whenever you made that hour pass in pain to whose flight you might have lent wings of down–whenever you have seen the tear, which your hand might have wiped away, fall uncaught, or forced it from an eye which would have smiled on you in light had you permitted it–whenever you have done this, you have been ten times more an agent of the enemy of man than all the wretches whom terror, enfeebled nerves, or visionary credulity, has forced into the confession of an incredible compact with the author of evil, and whose confession has consigned them to flames much more substantial than those the imagination of their persecutors pictured them doomed to for an eternity of suffering! Enemy of mankind!' the speaker continued,–'Alas! how absurdly is that title bestowed on the great angelic chief,–the morning star fallen from its sphere! What enemy has man so deadly as himself? If he would ask on whom he should bestow that title aright, let him smite his bosom, and his heart will answer,–Bestow it here!

I'd be willing to bet that the notion of the end of time is more common today in the secular world than in the Christian. The Christian world makes it the object of meditation, but acts as if it may be projected into a dimension not measured by calendars. The secular world pretends to ignore the end of time, but is fundamentally obsessed by it. This is not a paradox, but a repetition of what transpired in the first thousand years of history. ... I will remind readers that the idea of the end of time comes out of one of the most ambiguous passages of John's text, chapter 20... This approach, which isn't only Augustine's but also the Church Fathers' as a whole, casts History as a journey forward—a notion alien to the pagan world. Even Hegel and Marx are indebted to this fundamental idea, which Pierre Teilhard de Chardin pursued. Christianity invented History, and it is in fact a modern incarnation of the Antichrist that denounces History as a disease. It's possible that secular historicism has understood history as infinitely perfectible—so that tomorrow we improve upon today, always and without reservation... But the entire secular world is not of the ideological view that through history we understand how to look at the regression and folly of history itself. There is, nonetheless, an originally Christian view of history whenever the signpost of Hope on this road is followed. The simple knowledge of how to judge history and its horrors is fundamentally Christian, whether the speaker is Emmanuel Mounier on tragic optimism or Gramsci on pessimism of reason and optimism of will.

When you see the dawn breaking, you think back to the darkness in a new way. “Sin” is not simply the breaking of a law. It is the missing of an opportunity. Having heard the echoes of a voice, we are called to come and meet the speaker. We are invited to be transformed by the voice itself, the word of the gospel- the word which declares that evil has been judged, that the world has been put to rights, that heaven and earth are joined forever, and that new creation has begun. We are called to become people who can speak and live and paint and sing that word so that those who have heard it’s echoes can come and lend a hand in the larger project. That is the opportunity that stands before us, as a gift and a possibility. Christian holiness is not (as people often imagine) a matter of denying something good. It is about growing up and grasping something even better.

What makes the difference between "ideal" and an ordinary object of desire is that the former is impersonal; it is something having(at least ostensibly)no special reference to the ego of the man who feels the desire, and therefore capable, theoretically, of being desired by everybody. Thus we might define an "ideal" as something desired, not egocentric, and such that the person Desiring it wishes that everyone else also desired it. I may wish that everybody had enough to eat, that everybody felt kindly towards everybody, and so on, and if I wish anything of this kind I shall also wish others to wish it. In this way, I can build up what looks like an impersonal ethic, although in fact it rests upon the personal basis of my own desires--for the desire remains mine even when what is desired has no reference to myself. For example, one man may wish that everybody understood science, and another that everybody appreciated art; it is a personal difference between the two men that produces this difference in their desires. The personal element becomes apparent as soon as controversy is involved. Suppose some man says: "You are wrong to wish everybody to be happy; you ought to desire the happiness of Germans and the unhappiness of everyone else. "Here "ought" maybe taken to mean that that is what the speaker wishes me to desire. I might retort that, not being German, it is psychologically impossible for me to desire the unhappiness of all non-Germans; but this answer seems inadequate. Again, there may be a conflict of purely impersonal ideals. Nietzsche's hero differs from a Christian saint, yet both are impersonally admired, the one by Nietzscheans, the other by Christians. How are we to decide between the two except by means of our own desires? Yet, if There is nothing further, an ethical disagreement can only be decided by emotional appeals, or by force-in the ultimate resort,. By war. On questions of fact, we can appeal to science and scientific methods of observation; but on ultimate questions of ethics there seems to be nothing analogous. Yet, if this is really the case, ethical disputes resolve themselves into contests for power—including propaganda power.

All in all, Christian nation proponents commit several errors in their claims about the religious beliefs of the Founders. Their claims isolate the religious language of the Founders and other individuals from their immediate and cultural contexts. They pick statements that conform to modern confessions of faith, while they fail to acknowledge how those statements may have deviated from standards of religious orthodoxy of the time. And they draw assumptions from those isolated statements about how the speaker may have understood the basis of republican principles or the appropriate relationship between church and state matters. In the final analysis, a majority of the leading Founders were neither orthodox Protestants nor hard-core deists; yet, most leaned toward a form of rational theism, an approach that viewed Christianity, or theism generally, through the lens of Enlightenment rationalism. But more to the assumptions that underlie the Christian nation narrative, there is little evidence that the religious rhetoric of the Founders directed their understandings about the foundations of civil government.

