Christians forgo Facebook for ‘digital fasting.’ Published Oct. 27.

For financial guru Dave Ramsey, sour economy has an upside (from Oklahoma City). Published April 24.

Ministry sues for access to inmates (from Oklahoma City). Published Feb. 13.

College loses president, but receives $10 million gift (from Oklahoma City). Published Feb. 2.

Religion News Service

December 6, 2005 Tuesday 5:52 PM Eastern Time

How One School District Solved the ‘December Dilemma’

BYLINE: By BOBBY ROSS JR.

SECTION: DOMESTIC

LENGTH: 911 words

DATELINE: MUSTANG, Okla.

When the superintendent in this Bible Belt town yanked baby Jesus from a fifth-grade school play — but left in symbols of Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, along with Santa Claus — a small army of parents erupted in protest.

Some even blamed the defeat of a $12.9 million school bond election on voters irked by Superintendent Karl Springer’s exclusion of the Nativity scene.

But in the months after last year’s controversy, school officials, religious leaders and parents came together to develop a religious liberties policy that has helped mend, if not heal completely, the strained relations.

“I can pretty much guarantee that Mustang is not going to have a fight this year,” said Charles Haynes, co-author of “Finding Common Ground: A Guide to Religious Liberty in Public Schools” and a senior scholar at the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center in Arlington, Va.

As school districts nationwide grapple with the “December Dilemma” of how to mark the holidays, Haynes suggests that this Oklahoma City suburb’s experience offers a case study in what can go wrong — and right.

From coast to coast, battles over Christmas carols in school concerts, religious-themed holiday cards at class parties and Christmas trees in school hallways seem to rage every year, pitting groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State against Christian activists such as the Alliance Defense Fund and the Liberty Counsel.

Just last year, lawsuits were filed in Plano, Texas, over a school’s refusal to let a fourth-grader hand out candy canes to classmates, and in Maplewood, N.J., over a district’s policy of allowing secular songs, such as “Jingle Bell Rock,” but not hymns, such as “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.”

In Hampton, N.H., a seventh-grader dressed as Santa Claus was asked to leave a holiday dance last year by a principal citing a desire to be sensitive to other religious beliefs.

In Mustang, the manger scene in the Lakehoma Elementary fifth-grade play had been a tradition for years. That is, until the superintendent axed it on the advice of the district’s legal counsel, who voiced concerns about violating the separation of church and state.

However, the district allowed a Christmas tree and Santa Claus to remain in the production, as well as symbols of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah and the African-American harvest celebration of Kwanzaa.

Outraged, Kim Selvey and a dozen other parents hired an attorney to take their concerns to the school board.

The night of the program, protesters organized a live Nativity scene across the street from the school auditorium. Organizers carried signs such as, “No Christ. No Christmas. Know Christ. Know Christmas.”

“There were other quote ‘religions’ in the play. There were witches in the play,” said Selvey, a mother of two who attends an Assemblies of God church. “I felt pretty strongly about the fact that they chose the Christian religion to exclude.”

What started as a small dispute “got huge really, really quickly,” said Dave Bryan, pastor of Chisholm Heights Baptist Church, one of more than 30 churches in this part-urban, part-rural bedroom community of 14,000.

“Looking back on it, I think it’s because as a Christian, it seems like so many things in the United States are changing. So many things are being taken away,” Bryan said. “So when this happened, it was so easy for it to become explosive. It sort of hit us where we lived and breathed. Things like this weren’t supposed to happen in Mustang.”

The furor was all-too-familiar to Haynes, who was called to help mediate.

All too often, Haynes said, schools wait until December to decide their approach to religious issues when they should be developing clear policies in January.

At one extreme, many school Christmas assemblies seem “more like the local church than the local school,” he said. At the other extreme, districts strip any reference to the religious aspect of Christmas, in effect making the school hostile toward it.

“The reason people fight over these symbols is because they think that’s all there is,” Haynes said. “In other words, if we lose our tree in the lobby or if we can’t have our Nativity pageant, that’s the last vestige of our religion in the schools.”

But there’s a way to recognize the importance and history of religion in American society in a way that’s educational, not devotional, he said.

That could mean, for example, a holiday program noting that Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus on Christmas. A Nativity scene with a candlelight ceremony would be too much, he said.

