Report on Churches in North America

We are venturing on an approach to reporting that we hope will reflect the state of churches in North American and at the same time provide useful information to Ethiopian evangelical leaders. Here are some of the headlines.

Sad: Declining Lutheran Denomination Liberalizes Sex Teachings

Black, White Churches Merge To Save Money

Parish rift forms at prominent Florida megachurch

Megachurches have become one-stop centers, with food courts, sports leagues, and automotive repair shops alongside concert-caliber praise bands and strong preachers. Next up: seminaries.

Church's radical act: Sell building, use money for outreach

Episcopals to meet about direction

Southern Baptist missions chief's job reviewed; 'cronyism' a concern

Southern Baptists spend per capita 33 times more for missions in relatively gospel-saturated North America than they do for the comparatively unreached rest of the world, a recent analysis asserts. The primary reason for this “alarming” distortion in missions funding priorities is Baptist state conventions that “skim” approximately two-thirds of all SBC Cooperative Program dollars for their own causes, according to the author of the analysis.

F.J. Eikerenkoetter II, 74, who as "the Rev. Ike" was among the first preachers to harness the power of electronic media with the gospel of prosperity and drew millions of listeners on television and radio with such proclamations as "Jesus was a capitalist," died July 29 in a Los Angeles hospital. He had a stroke in 2007 and never fully recovered. For nearly three decades, Rev. Ike presided from a red velvet throne on the stage of the Christ United Church's Palace Cathedral, a Moorish-rococo former Loews movie theater in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan.

Southern Seminary's president said the SBC in 2009 continues to operate largely out of a model that the denomination adopted from corporate America in the early 20th century, a model that prioritizes efficiency over theological conviction in carrying out the task of missions. "Certainly in business, efficiency can be a make-or-break word between profit and loss," Mohler said, "but when it comes to missions and the work of our churches and the work of the Gospel around the world, efficiency has a limited application. "What this really marked, more than anything else, was an infusion of a business culture into the life of the denomination.... Churches were now concerned with efficiency; decisions were made on the basis of efficiency."