You may, for instance, inquire of a popular preacher, or any one else, who denounces his countrymen as "pagan" (as speakers, and even Bishops, at religious gatherings have been known to do) what, exactly, he means by this word, and you will find that he means irreligious, and is apparently oblivious of the fact that pagans were and are, in their village simplicity, the most religious persons who have ever flourished, having more gods to the square mile then the Christian or any other Church has ever possessed or desired, and paying these gods more devout and more earnest devotion than you will meet even among Anglo-Catholics in congress. To be pagan may not be very intelligent; it is rustic and superstitious, but it is at least religious. Yet you will hear the word "pagan" flung loosely about for "irreligious", or sometimes as meaning joyous, material and comfort-loving, whereas the simple pagans walked the earth full of what is called holy awe and that mystic faith in unseen powers which is the antithesis of materialism, and gloomy with apprehension of the visitations of their horrid and vindictive gods; and, though no doubt, like all men, they loved comfort, they only obtained, just as we do, as much of that as they could afford.

If the claims of the papacy cannot be proven from what we know of the historical Peter, there are, on the other hand, several undoubted facts in the real history of Peter which bear heavily upon those claims, namely: 1. That Peter was married, Matt. 8:14, took his wife with him on his missionary tours, 1 Cor. 9:5, and, according to a possible interpretation of the "coëlect" (sister), mentions her in 1 Pet. 5:13. Patristic tradition ascribes to him children, or at least a daughter (Petronilla). His wife is said to have suffered martyrdom in Rome before him. What right have the popes, in view of this example, to forbid clerical marriage?  We pass by the equally striking contrast between the poverty of Peter, who had no silver nor gold (Acts 3:6) and the gorgeous display of the triple-crowned papacy in the middle ages and down to the recent collapse of the temporal power. 2. That in the Council at Jerusalem (Acts 15:1–11), Peter appears simply as the first speaker and debater, not as president and judge (James presided), and assumes no special prerogative, least of all an infallibility of judgment. According to the Vatican theory the whole question of circumcision ought to have been submitted to Peter rather than to a Council, and the decision ought to have gone out from him rather than from "the apostles and elders, brethren" (or "the elder brethren," 15:23). 3. That Peter was openly rebuked for inconsistency by a younger apostle at Antioch (Gal. 2:11–14). Peter’s conduct on that occasion is irreconcilable with his infallibility as to discipline; Paul’s conduct is irreconcilable with Peter’s alleged supremacy; and the whole scene, though perfectly plain, is so inconvenient to Roman and Romanizing views, that it has been variously distorted by patristic and Jesuit commentators, even into a theatrical farce gotten up by the apostles for the more effectual refutation of the Judaizers! 4. That, while the greatest of popes, from Leo I. down to Leo XIII. never cease to speak of their authority over all the bishops and all the churches, Peter, in his speeches in the Acts, never does so. And his Epistles, far from assuming any superiority over his "fellow-elders" and over "the clergy" (by which he means the Christian people), breathe the spirit of the sincerest humility and contain a prophetic warning against the besetting sins of the papacy, filthy avarice and lordly ambition (1 Pet. 5:1–3). Love of money and love of power are twin-sisters, and either of them is "a root of all evil." It is certainly very significant that the weaknesses even more than the virtues of the natural Peter—his boldness and presumption, his dread of the cross, his love for secular glory, his carnal zeal, his use of the sword, his sleepiness in Gethsemane—are faithfully reproduced in the history of the papacy; while the addresses and epistles of the converted and inspired Peter contain the most emphatic protest against the hierarchical pretensions and worldly vices of the papacy, and enjoin truly evangelical principles—the general priesthood and royalty of believers, apostolic poverty before the rich temple, obedience to God rather than man, yet with proper regard for the civil authorities, honorable marriage, condemnation of mental reservation in Ananias and Sapphira, and of simony in Simon Magus, liberal appreciation of heathen piety in Cornelius, opposition to the yoke of legal bondage, salvation in no other name but that of Jesus Christ.

One of the most vivid examples of chaotic charismatic worship occurred during the Toronto Blessing of the mid-1990s. Sociology professor Margaret M. Poloma describes her firsthand experience at a worship service held at the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship in 1995: The outbreaks of laughter continued to gather momentum. [Evangelist Byron] Mote proclaimed, “God is throwing one major party.” He then opened to the first chapter of Luke, seeming to begin a sermon about Mary, the mother of Jesus. As people continued laughing throughout the auditorium, Mote’s speech became slurred. . . . He sat down trying to gain composure, looking like a drunk struggling to keep from falling off the bar stool. Mote soon fell to the floor “drunk in the Spirit,” as people laughed and applauded. Jan Mote then sought to fill her husband’s place as the speaker for the meeting, by returning to a passage from Song of Solomon: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.” Although Jan Mote, too, was struggling to retain her composure (having to sit down at one point because her “knees were weak”), she spoke about how laughter was opening people up to receive the love of God. Those in the congregation not spiritually drunk, laying on the floor, or laughing out of control then followed her in singing, “My Jesus I love you.

