Washed up the Ol Wing, then applied a bit of cannuba wax. Andrea & I rode again in the Teen Challenge Freedom Ride on Saturday, helping to raise $29,000. for their Women's Shelter. This was my 6th straight year on this bike doing the Freedom Ride from King City, Ontario (Aurora). Again tears came to my eyes as I listened to 'rescued' stories that the girls told us of, after they entered into this amazing women's shelter program!
This year the ride was split into 3 various area rides:
June 25, 2016 - London
July 23, 2016 - King City (Aurora)
Sept 24,2016 - Sault Ste., Marie
About the Ride
The Teen Challenge Freedom Ride was started in 2008 by a riding club known as the Recovery Riders. These 35 men and women have faced and struggled with adversity in their own lives and have been used as a powerful and effective tool to inspire, support and encourage others in recovery. The Freedom Ride has grown to be at multiple locations, on various dates across the province. This enables Teen Challenge to minister to wounded and broken men and women looking for freedom from their life controlling drug and alcohol addictions.
July 23, 2016 ~ King City, Ontario
To our Riders & Sponsors,
What a success Freedom Ride was on July 23rd! We had a beautiful day of weather, an amazing turnout and a great day of fellowship. Together as a group we were able to raise just over $39000.00 and donations are still coming in! The money from this “Motor Cycle Charity Ride” will go towards the Teen Challenge Ontario Women’s Centre. Those funds will help support the ladies here find freedom and victory and the healing they need to overcome addiction. We are so very thankful for your generosity & support. Each of you played a part in the success of the event! God is doing incredible things here at the centre and lives are being changed. We sincerely thank each and every one of you for your support with the “2016 Freedom Ride” and hope you will partner with us again in 2017. Whether you will be joining in on the ride or supporting someone else who rides, your contribution will have great impact. We welcome Corporate Sponsorships as well and definitely the prayer support. To God Be the Glory!!
“While many evangelicals are quick to condemn alcohol and drug abuse, our drug of choice has become entertainment and fantasy.”
We’re obsessed with fantasy. The explosion of interest surrounding Pokémon Go is yet another example of our desire to escape the real world—of real people and real problems—and enter into a make-believe world, or at least an augmented one. In less than a day, Pokémon Go shot to the top of the app stores, and in less than a week it is now the biggest mobile game to date.
But before we poke fun at Pokémon fanatics too quickly, consider that it’s only one way our obsession with fantasy and entertainment manifests itself today. On-demand streaming, live television, video-sharing websites and social media are platforms growing majorities binge on as ways of escape.
Our ability to access entertainment and escape from reality has swiftly and effortlessly encroached on every aspect of our lives. Impatiently waiting at a traffic stop? Grab your smartphone. Is your wife annoying you? Log in to Netflix. Is the subject in class dry or irrelevant? Check your Twitter timeline. Bored? Instead of meditating and praying, we go searching for Pokémon.
Although these devices and platforms aren’t inherently evil or sinful, they become dangerous when we develop habits of defaulting to them primarily oralone, allowing them to become our means of escape from the complexities and inconveniences of life into the more easily controlled world of fantasy.
Evangelical Drug of Choice?
While many evangelicals are quick to condemn alcohol and drug abuse, our drug of choice has become entertainment and fantasy. It softly distracts and weakens Christians daily.
Using entertainment as a primary means of escape is like “chasing the dragon”—a slang phrase that refers to the continuous pursuit of an ultimate high previously obtained at the initial use of drugs.
For example, a drug user tries heroin for the first time and has an amazing experience. But when he returns to the drug, he can’t get that same experience. Instead, the experience gets weaker, so the user takes more and stronger heroin to reach that same feeling. As he “chases the dragon,” the user’s body decays inside and out. This decay usually manifests itself in extreme itching, unwanted weight loss, slurred speech, kidney or liver disease, and more.
Addiction to entertainment is similar. The health effects are not as noticeable as heroin, but the spiritual effects are costly. Many have unrestrained affection for entertainment devices. They may seem to harmlessly distract us from the guilt of sin, friction in relationships or anxiety about work. They become what daily prayer and Bible reading should be—a sanctuary for the rest and comfort of our souls.
