The End of the Road: Part II

A sermon by Jim Somerville, Pastor, First Baptist Church, Richmond, Va. November 17, 2013 The Twenty-Sixth Sunday after Pentecost It hadn’t occurred to me when I named this two-part sermon series that some of you might think I was resigning.  I was only thinking that...

The End of the Road: Part I

A sermon by Jim Somerville, Pastor, First Baptist Church, Richmond, Va. November 10, 2013 The Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost A funny thing happened while we were on the road with Jesus: it came to an end. Back when I was making plans to preach this sermon series...

Churches Find Empty Pews at Sunday Evening Services

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (RNS) Doug De Vries describes Sunday evening worship as “a lot less formal” than the morning service at Plymouth Heights Christian Reformed Church. It’s also a lot less crowded. Plymouth Heights is in step with a larger trend of declining evening...

Researcher: British Churches Aren’t Dying

The church is “not dying,” and this message needs to be understood by Christians and the rest of society. That’s according to Benita Hewitt, director of Christian Research, who has released a series of statistics that point to an apparent end to a...

Is the Christian Church in Britain on its Deathbed?

We have grown so used to tales of gloom and doom about the future of the church that when someone brings us some good news the impulse is to disbelieve it. Surely, we think, they can’t all be wrong, all those learned scholars who predicted the imminent...