Revelation 2:5 Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.
Important Takeaways:
- How Do You Resurrect an Empty Church?
- America’s aging houses of worship face a stark choice: sell, redevelop, or pray for a miracle.
- On June 25, Summerfield Church in Milwaukee held its last Sunday service. The rough-cut sandstone church, with its bright red doors and stained-glass windows, was built in 1904 to house the state’s oldest Methodist congregation, and occupies a prominent corner lot a few blocks north of downtown. By this spring, the congregation had dwindled to just 11 members, none younger than 65, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. And the repair bill to get the water-damaged structure shipshape was $1.3 million.
- It is a story replaying over and over in cities across the United States, where older churches have been hammered by neighborhood change and maintenance costs, coinciding with a national trend of plummeting religious attendance across faiths. Over the past decade, the share of Americans who attend weekly services at a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple has fallen to 30 percent, after hovering for half a century at 40 percent. Overall membership has fallen even more precipitously, and less than half of Americans now say they “belong” to a religious organization. A pair of studies has suggested that thousands of U.S. churches close each year (though a smaller, significant number are founded).
- And all of this was happening before COVID, which normalized virtual participation and decoupled people from their neighborhood institutions.
- “Churches have been on the edge of a cliff, and COVID was a blast of air blowing them off,” said Rick Reinhard
- New Jersey, whose 291-year-old First Presbyterian was among the oldest institutions to close. “There is a great mismatch between small, aging congregations and large, aging properties,” he told me. “What empty department stores were 30 years ago, empty churches are today, but much more difficult to resolve.”
- Last month, the issue made headlines in New York City, where the dozen-person congregation of West-Park Presbyterian Church is trying to sell its 19th-century building to a developer who will demolish it and build apartments.
- Tim Keller, the influential evangelical pastor who died this spring, recalled the jarring sight of converted churches in Manhattan, including a beautiful brownstone church in Chelsea that had served Episcopal worshippers since 1844. “Now it was the Limelight, an epicenter of the downtown club scene,” Keller wrote. “Thousands of people a night showed up for drugs and sex and the possibility of close encounters with the famous of the cultural avant garde. It was a vivid symbol of a culture that had rejected Christianity.”
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Matthew 24:7 For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places.
Important Takeaways:
- Heat wave scorches millions as relief efforts strive to keep up
- Across a wide swath of the U.S. from Texas to Nevada, a major heat wave that is threatening to break temperature records continued to bake parts of the South and Southwest on Wednesday, sending people scrambling for relief and adding to what has become a series of weather extremes that researchers say fit the pattern of a warming environment.
- Temperatures well into the triple digits are expected this weekend from California to Texas to Florida, with parts of Nevada forecast to reach 116 degrees Fahrenheit and cities in Arizona expected to hit a staggering 118 F.
- “Today is Day 12 of 110-plus, and the exclamation on this event is yet to come,” said David Hondula, who directs the Phoenix Office of Heat Response and Mitigation, which was gearing up for a weekend spike in temperatures.
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Revelations 13:16-18 “Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom: let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.”
Important Takeaways:
- Horowitz: Inflation trap: Debt increases over a trillion in five weeks, quickest pace ever
- It looks like the Biden-McCarthy “Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023” will rival the Inflation Reduction Act (Green New Deal) in its Orwellian meaning and outcome. Just five weeks after the deal was hatched, the Treasury has issued over $1 trillion in new debt!
- This is simply astounding. It took from our founding until 1980 to accrue the amount of debt that we have now added in just over five weeks. It is truly hard to overstate the magnitude and impact of this spending. Unlike in recent years, when we were servicing this debt at 1%-2% interest rates, this new debt will be serviced with an over 5% interest rate! Our debt has increased almost 50% in just four years, topping out near $32.5 trillion, but now it will have a compounding effect with higher interest rates to service it. So this notion that inflation will decrease in the long run is absurd. This debt is not just a number on the government balance sheet. It represents why middle-income Americans will not be able to afford the American dream for the foreseeable future. So no, the debt ceiling deal did not “avoid default,” it accelerated it.
- Personal credit card debt is now approaching $1 trillion, up 15% since pre-COVID and more than triple what it was before the Great Recession in 2008.