We’ve failed to recognize that our never-ending pursuit of escape through games and fantasy is a direct enemy of our joy. And our addiction will subtly cause contempt toward God and reticence in our duty to ultimately delight in him.
Broad or Narrow Path
Jesus reveals that when we gravitate toward anything as our primary means of comfort, we’re moving further and further away from our Creator (Matthew 6:24). Jesus exposes an insightful reality: Love of anything other than God will cause hatred toward God. But the hatred is subtle.
If we devote inordinate amounts of time, money and affection to anything, including entertainment, we will despise whatever draws us away. We’ve all faced the choice between spending time with God or spending time with entertainment. At the crux of these decisions, the all-satisfying gift of Jesus is pit against a temporal escape. Whichever road is chosen increases hatred for the path denied.
When we mindlessly default to the broad path toward temporal escapes, seeds of contempt are planted for Christ. Likewise, when we choose the narrow road to Jesus, seeds of hatred are planted for all of our sin. We recognize that earthly sources of comfort can be beautiful gifts when used as God intended them. But when they’re not, they are cruel masters, seeking to devour our true joy and lead us away from Christ, our source of lasting comfort.
Because of our sinful hearts, earthly comforts over-promise but under-perform. They’re unable to satisfy what we truly long for. We want real rest. We want true comfort. But they can only offer a temporary fix. As soon as we wake up from hours of searching for Pokémon or searching our SnapChat, our problems remain, still waiting to be confronted. And we’re faced with the truth that all we’ve done is put off the inevitable.
Jesus Doesn’t Over-Promise
Jesus invites all who labor and are burdened to come to him, promising to provide rest for our weary souls (Matthew 11:28–30). This promise is not empty. In the gospel, he fulfills his promise by taking up our burden on the cross for our rest and joy in him.
As we walk through life, we will be tempted to continue to embrace mere earthly means of escapes and ignore our bondage. We will sometimes fail—falling into addiction and neglecting spiritual nourishment. But you don’t have to live in bondage, no matter how many times you fall.
By his Spirit, God supplies us with the power to say yes to him and no to sin. In communion with Jesus, we experience lasting joy that this world promises but never provides.
Jesus doesn’t over-promise, but he does over-perform. Words cannot express the joy he offers his own.
Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, who will accept the Republican nomination for vice president on Wednesday night, at the convention in Cleveland on Tuesday.CreditSam Hodgson for The New York Times
When Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana was in college, he found himself admiring a gold cross hanging from the neck of his fraternity “big brother.”
The response he received left such a powerful impression that he would recall it decades later on the floor of Congress.
“Remember, Mike, you have got to wear it in your heart before you wear it around your neck,” Mr. Pence said his fraternity brother told him.
Soon after this exchange, at a Christian music festival in Kentucky, Mr. Pence took a very different sort of pledge from the one he had taken to join Phi Gamma Delta. “I gave my life to Jesus Christ,” he recalled years later, “and that’s changed everything.”
It was a decision that would redefine Mr. Pence, setting him on the path to becoming an evangelical Christian and one of the country’s most outwardly religious and socially conservative legislators.
But it also caused him to break with two institutions that had been central to the Pence family: the Roman Catholic Church and the Democratic Party.
Mr. Pence, 57, who will accept the Republican nomination for vice president on Wednesday night, is the only one of six Pence siblings who is no longer part of the Catholic Church. Though the family remains close, his embrace of evangelical Christianity was long a source of disappointment to his mother, according to the Rev. Clement T. Davis, the priest at the church in Columbus, Ind., where Mr. Pence was baptized.
The family’s Irish Catholic roots run deep. Mr. Pence’s maternal grandfather, with whom he was especially close, came to America in 1923 from Ireland and settled in Chicago, where he eventually became a bus driver.
The family idolized John F. Kennedy, the nation’s first Irish-Catholic president. As a teenager, Mike Pence was the youth coordinator for the Bartholomew County Democrats.
All four of the Pence brothers were altar boys at their church, St. Columba, and attended its parochial school. They were at church six days a week, sometimes seven, if they were serving Saturday Mass. Even after they all went off to college, the church would call the Pence house during vacations or over the summer when it was in need of an altar boy.
