Evangelical church membership growth during recessions: 1.52 percent

Evangelical church membership growth in non-recession years: 0.98 percent

Forget your Members Only jacket. At Vintage21, a church in Raleigh, North Carolina, it's Owners Only. The church is eliminating the concept of membership entirely in favor of what they believe is a more appropriate description for the body of Christ: ownership.

Gyms and clubs have members. Vintage21 contends that these memberships are "painless to obtain and even easier to discard." Ownership, on the ...

Have you heard about the personals website designed to facilitate extramarital affairs? Log on and you have immediate access to thousands of men and women willing to kick their vows to the curb for a no-strings-attached sexual tryst. And should you want to use the site to have an affair, the designers behind the site have worked hard so that no one will ever know about your misdeeds. For example, ...

My first visit to a health club was in the 1970s. Health clubs were new. My friend Frank told me he had a membership and that I could come with him as his guest for a workout.

When I met Frank at the club, we went into a room filled with weight machines. I'd never seen these things before in my life. Frank called it "the circuit." The idea was to spend a few minutes on each machine, exercising all ...

Rate of major depression in women who have attended religious services since childhood: 27 percent

Rate in women who have changed attendance patterns (nearly all had stopped attending services): 36 percent

Incidence of major depression in men who have always attended religious services: 31 percent

Incidence in men who have stopped attending: 24 percent

Spiritual formation is so often couched in more individualistic terms, that it's easy to forget the important role the church community plays in our growth as individuals. In her book Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott shares a story she once heard from her minister that illustrates well the necessary presence of others in our journey of faith:

When [my minister] was about seven, her best friend got lost ...

A few years ago, an old acquaintance of mine served as a police officer in a northern native settlement in Canada. One day a rabid wolf wandered into the aboriginal settlement. My friend eventually shot it, but not before it attacked a young man and his grandmother in their home, making kindling out of a chair the young man used to protect himself from his attacker.

There were about 150 sled dogs in ...

Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German theologian, pastor, and martyr (1906–1945)

Without a doubt, my all-time favorite animal is the duck-billed platypus. It appeals to my nonconformist instincts because it breaks so many rules of biology. Consider: The platypus has a flat, rubbery bill, no teeth, and webbed feet, like a duck. Yet it has a furry body and beaver-like tail, and nurses its young like a mammal.

But wait—it walks with a lizard gait and lays leathery eggs like ...

Love cannot exist in isolation: away from others, love bloats into pride. Grace cannot be received privately: cut off from others, it is perverted into greed. Hope cannot develop in solitude: separated from the community, it goes to seed in the form of fantasies. No gift, no virtue can develop and remain healthy apart from the community of faith. "Outside the church there is no salvation" is not ecclesiastical ...