Could it be that our dynamic and “non-threatening” evangelistic events at church have had the unintended consequence of Christian families and Christian individuals not being evangelistic in their own homes and neighborhoods? The evangelistic call to the Christian has changed from “Invite your neighbors into your home. Share your life with them. Pray for God to give you an opportunity to share the Gospel” to “We have an incredible outreach event here at church next month. Pray about who you can invite to church so they can hear the gospel from our special speaker.” Is it possible that the more pastors and church leaders focus on running outreach events at church, the less Christians share their faith in their neighborhoods and workplaces?

When she’s in a courtroom, Wendy Patrick, a deputy district attorney for San Diego, uses some of the roughest words in the English language. She has to, given that she prosecutes sex crimes. Yet just repeating the words is a challenge for a woman who not only holds a law degree but also degrees in theology and is an ordained Baptist minister. “I have to say (a particularly vulgar expletive) in court when I’m quoting other people, usually the defendants,” she admitted. There’s an important reason Patrick has to repeat vile language in court. “My job is to prove a case, to prove that a crime occurred,” she explained. “There’s often an element of coercion, of threat, (and) of fear. Colorful language and context is very relevant to proving the kind of emotional persuasion, the menacing, a flavor of how scary these guys are. The jury has to be made aware of how bad the situation was. Those words are disgusting.” It’s so bad, Patrick said, that on occasion a judge will ask her to tone things down, fearing a jury’s emotions will be improperly swayed. And yet Patrick continues to be surprised when she heads over to San Diego State University for her part-time work of teaching business ethics. “My students have no qualms about dropping the ‘F-bomb’ in class,” she said. “The culture in college campuses is that unless they’re disruptive or violating the rules, that’s (just) the way kids talk.” Experts say people swear for impact, but the widespread use of strong language may in fact lessen that impact, as well as lessen society’s ability to set apart certain ideas and words as sacred. . . . [C]onsider the now-conversational use of the texting abbreviation “OMG,” for “Oh, My God,” and how the full phrase often shows up in settings as benign as home-design shows without any recognition of its meaning by the speakers. . . . Diane Gottsman, an etiquette expert in San Antonio, in a blog about workers cleaning up their language, cited a 2012 Career Builder survey in which 57 percent of employers say they wouldn’t hire a candidate who used profanity. . . . She added, “It all comes down to respect: if you wouldn’t say it to your grandmother, you shouldn’t say it to your client, your boss, your girlfriend or your wife.” And what about Hollywood, which is often blamed for coarsening the language? According to Barbara Nicolosi, a Hollywood script consultant and film professor at Azusa Pacific University, an evangelical Christian school, lazy script writing is part of the explanation for the blue tide on television and in the movies. . . . By contrast, she said, “Bad writers go for the emotional punch of crass language,” hence the fire-hose spray of obscenities [in] some modern films, almost regardless of whether or not the subject demands it. . . . Nicolosi, who noted that “nobody misses the bad language” when it’s omitted from a script, said any change in the industry has to come from among its ranks: “Writers need to have a conversation among themselves and in the industry where we popularize much more responsible methods in storytelling,” she said. . . . That change can’t come quickly enough for Melissa Henson, director of grass-roots education and advocacy for the Parents Television Council, a pro-decency group. While conceding there is a market for “adult-themed” films and language, Henson said it may be smaller than some in the industry want to admit. “The volume of R-rated stuff that we’re seeing probably far outpaces what the market would support,” she said. By contrast, she added, “the rate of G-rated stuff is hardly sufficient to meet market demands.” . . . Henson believes arguments about an “artistic need” for profanity are disingenuous. “You often hear people try to make the argument that art reflects life,” Henson said. “I don’t hold to that. More often than not, ‘art’ shapes the way we live our lives, and it skews our perceptions of the kind of life we're supposed to live." [DN, Apr. 13, 2014]

The monks explain that they have been sent by “the one who on the earth is the greater speaker of divine things,” the pope, to bring the “venerable word / of the One Sole True God” to New Spain. By worshipping at false altars, the friars say, “you cause Him an injured heart, / by which you live in His anger, His ire.” So infuriated was the Christian God by the Indians’ worship of idols and demons that he sent out “the Spaniards, / … those who afflicted you with tormenting sorrow, / by which you were punished / so that you ceased / these not few injuries to His precious heart.” The Triple Alliance was subjugated, in other words, because its people had failed to recognize the One True God. By accepting the Bible, the priests explain, the Mexica “will be able to cool the heart / of He by Whom All Live, / so He will not completely destroy you.