“Our life revolved around the church,” Gregory Pence, one of Mr. Pence’s two older brothers, said in an interview, adding that he still went to morning Mass there a few times a week with his mother.
But at Hanover College, a small liberal-arts college in Indiana near the banks of the Ohio River, Mr. Pence came to feel that something was missing from his spiritual life. The Catholicism of his youth, with its formality and rituals, had not given him the intimacy with God that he now found himself craving.
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Mr. Pence spoke at his class’s commencement ceremony at Hanover College in Indiana in 1981. While studying there, he felt something missing in his spiritual life.Creditvia Hanover College
“I began to meet young men and women who talked about having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ,” he said years later in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network. “That had not been a part of my experience.”
Still, it was not easy for him to leave behind the church in which he had been raised. After graduation, he worked as a Catholic youth minister and even considered becoming a priest. He described himself for years as “an evangelical Catholic.” Friends say he wrestled with how to square his religious past and his religious future.
“He was part of a movement of people, I’ll call it, who had grown up Catholic and still loved many things about the Catholic Church, but also really loved the concept of having a very personal relationship with Christ,” said Patricia Bailey, who became close to Mr. Pence when she and her husband, Mark, worked with him at a law firm in Indianapolis in the mid-1980s.
Mr. Pence’s wife, Karen, was also part of that movement. They met when he was in law school at Indiana University and spotted her playing guitar in a church choir in Indianapolis. After they started dating, she bought a gold cross with the word “Yes” engraved on it, and kept it stashed away in her purse until he proposed.
“She’s been very much a part of his faith journey,” said Mark Bailey, who often started his day by praying with Mr. Pence in one of their offices at the law firm. “He would refer to his wife as the prayer warrior of the family.”
By the mid-1990s, Mr. Pence and his wife were attending an evangelical church in Indianapolis. Years later, the break from Catholicism still stung his mother, Nancy, according to Father Davis, who has been the priest at her church, now called St. Bartholomew, since 1997 and has grown close to her.
ELECTION 2016By TURNER COWLES and MICHAEL BARBARO1:46What Mike Pence Brings to Donald Trump's Campaign
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What Mike Pence Brings to Donald Trump's Campaign
Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, announced Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana as his vice-presidential running mate. Mr. Trump made the initial announcement via Twitter.
By TURNER COWLES and MICHAEL BARBARO onPublish DateJuly 15, 2016. Photo by Damon Winter/The New York Times. Watch in Times Video »
“You could see Nancy just shake her head about it,” Father Davis said inside the rectory before Mass on Saturday. “She was disappointed. She had hoped he could find his way back to the church.”
Others in Columbus who knew the Pence family were also surprised. “They were just known as such a big Catholic family,” said Janie Gordon, a friend of Mr. Pence’s from high school.
Mr. Pence’s mother declined to comment. The governor also declined to be interviewed about his conversion, but he authorized his brother to speak about his family’s faith.
As Mr. Pence’s faith was changing, so were his politics. He voted for Jimmy Carter in 1980 but soon gravitated to Ronald Reagan, and to the Republican Party’s staunch opposition to abortion.
His evangelical Christianity is now the driving force behind his political agenda, whether he is working to deny federal funds to Planned Parenthood or to make it legal for religious conservatives to refuse to serve gay couples.
“I sign this law with a prayer that God would continue to bless these precious children, mothers and families,” he said in March, putting his pen to a sweeping abortion bill prohibiting a woman from aborting a fetus because it has a disability such as Down syndrome. (A federal judge blocked the law last month.)
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The Rev. Clement T. Davis, the priest at the church in Columbus, Ind., where Mr. Pence was baptized.CreditAaron Borton for The New York Times
“Pence doesn’t simply wear his faith on his sleeve, he wears the entire Jesus jersey,” Brian Howey, a political columnist in Indiana, once put it.
During Mr. Pence’s days on Capitol Hill, he would not attend events without his wife if alcohol was being served. Fellow representatives sometimes joked about the need to clean up their language when he was approaching them in the halls of Congress.
