Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Friday, March 10, 2017
I.N.C. INTERNATIONALLY BANNED AND UNDER INVESTIGATION Ni Antonio Ramirez Ebangelista
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime” – old Chinese proverb
This line of wisdom is a universal truth, yet if used by an expelled member of the church or even a non-member, the Church of EVM fanatics will always be quick to reply (without even thinking) that it should not be accepted simply because it came from the “tiwalag” (expelled/non-members). Thus began the era of EVM (Eduardo V. Manalo) wherein anything he says is considered infallible or gospel truth and anything that goes against his every word (more like whim) is considered as a blatant lie, because according to the EVM fanatics, how can EVM lie since he has been placed by God to be the Shepherd of the flock?
Do we disagree that EVM is a shepherd of the flock? No. The Bible describes him perfectly:
“What sorrow awaits the leaders of my people–the shepherds of my sheep–for they have destroyed and scattered the very ones they were expected to care for,” says the LORD. ~ Jeremiah 23:1 NLT
So what did the leaders of the Church of Christ do in order to hide their inadequacies and incompetence? They try to cover them up with a facade of false and shallow victories… they ushered in the era of superficial activities:.. continue reading...
Thursday, March 9, 2017
Allen Hunt: A Methodist Mega-Church Pastor Turned Catholic
Published by Win One for God at March 7, 2017
Allen is a former Methodist mega-church pastor and currently hosts a daily talk radio show (the Allen Hunt Show) which is heard on 150 mainstream stations around the country each week with a half million listeners. Allen is also a husband and father of two daughters.
I never saw it coming.
For fifteen years, my ministry as a Methodist pastor blossomed from one ministry to another, culminating in my dream job. I became the senior pastor of a mega-church, the most well-attended Methodist congregation in the South, and one of the largest in the country. Somewhere between four and five thousand people worshiped there each Sunday. Eight thousand gathered there for Christmas and Easter services. The church sponsored one of just two K-12 Methodist schools in the nation, had a full pregnancy resource center, a counseling center, a child care ministry, and maintained partnerships with vital missions on every continent around the globe.
How did my transition occur? Not in a single moment of great revelation, but slowly, through a series of experiences. More like a mosaic of God-encounters. Or better yet, like a journey on a boat that begins in the Atlantic Ocean, without a real plan or destination. One day you wake up, look around and realize that you’re somewhere in the Pacific. You’re not sure when you crossed from one ocean to the other, but you know you’re there, and there’s no going back.
Often, I was leading that wonderful mega-church, and deep inside I began to feel a longing to be a part of what I was convinced was God’s One Church. Over time that longing grew until I could deny it no more.
My journey culminated on Sunday, January 6, 2008, the feast of the Epiphany. On that day, I, the former pastor of a mega-church just twenty miles away, stood before the congregation at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Atlanta’s oldest Catholic church.
I was no longer the very public and well-respected Methodist minister. I would not welcome the congregation, deliver the homily, or stand outside and greet members as they left, but instead would be just like any other lay person there.
But then, finally, the moment came.
I walked to the front, and the priest gently placed the Body of Christ in the palm of my hand for the very first time.
And I began to weep.
Tears slowly streamed down my face as the years of journey climaxed in the enveloping presence of the Holy Spirit.
God’s Instrument
God used my friendship with a priest whom I met in graduate school to introduce me to the treasures of the Catholic Church. Through Father Steven, a Dominican friar, I came to see the six hidden treasures of the Catholic Church, treasures so powerful that they changed my life in ways I could never have imagined. I call them hidden treasures because they are so often over-looked or misunderstood or taken for granted.
At times, God uses friendships in remarkable ways. We listen to real friends. To strangers, we often turn a deaf ear or a cold shoulder. But to real friends, we will listen, even when listening stretches us in new ways. I do not think Fr. Steven intended to lead me home. Rather, he loved me and my family with abundance in a time when we desperately needed it. That friendship and love led to conversations about things of faith. Those conversations percolated and bounced around in my soul for years. I am constantly amazed at how God uses genuine friendships to shape our lives.