In Mustang, Bryan served as co-chairman of a 30-member task force formed early this year to develop a religious liberties policy for the school district. Members included Christian and Jewish religious leaders, teachers, school administrators and parents.

The policy approved by the school board in May states: “Public schools may neither instill nor inhibit religion.” It went on to say “Mustang Public Schools uphold the First Amendment by protecting the religious liberty rights of students of all faiths or no faith.”

Springer, the school superintendent, said “great progress” has been made.

This year’s Lakehoma Elementary program will feature a brief Nativity scene, he said.

But it will include this clear attribution: “Some Christians believe.”

“It’s a small change that makes a big difference,” Springer said.

LOAD-DATE: December 7, 2005

Religion News Service

November 23, 2005 Wednesday 10:16 AM Eastern Time

Kansas School Board Chairman Defends Faith, Attacks Evolution ‘Dogma’

BYLINE: By BOBBY ROSS JR.

SECTION: DOMESTIC

LENGTH: 989 words

DATELINE: ARKANSAS CITY, Kan.

At the Sirloin Stockade, the state school board chairman leading an assault on “neo-Darwinian biological evolution” bowed his head and prayed aloud before eating his buffet lunch.

A veterinarian and farmer, Steve Abrams makes no secret of his Christian faith or his belief that God created the Earth in six 24-hour days less than 10,000 years ago.

“I am a young Earth creationist,” Abrams said as country music played in the background. “That is different from science. Good science has the tenets, I believe, of what is observable, measurable, testable, repeatable and falsifiable.

“I don’t believe Genesis is observable, measurable, testable, repeatable and falsifiable,” he added. “You take it on faith.’

But Abrams, 56, insisted he’s not trying to impose his religious views on the state’s 460,000 public school students.

His critics — from major science organizations to the editorial board of The New York Times — see it differently. Led by Abrams, the board’s conservative majority voted 6-4 on Nov. 8 to adopt new science standards critical of the theory of evolution first advanced by Charles Darwin. In the process, the board put Kansas near the center of an escalating national debate over how the origin of the world should be taught in public classrooms.

It’s a fight that pits advocates of intelligent design — the idea that a higher intelligence must have guided the Earth and its life forms in their development — against evolutionists who say the supernatural has no place in science class.

Board member Janet Waugh of Kansas City, who opposed the new standards, said Abrams and fellow “fundamentalist Christians” control the board and threaten to make Kansas a national laughingstock by dismissing a century of science.

“I am a Christian and I personally believe in the Genesis version of creation in the Bible,” said Waugh, a Lutheran who leaves open the possibility that the six days were not 24-hour days. “But I don’t believe my faith should be taught in a science class.”

Abrams said he first ran for his hometown school board in the late 1980s out of concern for high school graduates’ poor reading skills — not to push any kind of moral agenda.

Later, he won election to the state board, where in 1999 he helped rewrite the science standards to remove most references to evolution, including the age of the earth and the big-bang theory.

The next year, Kansas voters ousted three state board members who opposed teaching evolution. In 2001, the moderate-controlled board restored evolution to the standards. But last year, conservatives regained control of the board, setting the stage for the recent vote.

A father of four and grandfather of 10, Abrams owns the Cottonwood Animal Clinic and maintains a 1,000-acre farm that his great-great grandparents settled in 1878.

Abrams, who grew up raising livestock, said anyone watching the cattle industry has seen cows evolve over the last 30 to 40 years.

“They’re much bigger,” he said at The Sirloin Stockade. “They’re much leaner.”

But that’s different, he said, than evolution from one species to another.

“Do I think neo-Darwinian biological evolution is proven beyond a fact? No,” he said. “I believe it has great holes in it. It is not good science to teach that as dogma.”

Except for time away at Kansas State University, Abrams has lived his entire life in Arkansas (Ar-KAN-zus) City, a farming and industrial city of 12,000 a few miles north of the Oklahoma state line.

On Sundays, he steers his extended-cab pickup down a gravel road, past wheat fields and oil wells, to the Mount Zion Community Church, an old white structure with its original wooden roof, built in 1893.

“God has blessed him with a massive voice,” pastor Gale Rider said of Abrams, who leads singing and teaches Bible classes at the nondenominational, evangelical church.

Rider, who has known Abrams for 45 years and preached at his mother’s funeral, speaks in spiritual terms when talking about the criticism his friend has received about Kansas’ new science standards.