A few years back I was the featured speaker at the Indiana Governor’s Prayer Breakfast. I found myself sitting with the then youngest (thirty-six years old) governor in the country, Evan Bayh. He’s also a very devout Christian. He turned to me and said, “Brennan, you’re in just about every nook and cranny of the United States. You’re in every college and university, from Campus Crusade to Young Life, and in an incredible number of churches as well. What do you hear the Spirit of God saying to the American church?” I said, “Well, Governor Bayh, if there’s one thing I hear with growing clarity, it’s that God is calling each and every Christian to personally participate in the healing ministry of Jesus Christ.

I was recently providing music at a conference where one of the speakers, a noted professor of theology, remarked that we are in the “Experiential Age” of the Christian faith, an age that is defined by a professed personal relationship with Christ. Then she threw up her hands and said: “What does that mean?

My point, then, is that in the real world, for all the difficulties there are in communication from person to person and from culture to culture, we still expect people to say more or less what they mean (and if they don’t, we chide them for it), and we expect mature people to understand what others say, and represent it fairly. The understanding is doubtless never absolutely exhaustive and perfect, but that does not mean the only alternative is to dissociate text from speaker, and then locate all meaning in the reader or hearer. True knowledge of the meaning of a text and even of the thoughts of the author who wrote it is possible, even if perfect and exhaustive knowledge is not. That is the way things are in the real world—and that in turn suggests that any theory that flies in the face of these realities needs to be examined again.

I once attended an evangelism conference sponsored by a local church. The main speaker for the conference asked the audience what they thought was the number-one reason for Christians not doing the work of an evangelist. The audience gave a number of good answers, ranging from fear, lack of knowledge, and indifference. The speaker stunned the audience when he sug- gested that those are certainly problems, but that the number-one problem is that too many Christians do not believe Romans 1:16. They do not believe the gospel is the power of God for salvation. They lack confidence in the gospel. How about you? Are you confident that the gospel is the power of God to save? Does your work as an evangelist demonstrate such confidence? I pray that we all can answer “yes”to these questions.

It is dreadful to hear time and again that National Socialism is a return to barbarism, to the Dark Ages, to times before any new progress toward humanitarianism was made, without these speakers even suspecting that precisely the secularization of life that accompanied the doctrine of humanitarianism is the soil in which such an anti-Christian religious movement as National Socialism was able to prosper.

To your left is “The Quiet Room.” It told me a lot about Christianity. The Quiet Room is a glass-encased room where parents are asked to take their noisy children. Yes, my mother took me and my sister in there on a few occasions. It’s just a section of pews in the back of the church that are walled off with glass. It’s a noisy place on a Sunday morning. The room’s mere existence reveals much about Christianity. There’s no such place in a public library or a museum. No architect of a public library or museum specifically designed a room where unruly children are to be taken. If a kid doesn’t want to behave or even be in a library or museum that kid shouldn’t have to be and should be removed. Whatever’s going on in there just isn’t that vital. But this particular church was different. Church itself was different. Inside the Quiet Room was an intercom speaker that piped in everything that was being said at the altar. As I grew older, I began to wonder why I was separated from the rest of the congregation. Was there something wrong with me? I could see it all through the glass, but felt like we kids were seen as a problem. We were a problem in the society of the church that had to be segregated, but not separated from the intrinsic requirement of the mass. I thought to myself, “Why don’t we just go home?” Nope, not until mass is done.

Some people recoil and reply, “God cannot lose face!” The objection misunderstands the nature of “face,” which is an Eastern way of talking about honor and shame. “Face” has both objective and subjective connotations.11 “Face” can even have a moral dimension. For instance, in Chinese culture, the phrase “ni bu yao lian” (“You do not want face”) is an insult because it conveys a person’s immoral lack of regard for others. It can indicate one’s shameful behavior, ill repute, or psychological state.12 In saying God “loses face,” we simply mean that sin publicly dishonors God. How can “face” have both an absolute and relativistic standard? God ultimately decides what is honorable and shameful. I once heard a conference speaker state it this way: “All truth is relative . . . relative to God.” In other words, when Christians say something is “absolutely” true or good, we mean it is true or good relative to God. Before knowing Christ, sinners do not share God’s perspective on glory. We treat God as if he were not infinitely precious, wonderful, and praiseworthy. At best, we treat him as ordinary. At worst, we publicly express contempt for him. The sins listed in Romans 1:29-32 simply express humanity’s shameful disregard for God. The non-Christian is ashamed of the

