this from the june 27th issue of time magazine:
This week, after a six-week barrage of allegations, the Air Force is expected to release a report based on more than 300 interviews, addressing charges that the academy is rife with an officially encouraged religious evangelization. Critics say the behaviors violated the Constitution and Department of Defense regulations--and threatened troop unity by teaching future commanders overt religious favoritism.
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Taken together, the complaints suggest evangelical saturation. They claim that mandatory gatherings often opened with prayers and that some professors actively recruited cadets to join evangelical churches.
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[Weida] established a call-and-response routine at campus events . . . The cheer was . . . intended to provoke curiosity among non-Evangelicals and start conversations about Christ. If so, it also verbally erased any distinction between loyalty to the Air Force and to Weida's God.
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. . . cadets who did not attend chapel were known as the "heathen flight" . . .
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Tom Minnery, public-policy head of James Dobson's Focus on the Family, based in Colorado Springs, argues that "cadets are trained to give the ultimate sacrifice. They ought to be encouraged to grapple with the ultimate meaning in life, and they ought to be encouraged to make a decision about God, one way or another."
trying my best to come up with words that have more than four letters . . . ok, here goes:
it is just this kind of inappropriate use of influence, this indoctrination-based approach to serving, that makes people think that Christians are only out to assimilate the masses. this kind of garbage has to stop. there are creative and effective means of engaging in dialogue about God which neither alienate those who disagree nor abuse the positions of influence or power we may find ourselves in. fred buechner discusses this in "now and then" . . . but i can't even go there right now. suffice it to say that if we don't clean up our acts, we can expect to be denied opportunity to do any good at all.
1 comment:
People forget that there is a difference between evangelism and forcing it down your throat. How do they expect people to know what Christ is all about when they themselves do not act in a Christ-way? People can be really stupid sometimes. I understand what they were trying to do, but alienating people, and forcing prayer on them will not help them to find Jesus.
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