“Any time you try to show the truth from God’s word in any way, shape or form, there’s a lot of people that are going to back up against that,” Rider said, his Bible open on his desk.

Asked if he thought the board was trying to infuse religion into the public schools, Rider replied, “No, but I wish they would.”

Under the new standards, Kansas students will study not only “the best evidence for modern evolutionary theory,” but also “areas where scientists are raising scientific criticisms of that theory.”

While intelligent design proponents pushed for the changes, “these standards neither mandate nor prohibit teaching about this scientific disagreement,” according to the document.

In addition to the new science standards, the board’s conservative majority proposes changes to the teaching of sex education, expansion of charter schools and adoption of a school voucher program, according to Kansas newspaper reports.

Last month, they hired former anti-tax activist Bob Corkins as the state’s new education commissioner. Four of the six conservative members face re-election next year — Abrams is not among them — and a fierce election fight is expected over evolution and other issues.

But Abrams, who has served on the board since 1995, said he’s not worried that the board majority could swing again to moderates.

Polls show most Kansans — and most Americans — believe God was involved in the creation of the Earth and the universe, but opinions on teaching public school students about the origin of life vary according to the specific questions asked.

“There’s not many people on the fence,” said Abrams, who reported receiving 4,000 e-mails in the first three days after the board’s vote. “People are either adamant evolutionists or they’re adamantly not, at least if you go by the communications that come to me.”

LOAD-DATE: November 28, 2005

Religion News Service

June 30, 2005 Thursday 1:08 PM Eastern Time

Tech-Savvy Megachurches Expand With Big Screens on ‘Satellite Campuses’

BYLINE: By BOBBY ROSS Jr.

SECTION: LIFESTYLE

LENGTH: 1293 words

DATELINE: OKLAHOMA CITY

Most weekends, Pastor Craig Groeschel preaches at 23 services in five church locations across Oklahoma.

His schedule isn’t quite as busy as it sounds, though. The founder of LifeChurch.tv, a nontraditional church, Groeschel delivers only five of the messages in person. Technology takes care of the rest.

Welcome to the electronic church, live via satellite.

In the reality TV age, perhaps it’s no surprise that fast-growth churches increasingly use cameras to put their pastors in two places — or three or four or more — at the same time.

Some do it to solve crowding issues or reach a wider geographical area, while others see it as a way to offer more worship styles under one roof, said Scott Thumma, a researcher of megachurch trends at Hartford Institute of Religion Research in Connecticut.

While the exact number of churches beaming pastors from one location to another is unknown, 22 percent of 153 megachurches surveyed in 1999 said they had satellite campuses, Thumma said. In an updated survey he’s conducting, he said he expects that number “to be greater than that for sure.”

The trend concerns traditionalists such as Ole Anthony, president of the Trinity Foundation, a Dallas-based religious watchdog group that tracks televangelists.

“Do you lay your hands on the screen for fellowship?” asked Anthony, who criticizes megachurches as bastions of amusement and anonymity.

On the other hand, researcher Thumma said satellite services only reflect what already occurs in most large worship settings.

“Even if you’re in the main sanctuary, chances are you’re not going to be watching the pastor at the pulpit anyway,” he said. “Your attention is going to be focused on the large screens because you can’t really see the pastor if you’re in a gathering of 4,000.”

On a recent Sunday, Groeschel appeared on the big screens at LifeChurch.tv’s south Oklahoma City campus sporting shorts, a T-shirt and a Los Angeles Dodgers cap.

Introducing a study of the apostle Paul’s epistle to Philemon, he walked through a leafy neighborhood to a mailbox, where he pulled out a letter just like the one contained in the New Testament.

When the taped segment gave way to the live portion of the message, Groeschel showed up in a dark shirt and slacks — but only on the video screens.

Not that the 450 or so jean-clad worshippers watching in a converted storefront minded the pastor delivering the sermon from another church location 20 miles away.

“In my opinion, it makes not one bit of a difference at all,” said Eric Urbach, a 32-year-old attorney making his third visit to the church. “In fact, it’s kind of a nice thing that I can see him up close.”

Urbach’s friend Amy Chilvers, 34, added: “You’re still getting the live music and the interaction with the other people who facilitate the service. So, to me, it’s not an issue.”