We love Mary for one reason: because we love Jesus. The more we love Jesus, the more we love Mary. If we could grade Catholics on a scale of sainthood, a kind of spiritual graph, three lines would be almost identical in height or depth: how saintly you are, how much you love Jesus, and how much you love Mary. That’s the empirical fact. Here comes the explanation. Look at the Hail Mary prayer. It stops halfway through. The speaker has to take a silence break before and after the name “Jesus.” He’s at the heart of that prayer as He was at the heart of her body, her womb. Look at the title we give her in that prayer: “Mother of God.” Unbelievable, astonishing, incredible, amazing, infinitely wonderful! What? Jesus in Mary, Jesus incarnating, Jesus coming down to us in Mary. Suppose He had chosen to come in another way. He could have. He could have appeared instantly as a full-grown man descending from the sky, the reverse of the Ascension. He could have come down on a mountaintop, or in the Temple. And if he had, every Christian in the world who adored Him would make a pilgrimage to that mountain or that Temple. They would love that place above all places in the universe. They would make a very big deal of it. Why? Because they make a very big deal about Him.

You've a false balance as a Christian if you can't lead OTHERS to Christ, or even speak to them about HIM.

When this story opens at the birth of Christ, the European landscape was marked by extraordinary contrasts. The circle of the Mediterranean, newly united under Roman imperial domination, hosted a politically sophisticated, economically advanced and culturally developed civilization. This world had philosophy, banking, professional armies, literature, stunning architecture and rubbish collection. Otherwise, apart from some bits west of the Rhine and south of the Danube which were already beginning to march to the tune of a more Mediterranean beat, the rest of Europe was home to subsistence-level farmers, organized in small-scale political units. Much of it was dominated by Germanic-speakers, who had some iron tools and weapons, but who worked generally in wood, had little literacy and never built in stone. The further east you went, the simpler it all became: fewer iron tools, less productive agricultures and a lower population density. This was, in fact, the ancient world in western Eurasia: a dominant Mediterranean circle lording it over an undeveloped northern hinterland. Move forward a thousand years, and the world had turned. Not only had Slavic-speakers replaced Germanic-speakers as the dominant force over much of barbarian Europe, and some Germanic-speakers replaced Romans and Celts in some of the rest, but, even more fundamentally, Mediterranean dominance had been broken. Politically, this was caused by the emergence of larger and more solid state formations in the old northern hinterland, as exemplified by the Moravians, but the pattern was not limited to politics. By the year 1000, many of the Mediterranean's cultural patterns - not least Christianity, literacy and building in stone - were also spreading north and east. Essentially, patterns of human organization were moving towards much greater homogeneity right across the European landmass. It was these new state and cultural structures that broke for ever the ancient world order of Mediterranean domination. Barbarian Europe was barbarian no longer. The ancient world order had given way to cultural and political patterns that were more directly ancestral to those of modern Europe.

But I believe that the Industrial Revolution, including developments leading to this revolution, barely capture what was unique about Western culture. While other cultures were unique in their own customs, languages, beliefs, and historical experiences, the West was uniquely exceptional in exhibiting in a continuous way the greatest degree of creativity, novelty, and expansionary dynamics. I trace the uniqueness of the West back to the aristocratic warlike culture of Indo-European speakers as early as the 4th millennium BC. Their aristocratic libertarian culture was already unique and quite innovative in initiating the most mobile way of life in prehistoric times, starting with the domestication and riding of horses and the invention of chariot warfare. So were the ancient Greeks in their discovery of logos and its link with the order of the world, dialectical reason, the invention of prose, tragedy, citizen politics, and face-to-face infantry battle. The Roman creation of a secular system of republican governance anchored on autonomous principles of judicial reasoning was in and of itself unique. The incessant wars and conquests of the Roman legions, together with their many military innovations and engineering skills, were one of the most vital illustrations of spatial expansionism in history. The fusion of Christianity and the Greco-Roman intellectual and administrative heritage, coupled with the cultivation of Catholicism (the first rational theology in history), was a unique phenomenon. The medieval invention of universities — in which a secular education could flourish and even articles of faith were open to criticism and rational analysis, in an effort to arrive at the truth — was exceptional. The list of epoch-making transformation in Europe is endless: the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, the Scientific Revolution(s), the Military Revolution(s), the Cartographic Revolution, the Spanish Golden Age, the Printing Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Romantic Era, the German Philosophical Revolutions from Kant to Hegel to Nietzsche to Heidegger.

brand of churches that do not depend on the Spirit, a whole culture of Christians who are not disciples, a new group of “followers” who do not follow. If all God asked for were faceless numbers to fill the churches, then we would all be doing all right. Most of us would feel pretty confident. But simply having a good speaker, a service that is short and engaging, a good venue, and whatever else we add to the mix does not make a “good” or “successful” church. God intended for His bride, those who claim His name, to be much more than this.

They say "never say never".Well, I can assure you that, you will NEVER make me feel bad about being black, being a woman, and being ambitious. If this offends, sounds like a personal issue and you have my thoughts and prayers (cuz I'm a Christian too). Live in and for your purpose. You were not created to be mediocre. And continue to pay it forward. Someone can always learn from your testimony.

