ELIM 100: Elim Was Founded in Monaghan on 7 January 1915

ELIM 100 CENTENARY - The Vision For 2015

MAX HASTINGS: Daily Mail Story on France and Terrorism

 Just imagine the Queen’s Birthday Parade, June 13, 2015: the monarch, her family and escorting officers are arrayed on Horse Guards’ in Whitehall, watching the serried red companies wheel and march past in slow time.

Suddenly, men burst from the crowd and begin spraying bullets among the soldiers and spectators.

It is a scenario from hell, yet no more fanciful than that of Wednesday’s massacre in a Paris magazine office, or last month’s slaughter of 132 schoolchildren in Peshawar, or the carnage of the London bus and Tube bombs of July 2005.

It is the sort of image with which security chiefs live every day of their working lives, because for them that would be the cost of a failure.

Yesterday’s dramatic events in France ended with three terrorists and four hostages dead after a formidable French security and intelligence operation.

The intelligence services have never doubted that new terrorist attacks will come to the West, including Britain. An event such as the Charlie Hebdo killings merely gives the ongoing threat a shocking new sense of immediacy.

On Thursday, the director general of MI5, Andrew Parker, made a rare speech, warning it was almost inevitable that an attack in this country would get through sooner or later. ‘Although we and our partners try our utmost, we know that we cannot hope to stop everything,’ he said.

The price of living in an open society, with the precious freedoms we take for granted, is that all of us, great and small, are vulnerable to attackers consumed by hatred for our culture, its values, and manifest superiority to those from which they come.

Globalisation places a disturbing number of such people in our midst, rather than far away in Somalia or Iran.

The good news is that although Islamic fanatics can cause us pain and grief, they pose no existential threat as did Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union.

They cannot be compromised or parleyed with, because they have no rational political demands: they claim affiliation to a feudal order in which women are denied rights, technology is banished and mullahs arbitrate over daily life.

Read more on this story here:

Using the S word, Premier

The world reacted in shock when actor and comedian Robin Williams took his own life in 2014. In reality, suicide kills one person every 40 seconds, yet it is rarely addressed in church. It’s time we broke the silence, says Will van der Hart.

I collected all the medications I was on, including others in the bathroom cabinet, and overdosed on a large quantity of medication and alcohol. I told nobody. I just wanted to be away from the world.’

In 2010, Christian health care worker Tim James nearly became the 5,609th person to commit suicide in the UK that year. Thankfully, he was resuscitated after his wife found him unconscious at their family home.

Statistical suicide trends place Tim in a high-risk category, not just because he has struggled with depressive illness, but simply because he is male. While the number of annual suicides among the UK’s female population halved to 1,391 between 1981 and 2012, the number of men committing suicide each year increased during that period. In 2012, almost 4,600 men took their own lives.

The Department of Health’s 2014 Statistical Update on Suicide stated: ‘The majority of suicides continue to occur in adult males, accounting for approximately three-quarters of all suicides (77%).’ Recent high-profile suicides among gifted and successful men such as Welsh footballer and coach Gary Speed in 2011, and actor Robin Williams in 2014, serve to highlight this tragic trend.

AN UNSPOKEN KILLER

Not cancer, not heart disease, not motor accidents: suicide is the greatest cause of death among men aged 20-49 in England and Wales. Yet how often do we hear about suicide in church? How often do we discuss suicide in our home groups? Church leaders: when did you last preach a sermon that addressed suicide?

Read more here from Premier.

More on depression

Depression, The Dark Fog of the Soul

Keep It Simple. Keep It Bible. Be a Shepherd. Don’t Be a Guru.by Chris Surber, Churchleaders.com

It seems most church culture these days supports guru-ism. We prop up our celebrity preachers and define ministry success almost strictly in terms of numbers. I see a lot of pastors succumbing to the internal pressure to experience success and the external pressure of their churches to manifest that kind of success. But we do better to remember the simple instruction of Paul to Timothy. “Preach the message, be ready whether it is convenient or not, reprove, rebuke, exhort with complete patience and instruction” (II Timothy 4:2 NET).

Keep it simple. Keep it Bible. Be a shepherd. Don’t be a guru. To help you understand what I’m saying, and to think through how this might apply to your ministry, here are a few contrasts between gurus and shepherds.

Gurus teach pet passages and constantly come back to the theme of their ministry that makes them popular. One of my former mentors is well-known—even in secular circles—for his strong stand for the uniqueness of the Kingdom of God and his conviction that Christians should divorce their faith from politics

Read more here:

Alex Salmond to demand tax autonomy despite oil price by Simon Johnson, The Telegraph

Alex Salmond

Alex Salmond has said SNP MPs would demand full tax powers to support a Labour Government despite warnings this would mean billions of pounds more of Scottish spending cuts thanks to the plummeting oil price

.

The former First Minister’s intervention came as Scottish Parliament research showed nearly 16,000 North Sea jobs are at risk, the largest threat to employment faced by the country since the Ravenscraig steel plant closed 23 years ago.

He predicted the Nationalists could win a “barrow load” of seats in May’s general election and confirmed that a second independence referendum would not be among his conditions for propping up a minority Ed Miliband government.

Instead he said the SNP would demand “home rule”, which he defined as control over everything except defence and foreign affairs, meaning the Barnett formula would be abolished and Holyrood given control over all taxes and spending.

But Unionist parties warned this would mean an additional £18.6 billion of spending cuts to public services in Scotland thanks to North Sea oil prices having nosedived to around $50 per barrel.

Read more here:

Further Reading

Oil crisis: SNP under fire over forecasts refusal. The Scotsman Newspaper

Pro-Union parties claim Alex Salmond's crusade could cost Scotland billions. The Daily Record

Salmond power bid slated as ‘back seat driving’ Daily Express

The Mayor of Atlanta Declares War on Religious Freedom

The Mayor of Atlanta Declares War on Religious Freedom

It was bad enough that Kasim Reed, the Mayor of Atlanta, declared open war on freedom of speech and religion by terminating the job of fire chief Kevin Cochran because of his views on homosexuality. But his reasons for doing so are even worse. Did Mayor Reed not even see the extraordinary irony of his words?

In 2013, Fire Chief Cochran, a committed Christian who is active in his local church, wrote and self-published a Bible-based, 160-page book that contained a few lines speaking against homosexual practice (along with other sexual sins) in very strong terms.

According to Cochran, he got verbal clearance to publish the book by the proper city authority and also gave a copy to the mayor personally, claiming that the mayor promised to read it.