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More Than 800 Salvations Through Crossover Triad
by Mickey Noah

More than eight hundred people received Christ during Crossover Triad 2006 in June, but the actual details of these life-changing conversions are only beginning to filter in — true stories made possible only because hundreds of witnesses in the Greensboro, High Point, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, areas shared their faith.

The salvations resulted from various coordinated Crossover events, activities, and strategies, including the concentrated efforts of the North American Mission Board's Intentional Community Evangelism (ICE) team. The ICE team was made up of fifty-five "witnessing warriors" from churches throughout the Southern Baptist Convention. Crossover preceded the SBC annual meeting in Greensboro.

"Crossover just shows what God can do with and through a group of believers who are committed to doing the work of evangelism," said Darrel Davis, ministry assistant for Crossover Triad 2006 for the Baptist Convention of North Carolina in Cary, North Carolina.

Davis said some two thousand Crossover Triad volunteers played a part in the more than eight hundred salvation decisions made during the combined Crossover and ICE initiatives, and that twenty-six new churches will be planted because of the effort.

Crossover's more than thirty evangelistic events were sponsored jointly by NAMB, the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, and the two hundred SBC churches of the Piedmont, Pilot Mountain, and Central Triad Baptist Associations.

Work has already begun on Crossover 2007, June 9-10, 2007, the weekend before next year's SBC annual meeting in San Antonio, Texas. For more information, visit the Web site at www.crossoversa.org.

Baptist Press

 


 

Evangelicals, Assimilate!

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, considered a possible Democratic nominee for president in 2008, told left-leaning religious leaders at the Call to Renewal's "Building a Covenant for a New America" conference June 28 that in order to sort through some of the "bitter arguments" about religion in America today, evangelicals need to water down their views to fit in better with the rest of society.

"Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values," Obama said at the event in Washington. "It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

"Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do," he added. "But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice."

R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, said Obama demands the impossible.

"Sen. Obama seems to believe in the myth of a universal reason and rationality that will be compelling to all persons of all faiths, including those of no faith at all," Mohler wrote on his weblog June 30. "Such principles do not exist in any specific form usable for the making of public policy on, for example, matters of life and death like abortion and human embryo research.

"This is secularism with a smile — offered in the form of an invitation for believers to show up, but then only to be allowed to make arguments that are not based in their deepest beliefs," Mohler wrote.

Baptist Press

 


 

Three Abortion Clinics In U.S. Shut Down

Three abortion clinics that were responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of unborn children have closed in recent weeks in the United States. The clinics were Women's Services P.C. in Omaha, Nebraska; Central Women's Services in Wichita, Kansas; and Summit Medical Center in Birmingham, Alabama.

The closings continued a trend for abortion providers during the last two decades. The number of abortion providers in the United States has decreased by 37 percent since 1982, according to a 2003 report published by the Alan Guttmacher Institute. That same study showed 87 percent of U.S. counties do not have an abortion provider.

The Women's Services clinic in Omaha closed June 30 as a result of its building's purchase by the Child Saving Institute, which operates a daycare and substance abuse program, according to LifeNews.com. Women's Services was Omaha's only abortion clinic, LifeNews reported.

The pro-life activist organization Operation Rescue bought the Wichita clinic and announced its closing June 29. Operation Rescue plans to renovate the building for use as its headquarters, which will include a memorial to unborn abortion victims. O.R. President Troy Newman said the closing of the clinic is "an encouragement to the pro-life movement that, through God's grace, we are winning the abortion battle one closed mill at a time."

The Birmingham clinic surrendered its license June 14 rather than face a hearing six days later in which the state health department planned to press for a license revocation, according to The Birmingham News. Alabama's State Board of Health suspended Summit's license May 17 for numerous infractions, including giving RU 486 to a woman late in her pregnancy. Clinic personnel allegedly told a woman in February she was only six weeks pregnant and gave her the abortion-inducing drug, after which she delivered a stillborn child who weighed 6 pounds, 4 ounces, according to The News. RU 486, a two-step regimen, is recommended for use only in the first seven weeks of pregnancy.

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