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Revelations 6:3-4 “when he opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!” 4 And out came another horse, bright red. Its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people should slay one another, and he was given a great sword.
Important Takeaways:
- Benjamin Netanyahu announces China invite as Biden keeps him at arm’s length
- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed Tuesday he has been invited to China before receiving a similar honor from the Biden White House.
- The prime minister’s office tweeted that Netanyahu had informed visiting members of Congress about the invitation.
- “The projected visit will be Prime Minister Netanyahu’s fourth visit to China; the American administration was updated one month ago,” Netanyahu’s office added, without indicating whether the 73-year-old had accepted the invite or when the trip would take place.
- Netanyahu began his third term as prime minister of America’s staunchest Middle Eastern ally in December, but he has yet to be invited to visit Washington by President Biden.
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Revelations 13:16-18 “Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom: let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.”
Important Takeaways:
- The Number Of Americans Living On The Streets “Has Broadly Risen This Year”
- Joe Biden and the mainstream media keep telling us that the economy is in good shape, but we continue to get more evidence that directly contradicts that assertion.
- According to a comprehensive analysis that was just conducted by the Wall Street Journal, the number of homeless people in the United States “has broadly risen this year”
- The Journal reviewed data from 150 entities that count homeless people in areas ranging from cities to entire states. More than 100 places reported increases in early 2023 counts compared with 2022, and collectively, their numbers indicate the U.S. might see a sharper climb than in recent years. Most major urban areas reporting data so far have seen increases, including Chicago, Miami, Boston and Phoenix.
- The Journal received data from 67 of the 100 locales with the highest homeless counts last year, along with many others. Preliminary data show 48 of those 67 reported an increase this year, with combined counts up 9% from the numbers HUD published for those places in 2022 and 13% since 2020.
- In San Diego, the homelessness crisis is worse than it has ever been before. In just the last seven months, 580 tons of trash has been collected from homeless encampments in the city
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Ecclesiastes 5:8 If you see the extortion[a] of the poor, or the perversion[b] of justice and fairness in the government, [c] do not be astonished by the matter. For the high official is watched by a higher official, [d] and there are higher ones over them! [e]
Important Takeaways:
- …from Asia to Europe, they are all expressing complete shock that the United States is collapsing and they are now all seeing that our forecast that the 2024 Presidential Election would be the most corrupt in history and mark the END of democracy in the United States.
- These leftist people just do not get it. They crossed the line and now the view of the United States from the outside looking in, they no longer believe that America is the beacon of liberty to the world. It is becoming so obvious that our computer will be right again. I warned it even was showing that the 2024 election might not even take place. That was a small 18% probability, but that NEVER came up EVER in this history of running our political models – NEVER!
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Revelations 13:16-18 “Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom: let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.”
Important Takeaways:
- New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., are all seeing a net exodus of college graduates (as is San Jose). Those four cities were typically the finish line for those seeking jobs in media, politics, entertainment, finance, or tech. As New Yorkers used to boast, “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” For many college graduates, the goal was to make it in one of those four big brand cities
- No longer. All four are plagued by a crime crisis that has bled out from those icky poor areas of the cities that college graduates avoided and into the rest of the city. New York City’s public transportation isn’t safe. San Francisco is plagued by homelessness. Los Angeles actively refuses to keep violent criminals and gang members off the streets. Washington can’t even guarantee the safety of members of Congress in their own apartments.
- Combine that with the stupidly expensive cost of housing in those cities, and you have the least desirable professional destinations imaginable. You can hardly blame the college graduates who are making their way to Tulsa, Oklahoma, or Sioux Falls, South Dakota, among the many cities seeing an increase in working-age college graduates. Arizona, Florida, and Texas are also winners…
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Romans 12:2 “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
Important Takeaways:
- Does God exist? Only half of Americans say a definite yes
- General Social Survey, stands out among several nuggets of new data about religion in America.
- Not quite 50 percent of Americans say they have no doubt about the existence of God, according to the 2022 survey, released Wednesday by NORC, the University of Chicago research organization. As recently as 2008, the share of sure-believers topped 60 percent.
- Thirty-four percent of Americans never go to church, NORC found, the highest figure recorded in five decades of surveys.
- Another new report, from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), said that 27 percent of Americans claimed no religion in 2022, up from 19 percent in 2012 and 16 percent in 2006.