At North Coast Church in Vista, Calif., north of San Diego, worshippers choose from four simultaneous “worship venues” at the church’s main location on Saturday nights and Sunday mornings.

“North Coast Live” offers preaching in person by Pastor Larry Osborne, along with a full worship band and Starbucks coffee. A separate “Video Cafe” presents a more acoustic style of worship, again with Starbucks coffee but with Osborne’s sermon by video.

A third venue, called “The Edge,” features what the church Web site describes as “a slightly more cutting edge atmosphere with full band worship,” along with “Mountain Dew, big subwoofers and teaching via big-screen video.”

Other options include a Saturday night “Country Gospel” service (“Y’all come on over,” the Web site says) and a Sunday morning “Traditions” service with a baby grand piano and a mix of classic hymns and contemporary worship choruses. Each venue gets the same video sermon by Osborne, often a recorded DVD to allow more flexibility in individual services.

“You tell me what music you play and I tell you who comes to your church. So we reach more people than we ever could with a one-size-fits-all approach,” said Osborne, whose church draws 5,700 worshippers each weekend to its “central hub” and four satellite locations within a 35-minute drive.

In Oklahoma City, Groeschel, 37, said he stumbled on the video format when his wife delivered the fourth of their six children on a Sunday morning in 2001.

By then, LifeChurch.tv — known for its ear-piercing praise band and Groeschel’s real-life sermon illustrations — had already grown to several thousand people at two locations. Groeschel had preached twice that Saturday night.

“I was holding my little son and asking, ‘Who’s going to fill in for the day?’” Groeschel said. “Someone said, ‘Hey, why don’t we roll video from the night before?’ We did and it worked great. There was almost no difference.”

Four years later, LifeChurch.tv has 130 ministers and staff members and serves a combined 13,000 people each weekend, with two locations in Oklahoma City and one each in Tulsa, Stillwater and Edmond.

And in September, LifeChurch.tv plans to take the concept to two new campuses in the Phoenix area, more than 1,000 miles away.

Groeschel — whose church advertises on highway billboards with messages such as “Love GOD, but hate church? So did we” — said church leaders felt called to share the message outside Oklahoma.

“We liked Phoenix because it’s one of the fastest-growing cities in the entire country, and at the same time it’s in one of the most unchurched counties in the entire country,” he said. “We just see great spiritual opportunities in Phoenix.”

About 100 LifeChurch.tv members from Oklahoma have quit jobs, sold homes and volunteered to move to Phoenix to form the core groups for the new campuses. They’ll be joined by five full-time LifeChurch.tv staff members at each location.

“Obviously, it’ll create some new issues in how we communicate with staff members, and in leading an organization from 1,000 miles away instead of just a few,” Groeschel said. “We’ll also have to deal with some cultural issues, just between Arizona and Oklahoma. But I think those are not insurmountable.”

When Groeschel mentioned in a sermon that members would be needed to take LifeChurch.tv out of state, Kevin and Cari Kelley said they felt God talking directly to them — even before they knew the locale would be Phoenix.

The Kelleys, parents of an 11-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter, likened transplanting LifeChurch.tv’s distinct “DNA” to the Arizona desert to franchising a McDonald’s restaurant.

But they stressed that a successful church requires more than loud music, a full-service coffee bar and a made-for-TV preacher.

Beyond the smoke-and-lights glitz, they said, LifeChurch.tv succeeds because of meaningful small-group studies and true commitment to the Christian faith.

“It’s not just something we do for fun,” said Cari Kelley, 35. “I mean, God is a life-changing God and he is at LifeChurch and he changes lives there, and we see it every weekend. People raise their hand and accept Christ every single experience every weekend.”

At every LifeChurch.tv location, a live band plays, campus pastors interact with the audience, and “welcome teams” greet visitors.

Since opening in March, the south Oklahoma City campus has grown to an average combined attendance of roughly 2,000 at two Saturday night and three Sunday morning services.

Nearly 500 people have signed cards saying that they made decisions to live for Jesus Christ, said campus Pastor Randy Coleman.

“It’s people looking for something significant yet different than traditional church,” said Coleman, 35, who wore a brown T-shirt and jeans to the recent service.

And hey, what’s more different than a sermon by satellite?

LOAD-DATE: July 1, 2005