c. 1999 Religion News Service
Jack Hayford named founding pastor, seminary president
(RNS) Jack Hayford, a prominent California-based Pentecostal minister, has made the transition from senior pastor to seminary president.
Hayford has been named founding pastor of The Church on the Way, a Los Angeles church he began in 1969. At the same time, he has gained the new title of president of The King’s Seminary, a graduate school of theology he founded in January on the church’s west campus.
When Hayford, 65, and his wife, Anna, began the church in the Van Nuys area of Los Angeles, they had 18 members. The Pentecostal congregation, which is affiliated with the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, now has 10,000 members.
Scott Bauer is now senior pastor of The Church on the Way. Bauer, 45, became associate pastor in 1985 and has been a co-pastor with Hayford since 1996.”I want to release the maximum potential of Pastor Bauer’s trusted and gifted leadership so as to avoid restricting the free navigation of this congregation’s future, and I want to more fully accept my role in serving the interests of our expanding ministries as a church,”Hayford said in a statement.
Bauer emphasized that Hayford is making a transition rather than ending his ministerial work.”This is a transfer of responsibility for Pastor Jack, not a retirement from duty,”Bauer said in a statement.”His focus and call is to lay foundations for equipping pastoral leaders globally for a new millennium.” Bauer and Hayford were installed in their new roles during a special service at the church on Oct. 24.
Probability of accepting Jesus drops dramatically after age 14
(RNS) The probability of people accepting Jesus Christ as their personal savior drops off dramatically after age 14, a new study by the Barna Research Group has found.
Data from a nationwide representative sampling of more than 4,200 young people and adults indicate that youth from ages 5 through 13 have a 32 percent probability of accepting Christ as their savior. Young people from the ages of 14 through 18 have a 4 percent likelihood of making that choice, while adults ages 19 and older have a 6 percent probability of doing so.
The data challenge the widely-held notion that the teen-age years are a prime time for evangelistic activity.”The statistics are eye-opening because they show how little evangelistic impact we are having in America upon teen-agers and adults,”said George Barna, president of the evangelical Christian firm based in Ventura, Calif.”However, that does not mean that teen-agers and adults cannot be reached with the gospel. It simply challenges the approaches currently used to reach those individuals.” Over the years, other Barna studies have shown that a large majority of Christians accept Jesus Christ as their savior before reaching the age of 18. This study specifically calculates people’s probability of doing so at different stages of life.
Barna also stated that his firm’s research”has consistently shown that between the ages of 18 and 24, we lose a very large percentage of young people who had been regulars at church.” The research was based on three separate surveys of adults, which had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points, and two separate surveys of youths, which had a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points.
Respondents were asked if they had made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that remains important in their lives. They were included in the category of those who have accepted Jesus as their savior if they said they had such a commitment and answered a follow-up question about their deaths by answering with the option”when I die I will go to heaven because I have confessed my sins and have accepted Jesus Christ as my savior.”
Church of England’s Sunday attendance continues to plunge
(RNS) Sunday church attendance in the Church of England has now dropped below the 1 million mark, according to figures released by the Church of England authorities to selected reporters and published last Saturday (Nov. 13).
The figures for usual Sunday church attendance have not been published for the last two years not only because a drop below the million mark was expected but also because it was felt that they did not represent the full picture.
Accompanying the figures which showed a decline in church attendance from 1,016,000 in 1996 to 995,700 in 1997 (the total was a million and a half in 1970) were the results of research into church attendance in nineteen of the Church of England’s forty-three dioceses which suggested that on some Sundays the true figure could be over a quarter higher.
These figures showed adult church attendance in these nineteen dioceses varying from 445,600 on the first Sunday of the month _ 27 percent higher than the usual Sunday attendance figure _ to a mere 361,300 on the fourth Sunday.
Among factors affecting the accuracy of usual Sunday attendance figures is that it is widely used as the basis for calculating the quota each parish has to pay the diocese _ which gives the parish a powerful incentive to keep the figures down.
In addition, it is felt that the old pattern of regular weekly attendance on Sunday has been replaced by a more relaxed attitude to church-going with some people turning up once a fortnight _ and not necessarily on Sunday.
