Word: worship
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...some flak" for the racial alteration. There were those who thought Oakhurst was caving in to the dogmatizers of diversity, the whistle blowers of melanin management. Some chose to leave the church and the neighborhood, looking for greener pastures and whiter places in which to live and worship. And then there were those that came, saw and stayed. In a perfect world, religion should be color-blind. Oakhurst isn't in that perfect world. It's in Decatur, Georgia...
Stroupe began to make changes. He added something to the worship service that he calls "a sharing of concerns and joys" where congregation members stand up and tell anecdotes from their lives. "It's a way to get some of the spontaneity of the black church into our service," he says. "It's also a way for people to see that our lives are more alike than we think." At Palm Sunday service, a black woman got up to say she believes in miracles because the last of several boys in her family was graduating from college, despite the fact...
...paradox of miracles seems only to deepen. Certainly they occupy a strange place on the spiritual map of America. When Time asked in a poll last week whether people believe in miracles, 69% said yes; and the fastest-growing churches in America are the Charismatic and Pentecostal congregations whose worship revolves around "signs and wonders." Tens of thousands of people gather in a pasture in Georgia or a backyard in Lubbock, Texas, because of reports that the Virgin appears in the clouds...
While traditional churches treat miracles gingerly, it is surely no coincidence that the fastest-growing movement in Christendom places miracles squarely at the center of worship. The growth rate of the "postdenominational" churches--the Charismatics and Pentecostals--now surpasses that of the Southern Baptists. Loosely structured, informal, led by powerful "apostles," these churches reject rigid hierarchies and sedate theology. "People don't come to listen," explains Peter Wagner, a professor of church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary, "They come to do." The miracles take many forms: besides healing, there are members who have visions, or speak in tongues, or collapse...
More threatening are the groups that wish to restore the imperial cult. The writer Yukio Mishima collected around himself a band of uniformed young men who shared his passion to make the Japanese--the military forces in particular--once again worship the Emperor. His student followers ended up by worshipping Mishima, and one joined him in his samurai-style suicide in 1970. Even today there are groups of right-wing Emperor worshippers who go around assassinating those they regard as unpatriotic. The mayor of Nagasaki was shot by a right-wing extremist in 1990 after saying the late Emperor Hirohito...