Meeting the Nuns
In our second year together, Fr. Steven arranged for the two of us to give Lenten lectures to a group of cloistered Dominican nuns in North Guilford, Connecticut. Of course, first, he had to explain what a cloistered monastery was. Talk about naive! I had no idea such places even existed.
A gathering of 50 nuns, located in a monastery whose grounds they vowed never to leave. A place of regular prayer, Mass, and simple, humble service. A group of nuns who supported their mutual life of prayer by making fudge (and it was great fudge!) and operating a book store. It was in their monastery that God planted the first seeds for my conversion, seeds which took sixteen years to come to fruition, and seeds which I did not even realize were being planted at the time.
Fr. Steven and I spent four wonderful afternoons giving talks to the nuns at the Monastery of Our Lady of Grace. I discovered later that I had been the first male who was not an ordained Catholic priest ever to instruct the sisters within their walls. It was a rare privilege and blessing, which I could not have fully appreciated at the moment. God had opened a door of grace into which I had stumbled.
Best of all, the experience proved eye-opening for me in more ways than one. This invitation into a cloistered monastery rocked my world.
A Graced Encounter
The holiness of these sisters stunned me. Keep in mind that these women would be the first to disagree at any suggestion that they are holy. They would be wrong.
Never before had I encountered persons so completely given over to God. Their faces shone with a grace and a light that unnerved me. The love of God revealed itself physically in their eyes, cheeks, and smiles. These were women whose entire lives were dedicated to the glory of God.
Remember this was totally new to me. I had no context or background to understand this place or these women. No such group exists in any Protestant tradition. Very simply, I was bumfuddled. It is not often that we have an experience that is so out of the ordinary and so out of place that we have no real way to process it at first.
This was all new territory to me. In some ways, it was scary because I was accustomed to teaching, speaking and being in charge of my setting. That control and leadership clearly did not apply here.
Fr. Steven and I shared lectures focused on the great Dominican doctor of the Church, Thomas Aquinas, and on John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement. We discussed sanctification and holiness, and the places where our beliefs intersected far more than we had anticipated. The common ground between us surprised the nuns, Fr. Steven, and me. We enjoyed great interaction and conversation together. After our last lecture, we reserved time for questions and answers. For many of the sisters, I was the first Methodist they had ever met.
A Probing Question
One sister, whom I call “Sr. Rose,” raised her hand and, as I bremember, said, “Allen, thank you for having come these past few weeks. We’ve enjoyed your teaching.” She paused and continued, “You sound so Catholic. After hearing you, I can’t help but wonder, ‘Why aren’t you a part of the Church?’”
The nuns giggled. The question startled me. “A part of the Church?” What did she mean?
As a Protestant I was taken aback by that. I thought to myself, “Well, I am a part of the Church. Don’t you understand that? I’m a Methodist pastor.” Then all of a sudden it dawned on me: she meant the Catholic Church is the one and only Church.
I laughed and gave a quick answer. I said something like, “Why am I Methodist as opposed to being Catholic? Well, you are some of the first Catholics I have ever met. The main reason revolves around communion. It seems very obvious to me that Jesus is using a metaphor when He talks about the cup and the loaf. The wine doesn’t literally become His blood; that seems kind of obvious to me as a Methodist. It’s still wine, or in the Methodist tradition, it’s grape juice. The loaf, He is saying, ‘It’s my body,’ just as He also says He is the door, He is the light, and He is the shepherd. It’s just bread and juice. I really do not understand why you all take it so literally. It’s a symbol.”
Believe it or not, I had never had that conversation in my brain before. As a Methodist and in my training in seminary, it was just something we assumed. I took it for granted.
Sr. Rose then came right back at me. Very kindly but very directly, she said, “Well, you are a New Testament scholar, right? So why does Jesus say…”
With that introduction, she then began to walk me through chapter 6 of the Gospel of John and Jesus’ teaching there on the Bread of Life. I thought I knew this passage, but Sr. Rose carefully paused on eight separate occasions to make the point: Jesus is serious about His body and His blood.
