It pains me more than I can say to report this bit of tragic news. According to the USA Today, Christians are fatter than non-Christians. More precisely stated (and this is even more painful), frequent church attenders are fatter than infrequent attenders. It appears that your Christianity has to be real to make you fat. Well, at least that means it’s not because of the baptisms!
Does this mean we’ll live longer if we become nominal Christians? No. Actually, other studies show that devout Christians are healthier and live longer than non-Christians. So evidently, Jesus is so powerful, he can even overcome obesity! This is good news indeed. You see, I could stand to lose a pound or two. A week. For several weeks. Months, really. But Jesus is the answer!
I can just see the new marketing materials. “Join our church and stop worrying about your waistline!” “Jesus saves even fat people!” “Extra-heavy-duty pews!”
“On the whole being religious has been shown by many studies to be associated with better mental health, lower smoking rates, lower mortality rates and better overall health status,” said Feinstein. “There are a whole lot of things religious people are doing right, but it’s just this specific area where there appears to be room for improvement.”
The upshot of the new research, said Feinstein, is that knowing there may be an obesity problem among church-goers provides a captive audience for intervention. Continue reading
The Servant’s Song
This will be a little unusual. I just received the daily email from the church office. It does a pretty good job of showing what life is like around here. So I thought I’d post it and then add a couple of brief reflections. I’ve replaced personal names with “***” for the sake of privacy.
The death of Osama Bin Laden raises many questions, but the one that has dominated the evangelical web pages is how we Christians should respond to the news.
Churches are always going to be filled with selfish people. If we managed to preach all our members into selflessness, we’d be so attractive that we’d soon have hundreds of converts — who’d be immature Christians and therefore selfish. Unhealthy churches have longtime members who are selfish. Healthy churches have new members who are selfish. And so all have selfish members.
Latest list of needs —
The staff
From 
