From WFIE somewhere in Kentucky:
Authorities believe the suspects broke into a church concession stand five different times. Those arrested are 19-year-old Kenneth Baird, 19-year-old Coty Johnson and 19-year-old Marvin Sanders.
Questioned by authorities, one of the young men suggested that he and his cohorts were merely doing to the church what Benny Hinn and Robert Tilton have been doing their whole careers.
We can’t wait! According to USA Today, O’Donnell is hyping her book via Twitter, quoting Dolly Parton:
“You’ll never do a whole lot unless you`re brave enough to try.”
We’re brave enough to slog through the book just hunting for something juicy (or sexed up). Who’s down?
Susie Hawkins was honored last Tuesday with the 2011 Willie Turner Dawson Award during the Ministers’ Wives Conference at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting, according to the Baptist Press. Hawkins is married to the president of Guildstone Financial and a frequent speaker at women’s retreats.
Hawkins predictably had no comment about the award, preferring to stay in her seat at the back of the sanctuary while the men made all the decisions.
We were looking at Joni Parsley’s blog (slow day today) and noticed that her daughter Ashton is rather fetching. She’s twenty-three and an English major (twenty-one when Joni wrote the description two years ago) and was active in Campus Crusade, and if she’s got a Facebook page, it’s not searchable. That’s her in the lower picture with her younger brother.
Thanks to Anthony Weiner, we’ve recently decided we can no longer ignore Twitter as source of great material, so we’re putting together our follow list right now. Please let us know if there’s someone with especially juicy tweets and we’ll get right on it. Meanwhile, Joni Parsley’s on Twitter and while she’s got 1066 followers, she’s following just one person, and that’s some kind of software company. We love it when people are too cool to follow back. And by love, we mean detest. Hello! Engage, why don’t you?
Ashton is unlikely to make our BabeWatch, as she seems to have hidden herself rather well. More if anything develops, but we wouldn’t hold our breaths.
Oh, we’ve got bad news for you.
It turns out that as of mid-June, Jumping the Broom, the film co-produced by T.D. Jakes, has grossed over $36,000,000. By most standards, that’s not much, but with a budget of only $6.6 million, the film has made its producers over thirty million, which will fund a lot of bad Christian television. In fact, true to his word-of-faith leanings, he appears to be interpreting this success as God’s approval and is working on at least one TV movie and one theatrical picture.
May God have mercy on us all, and let’s all not watch these, please.
Wiley’s back at it, this time suggesting that he might like to pray with the President. Of course, Drake has said in the past that he has prayed for the President’s death, so perhaps what he’s looking for is a front seat to the striking of lightning. We would never suggest that a man with his spiritual integrity might possibly determine that he is God’s chosen instrument for carrying out his will and be attempting to gain access to the President for more nefarious purposes. Nuh-uh. Not us.
If this continues, we’ll be out of a job.
The Mars Hill Church in Seattle, which claims 10,000 weekly attendees (yes, it makes us a little bit ill, too) is being targeted for picketing this Sunday by our buddies at Westboro Baptist Church. We have confirmed on Westboro’s website that this picketing is scheduled, but will not link to it because it’s got enough Google love and doesn’t need ours.
And how is the Washington megachurch responding? According to CNN, with a message that says, “This False Prophet and His Blind Lemmings Welcome You to Our Whore House for God’s Grace and Free Donuts.”
On the Mars Hill blog, Driscoll tells the Westboro picketers that “If you make it, we’ll also give you free copies of my book, Doctrine, so you can learn what the Bible says about who God actually is, and we’ll also provide fresh donuts and free coffee, along with smiles and chuckles.”
We’re turning the sarcasm machine off in honor of our dads today, and tipping our hat to Mars Hill pastor Mark Driscoll. Don’t worry, Mark. We’ll get you another day.
The Southern Baptist Convention this week resolved that it “cannot commend” the 2011 New International Version translation of the Bible and urged its LifeWay bookstores not to make it available because of the translation’s gender-neutral language. Although the resolution did not make it out of the resolutions committee, it was brought to the floor by Tim Overton of Halteman Village Baptist Church in Muncie, Indiana, according to the Associated Baptist Press.
It was further resolved that as a temporary, symbolic gesture of non-commendation for the new translation, the Convention would for one month refer to itself as the SoutHIMn Baptist Convention. Asked about the awkward pronunciation and spelling, one messenger shrugged his shoulders and said, “Nobody takes these conventions seriously anymore anyway. Most of us just come for the golf.”
Another messenger suggested that Overton’s church should lead the way by renaming itself HalteMAN Baptist CHISch, replacing the feminine-sounding portion of the church’s name with its masculine counterpart, and really underscoring the manliness of the congregation’s name.
We at the Home Office in Intercoruse, PA have had our share of threats against our bodily well-being. It comes with the territory. All those Benny Hinn defenders, you see, get a little surly when we do what we do.
We’ve considered a bodyguard. We admit it.
But holy cow. A certain story we’ve been following about one of Joyce Meyers’s bodyguards has indicated to us that the guy was pulling down $100,000 a year. He valued his job so much (and who among us wouldn’t?) that in order to keep it, he did an awful thing to cover an extramarital affair. It’s too distasteful even for us, so we won’t be linking to it, but if you’re interested, it shouldn’t be hard to track down.
A hundred K for protecting Joyce Meyer? That’s dinner and a pet sheep for a lot of World Vision kids. Wonder what Robert Tilton’s bodyguard makes.
Props to Christian Nightmares (via Stuff Fundies Like), here’s a great little video from someone at Bob Jones U. As graduates of a few religious institutions of higher learning ourselves, we in the Home Office in Intercourse, Pennsylvania are disinclined to mock the sincere pursuit of Babes in Christ (we, in fact, are getting misty with our own nostalgia!), but watch the video and see our few thoughts after the jump.