A Lifelong Journey
My transition into the Church stunned my family. I come from a long line of Methodist pastors, 8 generations I think my mother and in-laws are still processing my decision. My wife and children have been very supportive. One of my daughters (21 years old) has also entered the Church now. My decision cost me a number of friendships, primarily with some former colleagues. Of course, it put an end to all I had worked for in my career as a pastor. But it was impossible to avoid. It has been a wonderful journey, a hard journey, and a life-giving journey
Wednesday, March 8, 2017
Ang Pagiging Ministro sa Iglesia ni Cristo ay Hindi Lamang Dahil sa May Tinatamasang Kasaganaan sa Sanlibutan
Nakatutuwang basahin ang artikulong ito tungkol sa isang alagad ng Santa Iglesia na naging PARI sa kabila ng kanyang kaalaman sa siyensa. (Mula sa Washington Post).
Why a Yale neuroscientist decided to change careers — and is now becoming a priest
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| Jaime Maldonado-Aviles, a former neuroscientist at Yale, decided to become a priest at Catholic University’s Theological College in Washington. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post) |
Was this what he should be doing with his life? As he excelled in school, earned a post-doctoral position at Yale, and won prestigious fellowships, Maldonado-Aviles wondered: Is this what God wants from me?
Eventually, the calling he felt from God became too powerful to ignore. The promising neuroscientist left the Ivy League research laboratory — and entered seminary at Catholic University of America in Northeast D.C. to become a priest.
“This constant intuition — I almost want to say nagging — that maybe I was called to serve in a different way… it was always frequent,” he said. “At different times the question would come back: If I see myself 90 years old, close to death, would I say to myself, ‘I should have entered seminary’?”
He entered. And now, within the church, he hopes to help Catholics understand scientists, and scientists understand Catholics.
[A scientist’s new theory: Religion was key to humans’ social evolution]
Scientists are a secular lot, on the whole. While 95 percent of Americans say they believe in God or some other higher power, just 51 percent of scientists do, according to a 2009 Pew study. But many of them quietly believe. And a small but significant number are turning from research to the priesthood, bringing a science-based perspective to the Catholic church that many church leaders say is greatly needed.
When Maldonado-Aviles arrived at Theological College, the Catholic University seminary, many of his classmates were young men just out of college. But he also found among his peers a seminarian with a PhD in chemistry, another who studied nanoscience, another who first went to medical school.
The number of seminarians in Washington who studied the sciences, at least as undergraduates, is high enough that Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the head of the archdiocese, has noticed it. “Here they are, saying, ‘There’s more,'” he said about those seminarians who seek God after finding science first.
[Cardinal Wuerl voices Catholic support for immigrants, but urges caution about sanctuary churches]
Ken Watts works as a recruiter for Pope St. John XXIII Seminary, a unique school in Massachusetts open specifically to men over 30 — sometimes many decades over 30 — who decide they want to become priests. By far the most common first career for these men is education, he said, followed by healthcare, military service, social work and other religious work — all fields that logically might lead to the priesthood. But he’s guided scientists to seminary quite a few times.
“They seem to fit in pretty well, is all I can say. There doesn’t seem to be a terrible struggle for them to bring their scientific backgrounds through the front door here. Nobody asks them to abandon it,” Watts said. “When the moral issues are those that revolve around medical, scientific areas, it’s certainly helpful to have people who really understand that world to help refine and clarify the church’s thinking on this.”
Suzanne Tanzi, a spokeswoman for Theological College who noted the several scientists who have enrolled there, said scientist-priests are particularly helpful given one of the primary focuses of the current pope, who in fact was once a chemist himself: the environment. Francis’s first major writing as pope was a highly technical treatise on the environment, and the church has been an increasingly vocal advocate worldwide for policies to reduce climate change.
[10 key excerpts from Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment]
As Watts put it: “They’re very, very valuable.”
Maldonado-Aviles’s thoughts about the priesthood started early, as a youth growing up in Puerto Rico. He participated in mission trips as a high schooler, and started wondering what it would be like to grow up to be a missionary.
Instead, he studied biology at the University of Puerto Rico, where he earned a fellowship for honors students through the National Institutes of Health. After he earned his doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh, he went into a post-graduate program at Yale, where he spent six years. He became particularly interested in researching the molecular basis of eating disorders.
Almost three years ago, he got a job offer that seemed perfect: a tenure-track position doing research at the pharmacy school at the University of Puerto Rico. The job would bring him home to be closer to his family, which he had been wanting. It would mean longterm stability, a good salary and the chance to do interesting, meaningful research.