We seem to have a strange idea of Christian service. We will buy books, travel miles to hear a speaker on blessings, pay large sums to hear a group singing the latest Christian songs--but we forget that we are soldiers.

•A candidate running for president in 2012 referred to higher education as “mind control” and “indoctrination.” He ran again in 2016.         •A former Governor and 2012 presidential contender blamed the separation of church and state on Satan. He also sought to solve his state’s drought problem by asking its citizens to pray for rain. He ran again in 2016.         •A 2012 presidential contender claimed, “there’s violence in Israel because Jesus is coming soon.”         •A Georgia congressman claimed that evolution and the Big Bang Theory were “lies straight from the pit of Hell,” adding “Earth is about 9,000 years old and was created in six days, per the Bible.” He’s a physician, and a high-ranking member of the House Science Committee.         •From another member of the House Science Committee: “Prehistoric climate change could have been caused by dinosaur flatulence.”         •From the Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee: “Global warming isn’t real, God is in control of the world.”         •A former Speaker of the House -- a born-again Christian, and convicted felon – declared, “One thing Americans seem to forget is that God wrote the Constitution.”         •The Lt. Governor of a southern state claimed that Yoga may result in satanic possession.         •A Southern senator claimed, “video games represent a bigger problem than guns, because video games affect people.”         •A California state representative proudly stated: “Guns are used to defend our property and our families and our freedom, and they are absolutely essential to living the way God intended for us to live.”         •Another California representative suggested that abortion was to blame for the state’s drought.         •From a Texas representative: “The great flood is an example of climate change. And that certainly wasn’t because mankind overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy.”         •An Oklahoma representative said: “Just because the Supreme Court rules on something doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s constitutional.”         •From another Texas representative: “We know Al Qaeda has camps on the Mexican border. We have people that are trained to act Hispanic when they are radical Islamists.”         •A South Carolina State representative, commenting on the Supreme Court’s legalization of gay marriage said, “The devil is taking control of this land and we’re not stopping him!

The largest church in the United States is pastored by a motivational speaker who tells his audiences how to improve their lives with a positive attitude and relentless efforts to be nice. His best-selling book tells readers how to have their best life now, with “the best” presented in unashamedly consumer-friendly, all-American terms. From getting a new house to finding a great parking space to simply being the one who always gets the goodies, this pastor leads millions of people every week to believe that Christianity is about you getting everything you want the way you like it so that you you you you.

Yet even when such languages did not face direct official sanction, speakers of older tongues knew that they had little chance of getting on in an Arabic world. By the eleventh century, Coptic and Syriac were declining as major languages, and the compiler of the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria translated the work into Arabic because “today Arabic is the language that the people of Egypt know…most of them being ignorant of Coptic and Greek.”18

When that which professes to be the Word of God is acknowledged to be so, no person, unless devoid of common sense and the feelings of a man, will have the desperate hardihood to refuse credit to the speaker.

According to that fundamental principle, language is truthful, not when the meaning attached to the words by the speaker, but when the meaning intended to be produced in the mind of the particular person addressed, is in accordance with the facts.

There is great danger that a fluent and fervid speaker will wander into mere general appeals, equally appropriate to almost ally other subject or occasion. This may be sometimes allowable, but a more specific exhortation would almost always be more effective. It was once very common, among Baptists, Methodists, and some others, for a sermon to be followed by an exhortation from some other minister, or from some private Christian. The practice is now generally disused, except in "protracted meetings," but if properly managed, may be, upon occasion, quite appropriate and really useful. It would be an excellent thing to startle some of our congregations out of their decorous dulness, by an unexpected and rousing exhortation. But such addresses should not break away from the sermon, nor lose themselves in vague generalities. They should in general carry the subject, or some branch of it, farther in the same direction.

What is of import here is not just Tertullian’s dependence on an earlier exegetical tradition, but the person-centered reading strategy that he and his predecessors undertook—assigning dramatic speakers or addressees that are unmarked, and indeed in some cases, seemingly totally foreign to the Old Testament text.

Tertullian—the Spirit makes the basic prophetic utterance, obviously through the human medium, who then takes on different characters or acting-roles, and as such he steps into the role of the Father as the speaker, sometimes the role of the Christ, and at other times the Spirit speaks as the Spirit’s own self—indeed, the person addressed by the speaker also shifts. In short, for Tertullian, there are traces of divine conversation in the Old Testament. On what basis were such role assignments made and justified by early Christian interpreters such as Tertullian?—and what are the theological implications of such assignments? And vitally, when did the church begin using this reading strategy in conceptualizing God? Here I want to introduce the reader more thoroughly to a vehicle that I shall argue was irreducibly essential to the birth of the Trinity—a theodramatic reading strategy best termed “prosopological exegesis.” Previous Scholarship Related to Prosopological Exegesis In 1961 Carl Andresen’s landmark study, “Zur Entstehung und Geschichte des trinitarischen Personbegriffes” (“Toward the Origin and History of Trinitarian Conceptions of the Person”), foregrounded the degree to which early Christian exegesis contributed to the rise of Trinitarian dogma, bringing this critical dimension to the attention of patristic and systematic theologians.41 Andresen showed that Tertullian’s scriptural exegesis was definitive for his formulation of persons (Latin: personae) of the Trinity, and argued that this reading strategy—which Andresen termed prosopographische Schriftexegese (“prosopographic exegesis”)

