Faith Digest

Posted: 6/22/07

Faith Digest

Most Republicans doubt Darwin. Republicans are far more likely to doubt the theory of evolution than Democrats, a new Gallup Poll revealed. Sixty-eight percent of Republicans say they doubt humans evolved from lower life forms over millions of years; only 40 percent of Democrats hold the view. The poll was conducted by telephone last June and has a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points. In a separate Gallup poll this May, respondents were asked to choose between three hypotheses about human origin and development. Just 14 percent believed God had no part in the process, while 43 percent believed God created man in present form. A full 38 percent took a centrist view, affirming that man evolved but God guided the process. Beyond political parties, the poll also found a correlation between church attendance and belief in evolution. Those who seldom or never attend church are three times more likely to be evolutionists than those who attend church weekly.

Bishop urges three-minute Sabbath in transit. An Anglican bishop has asked thousands of British rail commuters to spend a few minutes each day doing precisely nothing. To help them keep track of the three minutes of stress-beating silence he was urging upon them, Stephen Cottrell handed out miniature egg timers—which he called the “gift of time”—to travelers as they rushed by him at the train station. “By learning to sit still, slow down, by discerning when to shut up and when to speak out, you learn to travel through life differently,” Cottrell said. The cleric took his cue from a recent study by Britain’s University of Hertfordshire that found the walking speeds in 32 cities around the world had increased by 10 percent over the past decade.

Ministry seeks to make fishers of men. Ed Trainer takes men and boys out fishing on the waters of British Columbia, Alaska and beyond to teach them about God. His group, International Fishing Ministries, rose up out of Trainer’s passion for fishing, his frustration with traditional worship and statistics suggesting women populate most church pews. “Church is too boring for men,” Trainer said. “Church is set up like a country club for women. For me, after five minutes of a sermon, I’m off in my mind fishing on some stream somewhere. … We decided to go out into God’s creation, pointing men to a Christian experience through fishing.” Trainer figures about 10 to 15 percent of the men who go fishing with him make a lasting faith commitment to Jesus Christ.

Scout chapel demolished to avoid offense. A woodlands chapel in Britain used by Boy Scouts and Girl Guides for nearly 70 years as an open-air place of peaceful worship has been demolished because Scout officials feared it might offend non-Christians. The Scout Association ordered removal of the rudimentary cross and basic altar, plus the wooden pews that had been fashioned from old telephone poles when volunteers built the chapel between World War I and World War II. A campfire circle replaced the chapel near the Belchamps Scout Center at Hockley, in east England, as part of an “updating” that manager Nigel Ruse said would “turn it into a place of worship of all faiths and not to exclude anyone from Scouting.”