The county employee notified the couple that the small Bible study, with an average of 15 people attending, was in violation of County regulations, according to Broyles.Broyles said a few days later the couple received a written warning that listed “unlawful use of land” and told them to “stop religious assembly or apply for a major use permit” — a process that could cost tens of thousands of dollars.

“For churches and religious assemblies there’s big parking concerns, there’s environmental impact concerns when you have hundreds or thousands of people gathering. But this is a different situation, and we believe that the application of the religious assembly principles to this Bible study is certainly misplaced,” said Broyles.

News of the case has rapidly spread across Internet blogs and has spurred various reactions.

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The appointment of renowned “anti-cultists” and controversial scholars of Islam to a Russian government body allocated sweeping powers to investigate religious organisations may prove the heaviest blow to religious freedom in a decade, Forum 18 News Service notes. The newly-reconstituted Expert Council for Conducting State Religious-Studies Analysis attached to the Justice Ministry now has wide-ranging powers to investigate the activity, doctrines, leadership decisions, literature and worship of any registered religious organisation and recommend action to the Ministry. Two months after the Council’s initial meeting, however, the full impact of the body is not yet clear.
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On March 4, 2009, Rachel had an opportunity to share about her hope in the midst of terminal cancer. What began as a small talk to her church women’s group became an event attended by over 600 women and was an experience that left many with a desire to discover more about Rachel’s journey and faith.

http://deathisnotdying.com/eventvideo/

Do you see in those lines what Jesus’ resurrection means to you? If you are a Christian, you can rejoice in the fact that Christ rose from the dead as a victor, a champion who lives forever to reign, “with His saints.” That refers to the promise based on our baptism into the death and resurrection of Christ–it is our hope and the reason and ground of all we believe. But what if there were no resurrection? What if the resurrection of Jesus Christ is just a first-century myth to be ignored or marginalized as a secondary issue? The implications of that approach are devastating to Christianity.

http://www.gty.org/Resources/Articles/A144

 

It was a small detail, a point of comparison buried in the fifth paragraph on the 17th page of a 24-page summary of the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey. But as R. Albert Mohler Jr.—president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of the largest on earth—read over the document after its release in March, he was struck by a single sentence. For a believer like Mohler—a starched, unflinchingly conservative Christian, steeped in the theology of his particular province of the faith, devoted to producing ministers who will preach the inerrancy of the Bible and the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the only means to eternal life—the central news of the survey was troubling enough: the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has nearly doubled since 1990, rising from 8 to 15 percent. Then came the point he could not get out of his mind: while the unaffiliated have historically
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