It is difficult to watch or listen to the news, talk shows or pick up a newspaper or magazine that does not at least comment on the question of same-gender “marriage.” What has not to my knowledge been mentioned, even by conservatives who are speaking out against same-gender “marriage,” is the false premise which has been used to market this idea to the public. The essential claim is that gays are being denied their Constitutional right to marry. The appeal to Constitutional rights can really play well. It plays well among Liberals and Progressives because the claim gives it the air of credibility, especially because so few of them have any inkling of what the Constitution actually says. For that reason they may not even be aware that the essential claim is false. Continue reading …

At first some readers will this is another political diatribe but really the examples I will be using are for illustration of a communication problem which is growing in our nation and culture in not only the political but religious arena. It is the problem of undefined words and concepts. Many claims to be spiritual but not religious. What does that mean exactly? Does God or some sort of deity come into play in the spiritual but not religious life and if so what sort of God? If it remains undefined we might simply call it the Fuzz God. Wispy with comforting colors which help to relax but makes no demands. It is the sort of God that fuzzy undefined language would allow. Continue reading …

I became a Christian in the mid-1970s. The winds of cultural change were already evident in good old America. Even though it had long been a nation which operated on Judeo/Christian morals and values, Progressivism had been doing its work slowly in universities and amongst politicians for 60 or 70 years. Even though the nation has a sort of a Christian hangover, still generally holding biblical values in the main, it was cultural but not necessarily tied to any embrace of biblical faith. The Barna Research Group recently released its material on America’s Most Bible Minded Cities. The statistics were not overly surprising to me but rather served to confirm something we at MCOI have said for quite a long time. We need missionaries to America! In fact we did an article in our Journal in 1999 titled, of all things, Missionaries to America? A little more than a decade later, in 2011, I revisited the topic in Missionaries to America – Deux. I won’t reprise either of them today but do think Barna’s research demonstrates something we have raised on more than one occasion. The church, for all of its attempt at remaking itself in order to have a broader appeal, has lost its sense of mission and as a result its impact on and influence in culture. Continue reading …

Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it or so it is said. I think there is a great deal of validity to this thought. The sexual revolution of the 1960s has made fairly big changes in the thinking of culture in the area of accepting sexual behaviors which had been regarded as deviant or at the very least, outside of the norm 50 years ago. Marriage was monogamous between one man and one woman for life. Sure, there were divorces but families in that situation were thought of as “broken” and the children were from “broken homes” signifying a less than ideal home life. Men and women may have “affairs,” sex outside of marriage but these relationships were regarded as wrong and most tried to hide them. These “ideals” are diminishing as the church continues its pursuit of trying to be acceptable to culture rather than speaking to and influencing culture and it is likely this trend will continue. In many ways we live in a book end of time. The time we live in now is more like the 1st Century than any other time in between then and now. The church transformed the way culture thought of themselves, God and their place in the universe. This included the area of sexuality.

The founders of Chic-Fil-A took a pro-traditional marriage position and Chicago Mayor, Rom Emmanuel worked to prevent them from opening a store in Chicago claiming that their traditional view of marriage “were not Chicago’s values.” The disregard for traditional marriage by the mayor surprised a few but passed with barely a ripple. Marriage is now being defined merely as two people, regardless of gender, entering into a legal union being called marriage. Continue reading …

As I sit here on a very snowy New Years Eve here in Quincy IL, it occurs to me that we have had a great year here at MCOI.  Somewhere along the way, the Lord has added to our numbers. Some of those people have found the Facebook page through the blog but more likely it was the other way around. We have currently 195 people and organizations that “like” us in the Facebook kind of way at least. We’ve had some stimulating discussions. We’ve raised a few eyebrows and hopefully the tenor of what passes for public debate. Not bad for a little outfit that operates on a shoe string budget (and if you know where we can sell these shoestrings for some actual money, please let us know!).

So in the tradition of . . . well,  every prime time morning TV show, let’s hop into the way back machine and take a look at some of the memorable posts from this year.

By far the biggest topic this year was the election. We had several posts and though MCOI is a non-partisan organization, we are not ostriches with our head in the sand. Don started us off this year with what he dubbed the first political question of the season in “‘Tis the Season to be Political”: Continue reading …

I have to admit, this started out to be a very different blog than it ended up. Like many, I was discouraged at the results of the election. Yes, I know that God is in control and uses even government for His purposes but sometimes those purposes are to punish His people or the nations in which His people dwell and they suffer as well. To be perfectly honest I am not a big fan of suffering.

I know that politics is messy business and corruption abounds in the hallowed halls of Congress and the White House. Special interest groups are working hard to persuade the Federal Government to use the club of legislation to beat down the opposition. But that is how government works in a Democratic Republic. We vote for candidates that most closely align with our worldview and values and trust they will at the very least protect us from those who have a different view. Continue reading …

Book Review: Buyer Beware Finding the Truth in the Marketplace of Ideas, Janet Parshall, Moody Press, 2012, 199 pages, $14.99

If you are looking for an informative and stimulating Christian book this one is instructive, thought provoking and practical. Janet Parshall is a columnist, author and radio host. In Buyer Beware she begins by taking us back to the 1600’s and John Bunyan’s classic work, Pilgrim’s Progress. She borrows Bunyan’s Vanity Fair imagery to launch into discussions about our present public square; “Vanity Fair” was and still is a rough place. Surely Christian and Faithful would have preferred the gentle countryside that lay not far beyond the fair. After all, who really wants to go into all that messy stuff – the shouting, the stealing, the lying, the sexual promiscuity, the turning of Truth on its head?

So let’s go visit Vanity Fair together. We’ll visit the booths and see for ourselves what is being bought and sold. Come and study the counterfeit goods being offered in the public square today so that you can better know how to offer the countervailing gift of truth. (Pages, 19 and 21).

Parshall transitions to the Old Testament Jeremiah Continue reading …