To be sure, the minister was well matched to the millionaires in his pews. Fifield insisted that he and his wife always thought of themselves as simple “small-town folks,” but they acclimated easily to their new life of wealth and privilege. Within a year of their arrival, they bought a mansion in an exclusive development on Wilshire Boulevard. “It had been built in the Twenties by a rich oil man for around a million dollars—using imported tile, special wood paneling, Tiffany stained glass windows, silk hand-woven ‘wall paper’ and many such luxuries,” Fifield remembered. “The extensive lawn, colonnade archways, swimming pool and large main rooms on the first of three floors enabled us to entertain visiting speakers, dignitaries and important people from all over the world who could and did assist the church.” The Fifields soon employed a butler, a chauffeur, and a cook, insisting that the household staff was vital in maintaining their “gracious accommodations” during the depths of the Depression. “The traditional image of a clergyman in those days [was] a man who has a hole in the seat of his pants and shoes run over at the heel,” Fifield acknowledged. “It was quite a shock to a lot of people to see a minister driving around in a good car with a chauffeur at the wheel

Thus orthodoxy is no longer (mis)understood as the opposite of heresy but rather is understood as a term that signals a way of being in the world rather than a means of believing things about the world. As we shall see, this approach opens up a Christian thinking that profoundly challenges some of the most basic ideas found in the contemporary Church. It is an approach which emphasizes the priority of love: not as something which stands opposed to knowledge of God, or even as simply more important than knowledge of God, but, more radically still, as knowledge of God. To love is to know God precisely because God is love. The emerging community, at its best, can teach us again that love must be the first word on our lips and also the last, and that we must seek to incarnate that sacred word in the world. I recently heard a well-known speaker say that if faith does not cost us something, then it is nothing. Only much later could I respond: if faith does not cost us everything, it is nothing. Orthodoxy as right belief will cost us little; indeed, it will allow us to sit back with our Pharisaic doctrines, guarding the ‘truth’ with the purity of our interpretations. But orthodoxy, as believing in the right way, as bringing love to the world around us and within us … that will cost us everything. For to live by that sword, as we all know, is to die by it.

He makes no bones about saying ‘keep away from any brother who is living in idleness and not in accord with the tradition that you received from us’. So much for Jesus and his wandering Twelve. Paul was on the side of busy people who valued hard work and took a pride in the reward that they got from it: tent-makers of the world, unite.5 Christianity had become a religion for urban commercial centres, for speakers of common Greek who might see the whole Mediterranean as their home and might well have moved around it a good deal

The Christian coloniser was acutely alive to the fact that language captured a culture’s journey and reflected it through its stories, idioms, proverbs and usages, which connected the speaker with the collective past. To remove traces of the past in the language of the future, native children were forbidden from speaking in their languages,20 a practice that continues in English-medium schools to this day.

Study the Speakers, Not the Sermons

Each week Christians contend with the pressures of strained budgets, stressful jobs, sickly bodies, and fragile relationships. Consequently, more is needed on the Lord’s Day than mere enthusiasm from a motivational speaker. More is needed than a fresh set of techniques from the latest pop-psychologist. It is the voice of the living Christ that people need to hear through the preaching of the evangelical scripture: to sense the power and efficacy of the Spirit most sensibly accompanying the word.2 ARTURO G. ARZUDIA III

the music piped through the speakers was Christian—the new kind, which says that Jesus is awesome.

they called themselves the Deutsche Christens, “German Christians.” The contortions required to pull together their idea of Germanness with their idea of Christianity can be painful to contemplate. 172 In her book, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich, Doris Bergen wrote that “the ‘German Christians’ preached Christianity as the polar opposite of Judaism, Jesus as the arch anti-semite, and the cross as the symbol of war against Jews.” Fusing the German Volk (people) with the German Kirche (church) meant stretching and twisting the definitions of both. Step one was to define Germanness as inherently in opposition to Jewishness. To make Christianity one with Germanness meant purging it of everything Jewish. It was an absurd project. For starters, they decided the Old Testament must go. It was obviously too Jewish. At one German Christians’ gathering in Bavaria, the speaker ridiculed the Old Testament as a saga of racial defilement. His remark that “Moses in his old age had married a Negro woman” drew boisterous laughter and enthusiastic applause.