Mr. Pence would not even engage in attack ads, having sworn off negative campaigning after running a particularly nasty and unsuccessful congressional race earlier in his political career. “Christ Jesus came to save sinners, among whom I am foremost of all,” he wrote after the election, quoting a line from Scripture.
When Mr. Pence was in a tight race for governor in 2012, his media strategist, Rex Elsass, invoked a different line from the Bible in an effort to persuade him that attacks from his Democratic opponent justified a direct and forceful response, as long as it was truthful, Mr. Elsass recalled. Mr. Pence refused.
In recent days, however, he has not hesitated to hammer Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee: He has called her “corrupt Hillary,” mimicking Donald J. Trump’s label “crooked Hillary.”
When Mr. Pence returned to his alma mater in 2008 to deliver a commencement address, his speech built toward what he considered to be the most profound experience of his college career.
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“There was one other person I met during my years here who changed my life more than all the friends and family combined,” he said, referring to Jesus Christ. “Thirty years ago this spring, I embraced the truth,” he continued, before quoting a verse from Scripture.
Today, Mr. Pence and his wife often worship at College Park Church, an evangelical megachurch in Indianapolis with three huge video screens, colored spotlights and Christian bands.
On Sunday, the day after Mr. Trump formally introduced Mr. Pence as his running mate in Midtown Manhattan, they sat in the balcony of the theater-style auditorium there, standing and clapping in rhythm with the music.
Several church members talked about their experiences of deepening their faith in God. One woman told of being raised Catholic before “accepting Jesus as my savior” and joining with like-minded evangelical Christians.
There was no talk of Mr. Pence or the election, but one song, its lyrics flashing across the big screens, encouraged the faithful: “Set your church on fire, win this nation back.”
It was a far cry from the wooden pews and kneelers of St. Columba, the austere Catholic church of Mr. Pence’s youth.
Gregory Pence said he did not see his brother’s turn to evangelical Christianity as a rejection of their Catholic upbringing, but rather as a reflection of the fact that he had different spiritual needs.
The two of them still pray together, just not usually in church. Indeed, Gregory said that when his brother called after learning that Mr. Trump had chosen him as his running mate, they wept and swapped verses from Scripture. (“Well done, my good and faithful servant,” Gregory Pence told his brother.)
He declined to say whether he had been supporting Mr. Trump before his brother joined the ticket. But asked if he thought his brother might have had some doubts about signing on with a man whose résumé includes three wives and a casino empire, and who liberally invokes coarse language and imagery, he answered without hesitation.
July 19, 2016 (Rorate Caeli) -- Pope Francis was right when he said more than a year ago that “a third world war was already in progress", fought “bit by bit”, but it’s necessary to add that it’s a war of religion, given that the motives are religious by those who have declared it, and even the homicides perpetrated in its name are ritualistic.
Francis called the Nice massacre an act of “blind violence” but the homicidal fury that pushed the driver of a truck to disseminate death along the Nice promenade isn’t an act of irrational madness: it is born of a religion which incites hate and instigates violence. The same religious motives caused the massacres at the Bataclan in Paris, at the airport in Brussels and Istanbul and in the restaurant in Dacca. All of these acts, however barbarous, are not “blind” but are part of a plan lucidly exposed by ISIS in its documents.
Abu al Adnani, spokesman for ISIS, in an audio diffused at the end of May on Twitter, urged killing in the name of Allah with these words “smash their heads with stones, butcher them with knives, run them over with cars, throw them from high places, suffocate or poison them.” The Koran does not say any differently with regard to the infidels. By continuing to ignore this, it is indeed, a sign of blind madness.
We deceive ourselves that the war in progress is not war declared by Islam on the West, but a war that is being fought internally in the Muslim world and the only way to save ourselves is to help moderate Islam to defeat fundamentalist Islam. Except that, moderate Islam is a contradiction, in so far as Muslims become secularized or integrate themselves into modern society, they cease to be Muslims, or become non-practicing Muslims or bad Muslims. A real Muslim can renounce violence for opportune motives, but always considers it legitimate against the infidel, as this is what Mohamed teaches.