And after much debate, Maldonado-Aviles turned down the offer.
“I have to seriously explore these questions,” he decided. And his process of priestly formation began.
That requires two years of philosophy, which some candidates complete while they are undergraduates, followed by four years of theology. For Maldonado-Aviles, who never studied either subject, that means six years of schooling. Now, at age 37, he’s in his third year.
[Seriously, I am giving up President Trump for Lent. Here’s how.]
If he continues on pace, he’ll be over 40 when he becomes a priest. That makes him older than more than 80 percent of newly-ordained priests in recent years, according to statistics from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, but far from the oldest. So-called “second vocation” priests have always been a presence in seminaries. American seminaries in 2016 ordained six men in their 50s and three in their 60s.
Moving back into a dorm, Maldonado-Aviles has given up some things: He doesn’t earn a salary, instead living with his fellow seminarians where the church takes care of his needs. He can’t visit his family in Puerto Rico as often.
And he used to date, and assumed he would someday marry. Now, he anticipates a life of celibacy if he becomes a priest.
“I wouldn’t say that I’m making more sacrifices” than someone in a marriage, which requires sacrifices of its own, he said. “If I believe God is calling me to be a priest, I also believe he will give me charisms — gifts — that will help me.”
Maldonado-Aviles is careful to say that he does not know yet that he will certainly become a priest. The time he spends in seminary is all part of his process of discernment: Reading the clues that God has left for him that point to the path he’s meant to take. He saw some of those signs long before he entered seminary — times he heard a particular Biblical passage in Mass and felt it was calling personally to him to radically devote his life to Jesus, for instance.
He seeks these clues with a diligence and precision that hearkens back to his first career.
[On Ash Wednesday, ashes to go — with a little extra sparkle for LGBT Christians]
He said he used to feel like the only one in the lab who believed in God — until he started seeing Yale professors filling the same pews he sat in at Mass. His work studying neurons led him to marvel all the more at God’s handiwork: “The complexity and yet the order in which things work in our body and in our brain, it makes you think there’s more than just randomness.”
But reconciling his faith and his work wasn’t always so easy. He remembers going to a talk about the development of the human neocortex, and realizing that the research being presented had been conducted on aborted human embryos in Europe.
He was shaken to think that his scientific career might bring him in contact with abortion, which the church teaches is a grave sin. “What is it that I’m doing? Would I ever compromise my faith based on the pressure for success?” he wondered.
Now, he says he has a deep interest in bioethics. Inspired by a handful of priest-scientists around him at Catholic University and some of the greats of Catholic history — priest Georges Lemaitre who first came up with the Big Bang theory, monk Gregor Mendel who originated the study of genetics — he envisions a potential future bridging the two realms. He wants to advise scientists on the ethics of their work.
Tuesday, March 7, 2017
INC®-1914 NEWS SA AFRICA: 8 NAMATAY DAHIL SA STAMPEDE
Zambia: 8 dead, 28 injured in stampede for free Church food
By Abdur Rahman Alfa Shaban with Mwebantu 06/03 - 11:12 (Africa News)
ZAMBIA - Zambian police have confirmed the death of eight people and injuries sustained by 20 others during a stampede after a church event in the capital, Lusaka.
The stampede occured when organizers of a prayer event, started distributing free food parcels to the crowds that had attended the event – an outreach program at the Church of Christ’s Olympic Youth Development Center (OYDC) – on Sunday, March 5.
Local media portal, Mwebantu, quoted a police spokesperson, Esther Mwaata Katongo as disclosing that among the dead were six females, one male adult and one male juvenile. Five died on the spot while three died at hospitals where they were rushed for medical attention.
"The victims are among the 35,000 which the group called Lesedi seven, had invited for prayers at OYDC. The group had also organized food hampers to distribute to people. This Lesedi seven is a grouping under Church of Christ."
The injured persons are said to be receiving treatment at Chingwere first level hospital and Chipata clinic while the bodies of the deceased have been taken to University Teaching Hospital mortuary.
“We have since dispersed the gathering and an inquiry into the matter has been instituted,” the police spokesperson added.
Wednesday, March 1, 2017
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