Free Republic

An increasing number of individuals who identify as “gender non-binary” have emerged among the clerical ranks in mainline Protestant denominations. Following the ordination of transgender clergy in the United States, non-binary clergy appear to be the next wave of sex and gender revisionism. While clergy already ministering within Christian communities have come out to their churches as non-binary, a number of non-binary identifying individuals have made headlines as the first to be ordained openly within their denomination. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, non-binary is relating to or being a person who identifies with or expresses a gender identity that is...

These aren’t the church plants you were thinking of, but students at New York’s Union Theological Seminary held a chapel service on Tuesday during which participants confessed to plants. “Today in chapel, we confessed to plants. Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor,” Union tweeted on its official account. “What do you confess to the plants in your life?” Rather than confess transgressions against an endangered grove or old growth forest, the student-led September 17 service featured...

Presbyterian Church (USA) officials are reporting that the oldline Protestant denomination shed another 62,375 members the same year that their governing General Assembly declared “Zionism is based on racism” and denounced religious freedom protections. At its current rate of shrinkage the PC(USA) will not exist in about 20 years. Statistics made available this week by the PC(USA) Office of the General Assembly (OGA) show the denomination continues to decline, dropping to 1,352,678 active members in 2018. A net 37 percent of members have died, transferred out, or simply vanished in the past decade. The drop of nearly 5 percent is...

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – The 217th General Assembly (2006) of the Presbyterian Church (USA), which will be the denomination's first biennial meeting, will be different in many ways. *** The Cumberland denominations will hold their General Assemblies in Birmingham, Ala., at the same time that the PCUSA General Assembly is meeting there. The dates for the PCUSA meeting are June 15-22, 2006. The three denominations have agreed to come together for worship services and some other parts of their meetings, although they say the time-sharing is not tantamount to a merger of the three bodies. ***

Mission Presbytery in Texas has dismissed a Confessing Church congregation and its pastor to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, but the property issue is still up in the air. The presbytery voted 152-76 in October against a motion to allow the congregation – First Presbyterian Church in Laredo – to leave with its property and assets. However, the presbytery decided to allow the congregation to continue using the property until after an appraisal is made of the land and building. The presbytery's trustees were instructed to make a recommendation for the disposition of the property "in such a way as to...