Life

Amish leadership travels to Israel to issue apology

New York – November 30, 2010: Amish leadership from Idaho, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Switzerland were in Israel November 21-27 to issue a declaration of repentance to Israel and the Israeli people. The apology was issued by Amish Bishop Ben Girod, along with many other leaders of the Amish community, including Pastor Micah Smith. Bishop Girod and Pastor Micah Smith are pictured above. The 45-person delegation toured Israel, however their primary motivation was to ask for forgiveness and hold reconciliation meetings with rabbis, city officials, and Israeli families to simply say, “We are sorry for rejecting Israel, please forgive us.” Among […]

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In Profile: Pastor Larry Thompson

Durring the busy holidays The Good News was able to catch up with Larry Thompson, Senior Pastor, First Baptist Church of Fort Lauderdale. With all the busyness of Thanksgiving, Christmas and the famous First Baptist Fort Lauderdale Christmas Pageant he still had time to answer a few questions.   How and when did you come to know the Lord? Although I grew up in church all my life, it wasn’t until I was 19 years old that I realized the difference between being religious and having a true relationship with Jesus. My girlfriend (now my wife) and I were at […]

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Christmas service in 3D

Church by the Glades (CBTG), recently named the 35th fastest growing church in America, has done it once again. Well known for their “wow factor”, CBTG is inviting over a hundred thousand people to witness the ultimate Christmas experience – 20 Christmas services in 3D. “Our December series will consist of three weeks of doctrinal teachings, each with three points. During our Christmas week services we will actually be giving out 3D glasses at all of our campuses and when visitors and members walk in , they will experience the ultimate worship experience in 3D,” shares Pastor Hughes, Lead Pastor […]

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Building hope in South Florida one family at a time

The following is the first in a series spotlighting Hope South Florida – a unique collaboration of city officials, social agencies and the faith community with a single purpose – to end family homelessness in Broward County. “Eighteen months ago, Stephan Tchividjian of the Christian Community Foundation of South Florida encouraged a group of his pastor friends to start meeting. Soon they agreed to unify around the gospel and to address the critical need of homelessness. They each appointed a staff member to sit on a team with representatives of The Shepherd’s Way and brainstorm how to create solutions that […]

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Churches do missions “in-house”

How churches do missions is changing. Traditionally, prospective missionaries leave their church families to join mission organizations to execute the vision and tasks of the organizations. But here in South Florida, churches themselves fulfill the role of the mission agency. Calvary Chapel Boynton Beach, First Baptist of Fort Lauderdale, Calvary Church in Jupiter, Grace Fellowship in West Palm Beach Florida, Calvary Chapel Port St. Lucie, and Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale, are planning projects, training missionaries, and staffing their own cross-cultural mission ventures with people from their own church communities. “The possibilities for churches and their missions involvement are endless,” says […]

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Make a difference at the ends of the earth

Mom and Dad: I’m exhausted and I can barely string these words together in a coherent sentence but I knew that I had to try. This was a disaster of extremes – people affected, lives lost, the height of the flood waters but I gotta tell you about the real extremes- neighbors risking their lives for each other, the sheer gratitude when a mother gets food for her kids, the look on the village officials’ faces when we tell them that it’s from Jesus.I’ve been up for almost 48 hours. Before you freak out, we were putting together food packs […]

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God’s ‘Tactical Blunders’

Have you ever really goofed up?  I sure have.  One summer I took a week off to attend a seminary class up in Charlotte, NC.  I had planned to drive up a day or so early so that I might take a “day trip” over to the mountains in the western end of North Carolina.  On my day off, I enthusiastically set off on I-85 out of Charlotte, savoring the anticipation of seeing the mountains and smelling the fresh mountain air if even just for a few fleeting hours.  Not really knowing the interstate I was driving on, the names […]

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Executive chef learns to serve

Jean-Claude Mille learned to cook in France at his grandmother’s knee. She had taken  him in as a child after his parents divorced. Jean-Claude remembers the love for Jesus that she instilled in him- a love that led her to dream of him entering the priesthood. Once he decided Catholic seminary was not for him, it was their shared love of cooking that replaced her dreams for his future work.“She was the one who taught me to cook and many of the recipes I use today are ones I made with her,” he shares.For Jean-Claude, cooking came naturally and he […]

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Self-worth in a world of shame and abuse

“I remembered that life: the suffocating feeling of being trapped, with no end in sight; wanting the money, needing it, but wishing there were some other legal way to get it. The constant pressure to smile, and pretend you want nothing more than to fulfill every wish and fantasy of a stranger, when all you really want to do is lie around your apartment in sweat pants, watching mafia movies like Goodfellas and Casino – imagining you could live some other life.” “I remembered, and all I could do was pray: that the women behind those very walls, feeling as […]

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Surviving grief: From desperation to healing

When Linder Berman attended a “Calm My Anxious Heart” Bible study years ago, she had no idea that the lessons she learned through that study would soon be put into practice in her own life.  I originally sat down with Linder to write an article about her son Paul’s death three years ago at the age of 22. What I didn’t know was that God had something greater in store. During our hour-long interview, I was able to learn how a Christian, truly grounded in God’s word, dealt with the gamut of emotions that come with the grieving process. In […]

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