The war in progress is a war against the West, but also a war against Christianity, since Islam wants to replace Christ’s religion with that of Mohamed. For this the final objective is not Paris or New York, but the city of Rome, centre of the only religion that Islam, since its very beginning, has wanted to wipe out. The war on Rome goes back to Islam’s birth in the eighth century. The Arabs had Rome as their objective in 830 and 846 AD, when they occupied, sacked and were eventually constrained to abandon the Eternal City. They had Rome as their target the Muslims that decapitated 800 Christians in Otranto in 1480 and those who butchered our fellow-countrymen and women in Dacca in 2016.
It’s a religious war Isis has declared against the irreligion of the West and against its religion, which is Christianity. In so far as Christianity is secularized, it smoothes the way for its adversary, which can only be overcome by a society with a strong religious and cultural identity. As the English historian Christopher Dawson notes, it is the religious impetus that supplies the strength of cohesion to a society and its culture.
The great civilizations do not express from within the great religions as a species of cultural by-product; the great religions are the base upon which the great civilizations rest. A society that has lost its religion is destined sooner or later to lose its culture.
This religious war is now a European civil war given that it is being fought inside the nations and cities of a continent invaded by millions of immigrants. We hear repeatedly that faced with this invasion we must build bridges rather than erect walls, but a fortress attacked is defended only by raising the drawbridge and not lowering it.
Someone is beginning to understand this. The French government has foreseen the outburst of a civil war destined to take place primarily inside the great urban centres, where multiculturalism has imposed the impossible cohabitation of diverse ethnic and religious groups. On June 1st 2016, a communiqué from the High Command officially announced the creation of a conventional force of the army. “A Control Command for the National Territory” (COM TN), destined to combat the jihad on French territory. The new strategic model, baptized “Au contact”, includes two divisions, under one command, for a total of 77,000 men destined to confront the threat of an Islamic insurrection.
Against this threat, physical arms which are used in every conflict to destroy the enemy are necessary, but most of all we need cultural and moral arms, which consist in the awareness of being heirs of a great Civilization, which precisely in its combating Islam, has defined its identity throughout the course of the centuries.
Respectfully and urgently, we ask Pope Francis, Vicar of Christ, to be the voice of our history and our Christian tradition against the danger which threatens us.
Translated by Francesca Romana from Il Tempo for Rorate Caeli. Reprinted with permission.
We are pleased to celebrate the news that Steve Kennedy, the editor of our testimony magazine, and two freelance writers for testimony, came out winners at this year’s Word Guild Awards Gala in Toronto, Ont. The Word Awards recognize the best work published in the previous year in 35 categories of writing, including novels, non-fiction books, articles, columns, poems, song lyrics, scripts and screenplays. Hall-Wilson won an award in the "Short Feature" category for her article "Violence Against Women—Stories That Need To Be Told and Listened To" which was published in the May/June 2015 issue of testimony. (You can read the article here.) Parker won an award in the "Personal Experience" category for her article "The Mission on My Street—When Love Comes Back Around" which was published in the November/December 2015 issue. (Read that story here.) Kennedy won an award in the "Poetry" category for the poem "Afar Feast" which was published in Presbyterian Record magazine.
The Word Awards was established by the Word Guild to encourage the pursuit of excellence in the art, craft, practice and ministry of writing and help to raise the profile of Canadian writers who are Christian. The ultimate vision is to positively influence individuals—and ultimately the Canadian culture—through life-changing words that bring God’s message of hope.
The Word Guild is a growing community of more than 325 Canadian writers, editors, speakers, publishers, booksellers, librarians and other interested individuals who are Christian. From all parts of Canada and many denominational and cultural backgrounds, we affirm a common statement of faith and are united in our passion for the written word.
Congratulations again, Steve, Lisa, and Kimberley!
In the face of the sexual revolution, the Christian church in the West now faces a set of moral challenges that exceeds anything it has experienced in the past. This is a revolution of ideas--one that is transforming the entire moral structure of meaning and life. These challenges would be vexing enough for any generation. But the contours of our current challenge have to be understood over against the affecting reality for virtually everything on the American landscape, and furthermore in the West. This revolution, like all revolutions, takes few prisoners. In other words, it demands total acceptance of its revolutionary claims and the affirmation of its aims. This is the problem that now confronts Christians who are committed to faithfulness to the Bible as the Word of God and to the gospel as the only message of salvation.