The statistics were made available to five daily newspapers and the BBC radio program Sunday through a series of individual briefings, as well as to two Church of England weekly newspapers too late for their editions that week. (A sixth daily newspaper would have been included if its religious affairs correspondent had not been ill.) The adoption of this procedure, rather than releasing the information at a press conference open to all journalists, supports the conclusion reached by several observers that the Church of England has become so unsure of itself that it has succumbed to the allure of the spin doctor’s art.
Update: Sydney’s archbishop says no to laity presiding at communion
(RNS) Archbishop Harry Goodhew, the head of the Anglican diocese of Sydney, Australia, has rejected a decision by his synod to allow lay people and deacons to preside at Holy Communion.
The synod, voting Oct. 19 by secret ballot, voted by a solid 2-1 margin to allow the laity to officiate over the ritual traditionally reserved in most Christian churches to priests and clergy.
Had the proposal been approved by Goodhew it would have been a first for the worldwide Anglican communion and critics said it would have split the Australian church and isolated the Sydney diocese from Anglican churches around the world.
Supporters of the measure, known as”lay presidency”or”lay administration,”said to prevent the laity from from being celebrants goes against the gospel message of equality.
They also said they will take the issue to the Australian church’s General Synod, which meets in 2001 and that it will be an issue in the election of Goodhew’s successor, which also will take place in 2001.”I don’t believe synod will vote as archbishop someone who not unequivocally state that he would assent to lay administration,”Canon Bruce Ballantine-Jones, president of the evangelical-oriented Anglican Church League told Ecumenical News International, the Geneva-based religious news service.
In his Nov. 10 statement rejecting the measure, Goodhew said he recognized the support in the synod for lay presidency but noted the national and international impact the action would have.
Goodhew has been active in urging other liberal bishops not to act unilaterally in ordaining gays to the ministry and recognizing same-sex marriages.
But Ballantine-Jones said such reasoning was disappointing.”We do not like what others are doing in terms of liturgical practice and sacramental theology, but that does not mean we separate from them,”he said.
Los Angeles Episcopalians elect new bishop
(RNS) After eight ballots, clergy and lay delegates of the 85,000-member, six-county Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, in an upset election Saturday (Nov. 13) named a from-the-floor nominated local pastor, ex-cop and ex-Denver Broncos football player to be their new bishop.
The election of the Rev. J. Jon Bruno, who turns 53 on Nov. 17, bypassed the four official names for bishop offered up by the diocese’s nominating committee. Bruno, provost of the diocese’s Cathedral Center of St. Paul, will replace current Bishop Frederick Borsch, 64, when he retires at an unspecified future date.
Bruno’s election also has to be formally ratified by the bishops and standing committees of the country’s other 112 Episcopal dioceses.
The daylong special convention found the 248 clergy and 372 lay delegates largely uninterested in the four candidates submitted by the official search committee.
Some church members complained in the diocesan newspaper and at the convention that the search committee failed to produce a woman candidate.
Delegate Michelle Miyatake, a youth minister, said another issue was that the four official candidates included no minorities.
One woman, the Rev. Kathleen Cullinane, was nominated, along with Bruno, from the convention floor.
Through about five hours of balloting, Bruno and Cullinane vied as top vote-getters. Bruno led among lay delegates while Cullinane had the most clergy votes. By the eighth ballot, Cullinane trailed with 77 clergy votes and 105 lay votes to Bruno’s majority win of 133 clergy and 230 lay votes.
Bruno played football for a year with the Denver Broncos and spent six years as a Burbank, Calif., police officer. Ordained to the Episcopal priesthood in 1978, he has worked at parishes in Thousand Oaks and Pomona in California and in Eugene and Junction City in Oregon. He is a social activist and, like the five candidates he defeated, is critical of the resolution condemning homosexuality passed by the world’s Anglican bishops at the 1998 Lambeth Conference.
Quote of the day: Amelia Golden, B’nai B’rith of Canada
(RNS)”In Canada, we are secure enough in our own identities and lifestyles that we don’t have to try to impose them on others.” _ Amelia Golden, a lawyer with the League of Human Rights of B’nai B’rith of Canada, quoted Tuesday (Nov. 16) by the Washington Post on the creation of the first gay Boy Scout troop in Canada and the lack of negative response to the move.
DEA END RNS
