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Dear Faithful Readers:

Updating content on our TPC website will be temporarily suspended effective Oct. 8 while we work out some technical issues. In the meantime, we'll be posting important news as notes on The Progressive Christian's Facebook page.

We look forward eagerly to returning this website to active status shortly.

Cynthia B. Astle

Editor

Ever notice how, when one has been faithful in personal devotion, joyful in corporate worship, and practiced acts of love and justice, that something often comes along to kick you in the teeth?

That something this week was the report from the U.S. Census Bureau announcing that 1 in 6 Americans is now living below the poverty line. Released Sept. 13, the report shows that the overall poverty rate rose to 15.1 percent of all Americans, or 46.2 million people. The official poverty level is an annual income of $22,314 for a family of four.

Islamophobia reared its evil, ugly head in my backyard this week, in the form of an email from some church acquaintances calling people to stop a Muslim event scheduled at a hotel in a north Dallas suburb called Richardson.

World Council of Churches News

As the sun rises on Sunday, May 22 Christians and churches across the world are being encouraged by the World Council of Churches (WCC) to celebrate God’s peace in their worship services, to hold a Peace Sunday dawn vigil, to plant a tree as an act of peace or to use social media to share prayers for peace with Christians around the world.

A Facebook post questioning the existence of an eternal hell proved to be a point of no return for a United Methodist student pastor and his rural North Carolina congregation.

However, there is more to the story than what has been widely reported about Chad Holtz’s departure from Marrow’s Chapel United Methodist Church in Henderson, N.C.

During the 2008 election year, one of the biggest political fights in the California state ballot was on Proposition 8, a proposition against gay marriage. Sadly, the proposition passed. One of the keys to the passage of Proposition 8 was the efforts of the Mormon church, the Evangelical church, and the Catholic church to lobby its members to vote for the measure. A friend of mine told me that two weeks before the elections, the pastor in the evangelical church that he attends in Cupertino had a sermon against gay marriage.

Going through my Monday email is a bit like being Alice in Wonderland. I never know what's going to pop out of the rabbit hole. That's because I do my best to observe at least one day each weekend as a digital Sabbath. I don't read email, go on Facebook or tweet. Like my daily prayers, this personal "rule of life" can be hard to keep, and I fail about as often as I succeed.

One of the many things I cherish about my 17 years at the United Methodist Reporter newspaper was the collaborative working style of the editorial staff. Each Monday morning we gathered for spiritual devotions and rigorous, sometimes even fierce, critique of the newspaper product we had created that week. Two questions encapsulated this vigorous assessment of the Reporter's capacity as a media form to affect events and issues through communications:

What have we done FOR [our audience] the Church, and what have we done TO the Church?

Words have specific meanings. As an educator, theologian, and a minister-in-training, I take care in choosing my words—whether spoken or written—carefully. With her Jan. 12 speech on the Tucson shooting, Sarah Palin illustrated to me that her gross ignorance is harmful to others.