Scrolling around...October 11, 2012

Praising the school of hard knocks
The tendency to over-praise pupils has left our children cocky, thin-skinned and poorly equipped to enter the global race...

Canada: Gay teens will die, but who is to blame?
...However, the media is half right - people who identify as ‘gay’ are indeed dying at a staggering rate in comparison to the general population, most strikingly, the males. And someone is to blame for their deaths, but the culprit is neither school bullying, Christianity nor ‘homophobia’.

I recently discovered a shocking epidemiological study on the prevalence of HIV amongst men who have sex with men (MSM) in Ontario. This infection rate is shocking. The study was done in collaboration with the Ontario Ministry of Health & Long-Term Care. Yes, that does mean the McGuinty government!

The report is based on 2008 data from Ontario’s Public Health Units, the most current data year.

It shows that almost 1 in 4 MSM in Toronto are living with HIV. That’s a real epidemic! Not one fabricated to advance a political agenda....

Ontario Education Minister: Catholic schools can’t teach abortion is wrong - that’s ‘misogyny’

Gunmen kill U.S. embassy employee in Yemen
Masked gunmen shot dead a Yemeni man on his way to work at the U.S. embassy in Sanaa on Thursday, a security source said, the latest in a wave of assassinations in the Arab state where Washington is battling al Qaeda militants...

A Secularizing America?
...So what the Pew study may actually reveal primarily is the ongoing disaffection with denominational loyalties, most especially by Mainline Protestants. Catholics and evangelicals seem mostly to be retaining their overall market share. But once dominant Mainline Protestants are now in their fifth decade of continuous membership decline, and the spiral continues...

Why New Churches Should Sing Old Songs
...While it is important to continue to sing new songs to the Lord and to continue to write new songs to the Lord, I am often grieved to hear people say, "I don't like hymns," or, "That's for the older people." Perhaps the only thing that grieves me more is the lack of good doctrinal content in much of the newer corporate worship music.

I am not a traditionalist, but I believe new churches ought to sing old songs. I do not think that the only way is the old way. But we are standing on the shoulders of giants who have written songs that describe and declare the glory of Christ in a way that is unlike many songs written in our day. We miss out when we fail to teach with these songs that have shaped generation after generation before us.

I pray that in our day more than ever before, men and women will write great, God-exalting, Bible-saturated works that join the ranks with these hymns that have endured through hundreds of years of bad church music. All the while, I also pray that our church would guard good doctrine and not settle or compromise the gospel content of our songs for the sake of singing trendy new songs. May we sing songs, new and old alike, that make as much of Jesus as possible.

Backyards are highly overrated
There's an impression we all seek 'the great outdoors.' But we spend more time indoors...