Word: pastors
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...home through an Orlando, Fla., downpour when he lost control of his car and ran into a tree. He died instantly. The tragedy was mourned deeply in lofty reaches of the evangelical world because the Rev. Edington is an extremely respected minister and at the time was the personal pastor to Bill Bright, founder of the megaministry Campus Crusade for Christ...
...Sunday was in 1994. Leaders at Willow Creek Community Church, a congregation in the affluent Chicago suburbs where about 15,000 people worship each weekend, said that attendance wasn't great. This year, they decided to try "an experiment in decentralizing the congregation on Christmas morning," says senior pastor Bill Hybels. If you want to sing some carols and share the Christmas peace at Willow Creek on Dec. 25, you'll have to do it alone, out in the church parking lot. "In our community, people-particularly seekers who may not normally attend church-are more like...
...Haggard, who is also pastor of the 11,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colo., says his church "would never not have church on a Sunday. Christians have been doing it for 2,000 years." At the same time, he says, Willow Creek is showing the creativity and innovation for which it and Hybels have long been known. "Willow Creek is communicating that we're in an era when the church meets in a variety of ways," Haggard says. "This is what makes American Evangelicalism so great. We're so diverse. The meaning of Christmas is more important...
...close a church's doors. "It does muddy the message if, for convenience and pleasure, people are taking church out of Christmas," says Ed Vitigliano, a spokesman for the American Family Association, which has led the boycott against retailers who use "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas." A pastor at a church in Pontotoc, Miss., Vitigliano's church will be open on the 25th. "Part of celebrating Christmas should always be keeping the focus on Christ...
...fighting about. ""The central point is not what hour of what day the congregation gathers corporately to celebrate the birth of Christ," says Willow Creek's Hybels, "but rather that in our hearts and lives we allow the coming of Christ to transform us." On his blog, Louie Marsh, pastor of a small church in rural Arizona, quoted the Apostle Paul from the Book of Romans, who wrote, "Who are you to judge someone else's servant?" "I do know [that] this isn't something we should be fighting about," Marsh blogged. "Let's just focus on serving...