A couple of weeks later, Victor Tyson and his family were targeted by the government. They lived outside of Birmingham, Alabama, on five hundred acres, and people had to drive across ten acres just to get to the house. As the SWAT team tried to sneak onto the property at the same time of morning as when they took down the Massey’s, a floodlight suddenly turned on and an alarm began ringing. One of them started to shoot out the floodlight, when a voice came booming out of a loud speaker from somewhere. “This is Victor Tyson. Get off my land. If this is the government’s attempt at trying to arrest me, you’ll not succeed. Come any closer and you’ll see how heavily armed my property is,

The case propelled Rekers to teaching positions at the University of Miami, Kansas State University, and other institutions, and he was awarded more than $1 million in grants from the NIMH and the National Science Foundation. He also became a sought-after speaker on the subject of treating sexual deviancy before committees of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. In 1983, he co-founded the Family Research Council, an influential Christian lobbying group that helped craft the plank in the 2012 Republican national platform calling for an amendment to the Constitution defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Rekers’s ubiquity in courtrooms coast to coast, furnishing expert testimony against gay marriage and gay adoption in pivotal cases, inspired the New York Times’ Frank Rich to call him “the Zelig of homophobia.” In the meantime, his star patient wasn’t faring nearly as well. Kirk hanged himself in 2003 at age thirty-eight, following decades of depression.

Christian men and women aren’t preaching per se; they prepare and present lessons and talks; they lead discussions in which they are presenting the Word of Christ.4 Even though Peter is not only talking to public speakers he warns those who present the Word to others in any form to take their task seriously. He adds that when Christians teach the Bible their speech should be “as . . . the very words of God” (1 Peter 4:11).

Your grandpa said already that propaganda is a governmental function. It has nothing to do with business. Furthermore, the government needs to bring its ideas across to the public and needs to resort to effective methods. Therefore, it encourages gifted speakers to explain the government plans. Besides that, the government is most certainly allowed to stick signs on billboards. Since the signs reflect the doctrine of the government it is not against the law.” “Harold, think about it. Are you saying that the government can proclaim whatever it wants because it makes the laws and therefore is able to get away with outright lies?” Karl’s grandpa wanted to be sure that he understood what Harold had been taught. “I don’t know about outright lies, but yes, our government is allowed to make the laws. Therefore, it is able to proclaim or to deny without coming into conflict with the laws.” Harold was unyielding. The old man Veth nodded in agreement. “Alright, Harold, now think before you answer. Considering your previous point about advertising would you now come to the conclusion that the propaganda of our government is self-serving?” Harold did not miss a beat. “Of course our government is self-serving. I don’t think that there is any difference between our government and other governments. They are always self-serving.” “Then you don’t even think about the fact that Herr Hitler can say what he wants, but that we citizens are in jeopardy if we don’t agree with him.” Herr Veth wanted to turn this conversation into a lesson. Harold showed that he was indeed already too long in the rain. “No Herr Veth, Herr Hitler does not say what he wants. He is only taking measures to assure that we are building an eternal empire. It will last at least a 1,000 years because we will eradicate the mentally ill by not permitting them to reproduce and also by sterilizing their roots. We will also abolish any vagrants and quacks, regardless of their faith, by sending them to labor camps. If any nonproductive person does not like our restraints they are free to migrate to other countries, which will suffer by this fact and therefore will never be of any competition to our disciplined nation.” Karl was stunned by Harold’s outpouring. “Harold, what is the matter with you? Don’t you realize that you are sounding like a member of the Nazi party?” Harold turned to face his friend. “No, Karl, I don’t sound like a Nazi. Discipline and productivity are the hallmarks of our Prussian culture and upbringing. There is nothing wrong with it.” Herr Veth intertwined. “There is something wrong with using the Prussian discipline to control young minds. Herr Hitler is using the very core of our

For example, if the two of you tend to escalate when you try to talk about issues, you need to master some form of Time Out. Likewise, if you want to communicate more effectively, you need to practice using the Speaker-Listener Technique until the underlying principles become second nature. You cannot wish the negative patterns away. You have to drive them away by replacing them with new behaviors and attitudes.

To meet the responsibilities of democracy, individuals must have access to a broad spectrum of opinions, ideas, and information. For the government to censor public debate because it thinks a particular speaker unwise or ill informed would usurp the authority of citizens to make their own judgments about such matters and thus undermine the very essence of self-government…. The First Amendment promotes the emergence of character traits that are essential to a well-functioning democracy, including tolerance, skepticism, personal responsibility, curiosity, distrust of authority, and independence of mind.33

The difference between a motivational speaker and multiplier is the annointing.

While not exclusive to parachurch institutions, there is a reason the sale of ministry occurs more frequently outside the church than inside the church. Book sales cover author commission, conference tickets cover speaker fees, tuition payments cover tenured salaries, and proprietary licenses cover musician paychecks.