- The General Social Survey found 29 percent of Americans claiming no religion in 2021, up from 23 percent in 2018 and 5 percent in 1972.
- Mainline Protestantism, the backbone of faith in many American communities, is “collapsing,” Burge wrote in a recent article on the decline of Baptists, Methodists and other denominations.
- Since the 1970s, the share of Americans who identify with Protestant denominations has declined from nearly 1 in 3 to around 1 in 10.
- To some extent, declining faith is a generational trend. The share of Americans who claim no religion rises with progressively younger age groups: 9 percent of the Silent Generation, 18 percent of baby boomers, 25 percent of Generation X, 29 percent of millennials and 34 percent of Generation Z, according to data from the Survey Center on American Life.
- But the rise in nonreligious Americans is too steep to be fully explained “in terms of generational replacement; that is, religious old people dying and secular young people taking their place,” said David Campbell, the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame.
- Changing societal norms may also explain why half of Americans can now say they aren’t sure there is a God.
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Romans 12:2 “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
Important Takeaways:
- A recent survey conducted by The Wall Street Journal and The University of Chicago found that Americans are, in huge numbers, pulling back from the values that once defined them. Over the last 25 years, the percentage of Americans who described “Patriotism” as either “important” or “very important” fell from 70% to 38%. Those who valued “Religion” fell from 62% to 39%, “Having Children” from 59% to 30%, and “Community Involvement” from 47% to 27%. Even the percentage of Americans valuing “Tolerance for Others” dropped from 80% to just 58%. Only one value out of the ten listed increased: “Money,” from 31% to 43%.
- If there is no moral design to reality, or for humanity in particular, what people value is inconsequential. In such a world, there is nothing to be pursued outside of individual expression, which is assumed to lead to happiness and human flourishing. Who cares if people do not value communities, countries or tolerance? It is the inherent determination of individuals, the pursuit of what they want the most, that will inevitably guide them. We can only follow our own impulses and desires.
- History tells a different story, however. For example, a central genius of the American system is the built-in idea that people can and will go wrong if given the chance. Even the well-intentioned can be hypocrites, including America’s founders, who nevertheless understood the pitfalls of both concentrated power and a virtue-less mob. In the prophetic words of John Adams,
- “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net.’’
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Isiah 3:3-5 “the commander of fifty and the dignitary, the counselor, the cunning magician, and the clever enchanter. 4“I will make mere lads their leaders, and children will rule over them.” 5The people will oppress one another, man against man, neighbor against neighbor; the young will rise up against the old, and the base against the honorable.
Important Takeaways:
- Leadership Crisis in America
- These numbers should frighten everyone. It is hard to imagine how a country functions effectively if only 21% of its citizens believe they can trust their government to do the right thing most of the time. What does this mean and why are the numbers so low?
- Many of the people present on January 6th did not accept the results of the 2020 presidential election and were protesting the outcome. They simply could not be convinced that Joe Biden won fair and square. Believing in free and fair elections is a bedrock principle of representative government; without it, the critical support needed to underpin our entire system is gone.
- Among SVB’s customers are many Chinese companies that are being fully covered while citizens impacted by the East Palestine train derailment have found out they do not qualify for traditional FEMA disaster assistance. It is hard to build trust in citizens when the government seemingly treats one group better than it treats others.
- …outright government deceit. FBI and intelligence leaders fostered the notion that President-elect Trump was compromised by Russia. The “Russia hoax” persisted for more than two years as a cloud over the head of President Trump and incapacitated the country. Congressional leaders such as House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff promised the American people that he had direct evidence about Trump that warranted the president’s impeachment. Later, it became clear that he did not, but that has not stopped him from continuing to push his fabrication as he mounts a Senate bid in California. Fifty-one intelligence professionals and leaders signed a letter implying that the Hunter Biden laptop was disinformation and not real. They were all wrong.
- Investigations into the origins of the COVID pandemic, continuing attempts to set up some version of a Department of Misinformation and Disinformation – read: the government deciding for you what “truth” is, then punishing citizens who might disagree — and the weaponization of the government against citizens ongoing in the House of Representatives may expose even more examples of the federal government bureaucracy being deceitful in its interactions with the American people.
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