The scale and scope of this challenge are made clear in an argument made by the British theologian Theo Hobson. As Hobson acknowledges, "Churches have always faced difficult moral issues and they have muddled through." Some will argue that the challenge of the sexual revolution and the normalization of homosexuality are nothing new or unusual. He says, "Until quite recently I would have agreed," but he also says, "It becomes ever clearer that the issue of homosexuality really is different."
Why is this challenge to Christianity different? Hobson suggests that the first reason is what he recognizes as the either/or quality of the new morality. I agree with him that there is no middle ground in terms of the church's engagement with these hard and urgent questions. Churches will either affirm the legitimacy of same-sex relationships and behaviors or they will not. And the churches that do not will take a stand on the basis of a claim that God has revealed a morality to His human creatures in holy Scripture.
The second factor that Hobson suggests is what he calls "the sheer speed of the homosexual cause's success." As he describes it: "Something that was assumed for centuries to be unspeakably immoral has emerged as an alternative form of life, an identity that merits legal protection. The demand for gay equality has basically ousted traditionalist sexual morality from the moral high ground." This is a profoundly important point. Hobson is arguing that this revolution, unlike any other, has actually turned the tables on Christianity in Western civilization.
The Christian church has always enjoyed the moral high ground; it has always been understood to be the guardian of what is right and righteous, at least in Western societies. But what we are seeing now is a fundamental change. Hobson is arguing that this moral revolution, having turned the tables of Christianity, now robs the Christian church of the moral high ground it had previously claimed. The situation is fundamentally reversed. For the first time in the history of Western civilization, Christianity appears to be on the underside of morality, and those who hold to biblical teachings concerning human sexuality are now "ousted" (to use Hobson's word) from the position of high moral ground.
Hobson also rightly observes that this vast change in attitudes towards same-sex relationships and behaviors is not simply "the waning of the taboo." As he explains: It is not just a case of a practice losing its aura of immorality (as with premarital sex or illegitimacy). Instead, the case for homosexual equality takes the form of a moral crusade. Those who want to uphold the old attitude are not just dated moralists (as is the case with those who want to uphold the old attitude to premarital sex or illegitimacy). They are accused of moral defficiency. The old taboo surrounding this practice does not disappear but "bounces back" at those who seek to uphold it. Such a sharp turn-around is, I think, without parallel in moral history.
Hobson's main point is that homosexuality "has the strange power to turn the moral tables." And so what was previously understood to be immoral is now celebrated as a moral good. As a result, the Christian church's historic teachings on homosexuality--shared by the vast majority of the citizens of the West until very recently--is now understood to be a relic of the past and a repressive force that must be eradicated.
This explains why the challenge of the moral revolution threatens to shake the very foundations of Christianity in the United States and far beyond. And yet, even as we understand this revolution to be a new thing, its roots are not recent. As a matter of fact, the church has seen the sexual revolution taking place turn by turn for the better part of the last century. What now becomes clear is that most Christians vastly underestimated the challenge this sexual revolution would present.
The confessing church must now be willing to be a moral minority, if that is what the times demand. The church has no right to follow the secular siren call toward moral revisionism and politically correct positions on the issues of the day. Whatever the issue, the church must speak as the church--that is, as the community of fallen but redeemed sinners who stand under divine authority. The concern of the church is not to know its own mind, but to know and follow the mind of God. The church's convictions must not emerge from the ashes of our own fallen wisdom, but from the authoritative Word of God, which reveals the wisdom of God and His commands.
The church must awaken to its status as a moral minority and hold fast to the gospel it has been entrusted to preach. In so doing, the deep springs of permanent truth will reveal the church to be a life-giving oasis amid American's moral desert. Richard Albert Mohler, Jr., is an American historical theologian and the ninth president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He has been described as "one of America's most influential evangelicals".
-1.jpg?sfvrsn=1 "Resized Steve Kennedy - Word Awards (With Frame)-1")
We are pleased to celebrate the news that Steve Kennedy, the editor of our testimony magazine, and two freelance writers for testimony, came out winners at this year’s Word Guild Awards Gala in Toronto, Ont. 
