National Christian Leaders Accept Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Roma Downey & Mark Burnett’s Urgent Call for Solidarity & Prayer for Persecuted Christians

Apr 03, 2015 15:01 ET National Christian Leaders Accept Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Roma Downey & Mark Burnett’s Urgent Call for Solidarity & Prayer for Persecuted Christians LOS ANGELES, April 3, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — In an opinion piece published today - Good Friday - on CNN.com, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of the Archdiocese of New York, and Roma Downey and Mark Burnett, executive producers of ” A.D.

Faith leaders: Exempt religious groups from order barring LGBT bias in hiring

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Pastor Saeed’s Case Raised in Iran

Pastor Joel C. Hunter offered the opening prayer at the fifth annual Easter Prayer Breakfast at the White House.

Even as polls show Americans broadly oppose electioneering from the pulpit, a new report by a group of faith leaders working closely with Capitol Hill argues for ending the decades-old ban on explicit clergy endorsements.

The report being given Wednesday to Sen. Charles E. Grassley — the Iowa Republican whose office for years has been probing potential abuses by tax-exempt groups — comes as the ban has become a culture-war flashpoint.

More than 1,100 mostly conservative Christian pastors for the past few springs have been explicitly preaching politics — they call the annual event “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” — in an effort to lure the Internal Revenue Service into a court showdown. Meanwhile, groups that favor Read more…

by Scott Maxwell, Orlando Sentinel

Last week, someone told the Rev. Joel Hunter that they hoped his family dies in a fire.

Why? Because Hunter had the audacity to speak out against intolerance, specifically intolerance against Muslims.

Hunter quickly paid the price, receiving hundreds of angry emails, including the death wish. Read more…

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The Florida Family Association is calling Pastor Joel C. Hunter, senior pastor of Northland Church in Longwood, Fla., to the carpet for “partnering with Islamists to oppose an anti-Shariah bill in the Florida legislature.”

The Florida Family Association is claiming that Hunter is helping the Hamas-linked, Jihadi apologist, Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) to stop laws from being enacted that would prohibit courts from accepting Shariah law. The association also published Hunter’s personal email address and invited readers to contact him.

According to the Florida Family Association, if Florida courts accept provisions of Islamic Shariah law or other foreign laws and legal codes which are inconsistent with American laws, it will undermine public policies enacted by our representative form of government and change our value system.

Atif Fareed, a Muslim and former chairman of CAIR Florida, said Hunter, the spiritual advisor to President Obama, asked him to read the following statement: Read more…

Last month President Obama publicly acknowledged his support for same sex marriage in an interview with ABC News. Shortly before the interview, the president called Dr. Joel Hunter, pastor of Northland Church near Orlando and a spiritual adviser to the president, to tell him about his decision. Hunter told the president that he disagreed with his view on marriage, but the decision would not Read more…

Joel Hunter was an unlikely ally of Barack Obama’s in the 2008 election. The Christian evangelical, who leads a mega-church in central Florida, had backed fellow pastor Mike Huckabee in the Republican primary that year. At Obama’s inauguration, Hunter found himself sitting next to Muhammad Ali in the 12th row.

Obama’s outreach to the faithful during the 2008 campaign—unprecedented for a Democratic candidate—paid off. He did 8 percentage points better than 2004 nominee John Kerry had among voters who worship weekly or more, although he lost regular worshippers overall to Republican John McCain. With strong support from minorities, Obama beat McCain by 9 percentage points among Catholics (who favored George W. Bush over Kerry by 5 points in 2004) and made smaller inroads among evangelicals such as Hunter.

Those gains are now in jeopardy, according to Hunter and other religious leaders fuming over the Obama administration’s requirement that church-affiliated institutions such as hospitals, schools, and charities cover birth control in their employee health insurance plans.

“The boundaries of religious freedom and identity are being trespassed,” said Hunter, who still writes weekly devotions for Obama and visited the Oval Office last week; he said he keeps his spiritual guidance separate from any policy recommendations he funnels to the president. “I do think this will have political repercussions in the religious community,” Hunter added. “This has the potential to be a breaking point.” Read more…

In an effort to more clearly define and look into possible changes in legislation regarding tax breaks and compensations for churches and nonprofit groups, the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA) has appointed a trio of panels.

The ECFA announced last week that representatives from religious groups, the broader nonprofit sector and the legal community have been appointed to the panels that will work with the Commission on Accountability and Policy for Religious Organizations.

The commission was formed following a report issued by U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) in January that focused on the financial practices of six high-profile Christian ministries, ECFA said. Allegations included perceptions of excessive spending on high-end travel, accommodations, and property, according to a commission member.

After Grassley released the findings of his three-year inquiry, rather than seek legal action, the senator asked ECFA to lead an independent national review that includes making recommendations on accountability and policy issues affecting religious and other nonprofit organizations.

Florida pastor and one of President Obama’s spiritual advisers, Dr. Joel Hunter, who is a member of the ECFA commission, told The Christian Post that he would Read more…

The decision by NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s to exclude any prayers from clergy at Ground Zero in the upcoming 10th anniversary commemoration of the 9/11 attacks is being categorized as un-American by an evangelical leader and spiritual adviser to President Obama.

Florida Pastor Joel C. Hunter, who also serves as an executive board member for both global and national evangelical associations, said Christians should speak out or protest the decision because the importance of faith in the United States is being neglected.

Bloomberg stirred much controversy recently when he stated, “Everybody would like to participate, and the bottom line is everybody cannot participate. There isn’t room. There isn’t time. And in some cases, it’s just not appropriate.”

Hunter told The Christian Post, “The problem with this is, because of his singular decision, this ceremony isn’t really going to be representative of America. It’s going to be exclusionary, secularist only, and we are one of the most religious countries in the world. So, the bottom line is, this is not how we were founded. This is not who we are.” Read more…

Prayer and religious leaders have been left out of New York City’s official ceremonies observing the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Dr. Joel C. Hunter, senior pastor of Northland, A Church Distributed, and John Kieffer, Atheists of Florida, have a respectful discussion on the issue.

“Most people, who call America home, are people of faith. Why would a public event of national remembrance and healing intentionally omit that which would be the greatest consolation to most people? Do you remember our nation’s first response to 9/11? Our nation’s churches were full to overflowing! And entire communities of faith were engaged in responding to the needs that resulted from the tragedy. Are the 9/11 ceremonies a reflection of government officials or of the people they are supposed to represent?”

THE WASHINGTON POST ASKS: A bill legalizing same-sex marriage for couples in New York State is at a standstill over the issue of exemptions for religious organizations and individuals. The reach of these religious protections is wide-ranging -from whether Catholic adoption agencies may reject same-sex couples, to the right of religious caterers to refuse services for gay weddings. In New York State’s Marriage Equality Act, should there be exemptions for religion? What should happen when equal rights for gay citizens and the right to religious free exercise clash? READ DR. HUNTER’S RESPONSE.

Click to read more “On Faith” posts from Dr. Hunter

With attacks on Christians already increasing in the Middle East, the populist uprising in Egypt has triggered fears among some that the region’s largest non-Muslim population - Egypt’s 7 million Coptic Christians - could be at risk.

Copt leaders in the United States said they are terrified that a new Egyptian government with a strong Islamic fundamentalist bent would persecute Christians. They are quietly lobbying the Obama administration to do more to protect Christians in Muslim countries and are holding prayer vigils and fasts such as one that ends Wednesday evening at Copt churches around the country, including four Read more…

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — Islam is suddenly on trial in a booming Nashville suburb, where opponents of a new mosque have spent six days in court trying to link it to what they claim is a conspiracy to take over America by imposing restrictive religious rule.

The hearing is supposed to be about whether Rutherford County officials violated Tennessee’s open meetings law when they approved the mosque’s site plan. Instead, plaintiff’s attorney Joe Brandon Jr. has used it as a forum to question whether the world’s second-biggest faith even qualifies as a religion, and to push a theory that American Muslims want to replace the Constitution with extremist Islamic law. Read more…

The National Association of Evangelicals, the nation’s largest evangelical umbrella group, is urging a Florida church to call off a planned Quran burning scheduled for September 11. Here’s the NAE’s statement:

NAE Urges Cancellation of Planned Qu’ran Burning

The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) encourages increased understanding and reconciliation between those of different faiths and backgrounds, and it laments efforts that work against a just and peaceful society. The plans recently announced by a Florida group to burn copies of the Qu’ran on September 11 show disrespect for our Muslim neighbors and would exacerbate tensions between Christians and Muslims throughout the world. The NAE urges the cancellation of the burning.

NAE President Leith Anderson said, “It sounds like the proposed Qu’ran burning is rooted in revenge. Yet the Bible says that Christians should ‘make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always try to be kind to each other and to everyone else’ (1 Thessalonians 5:15).”

In 1996 the NAE addressed religious persecution saying that “If people are to fulfill the obligations of conscience, history teaches the urgent need to foster respect and protection for the right of all persons to practice their faith.” [i] In the same resolution, the NAE pledged to “address religious persecution carried out by our Christian brothers and sisters whenever this occurs around the world.”

The NAE calls on its members to cultivate relationships of trust and respect with our neighbors of other faiths. God created human beings in his image, and therefore all should be treated with dignity and respect. The proposed burning of Qu’rans would be profoundly offensive to Muslims worldwide, just as Christians would be insulted by the burning of Bibles. Such an act would escalate tensions between members of the two faiths in the United States and around the world.

“We have to recognize that fighting fire with fire only builds a bigger fire,” said Joel Hunter, Senior Pastor of Northland, A Church Distributed, in Orlando, Fla., and member of the NAE Board of Directors. “Love is the water that will eventually quench the destruction.”

Anderson said, “The most powerful statement by the organizers of the planned September 11th bonfire would be to call it off in the name and love of Jesus Christ.”

FIND THIS ARTICLE AT: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/07/30/national-association-of-evangelicals-denounces-churchs-quran-burning-event/

Dr. Joel C. Hunter and Annie Laurie Gaylor of the Freedom From Religion Foundation discuss this issue on WNYC’s (NPR) The Takeaway.