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Barrie and Tony Drewitt-Barlow
The Christian Institute reports…
Wealthy gay dad, Barrie Drewitt-Barlow, says he and his civil partner Tony will go to court to force churches to host gay weddings.
He told the Essex Chronicle that he will take legal action because “I am still not getting what I want”.
A Government Bill legalising gay marriage passed Parliament recently but it included measures to protect churches from being forced to perform same-sex weddings.
Challenge
Mr Drewitt-Barlow said: “The only way forward for us now is to make a challenge in the courts against the church.
“It is a shame that we are forced to take Christians into a court to get them to recognise us.”
He added: “It upsets me because I want it so much – a big lavish ceremony, the whole works, I just don’t think it is going to happen straight away.
“As much as people are saying this is a good thing I am still not getting what I want.” …Read More!
If we define morality…no, if man re-defines morality then the boundaries become elastic and nebulous . Speaking of which the recent agenda in many countries to redefine marriage seems have gone off on a tangent….
The politician who masterminded the gay marriage campaign in Holland says that ‘group marriage’ is now being discussed in the country. Boris Dittrich, a former Dutch politician, gave a video interview about how he successfully introduced gay marriage.
He said, “there is now a discussion in the Netherlands that sometimes people want to marry with three people and maybe even more.
Beginning
“But that’s the beginning of something completely new and that will take a lot of years I guess.”
He was speaking to a French gay news agency, and he revealed that he softened public opinion to gay marriage by first introducing registered partnerships. He said, “we thought it might be psychologically better to first introduce registered partnerships”.
Logical
It was a good decision, he said, because people got used to legally recognised gay unions and called them gay marriages. The next logical step was to introduce full gay marriage by law, he said. Now he admits there are discussions about marriage for more than two people.
Three-way relationships have already been recognised in Holland, under a “cohabitation agreement”. …Read More!
Pieter Stok has been married for well over thirty years. Apart from being nuts over Lego (who wouldn’t be?) he is passionate about his Christian faith, marriage and family. He looks back to pressure points in his marriage with thoughtfulness and candidly recounts:
A recently married person asked me the other day what the pressure points were in our 38+ years of married life. Things have been so calm for a number of years ( apart from a moment on an Italian motorway), I had to think. Yes, there had been times when we had to work hard to love each other. Or as an old Dutchman once said, “I never, absolutely never, ever thought of divorce – it never entered my mind, never, … but murder, quite a few times.”
For every couple those pressure points will be different. Their personalities, character traits and circumstances will mean unique pressures on their marriage. Here are some that I struggled with. (Continued here)
I love the final bit where he adds that most of all in a marriage we share a journey with God. He is the third strand (Eccl 4:12). If there were times when we were weak, we had to rely on Him even more. So even when we let each other down He has never let us down.
Excerpt from Travels from Ur.
Marvin and Jewell have been living in Arua for a couple of years now. Marvin usually updates me on his progress in evangelizing this people group in the Northern Eastern parts of Uganda. This week’s newsletter really warmed my heart and I will share an excerpt with you….
We had a double blessing today as we were able to have a baptismal service. We have been waiting for the baptismal tank to fill with rain water, but it never seemed to get full. So on Friday morning the school children grabbed jerricans large and small and ferried water from the tanks by the house over to the baptistery. Ah – all was set! Imagine our surprise on Saturday afternoon when I went out to check things only to find all of the water was gone again! Now we realized why it wasn’t filling with rain water; we had a leak somewhere. What to do? We asked the children to come at 7:00 on Sunday morning and fill it up again. What a good little troop they were as for the second time in one week they hauled water back and forth to fill the tank. But it was well worth the effort because we were able to see three people follow the Lord in believer’s baptism.
The second blessing of the morning involved a couple who had just been baptized; they also got married! The couple switched from their wet baptismal clothes into
If we define morality and the institution of marriage by our own human standards we are bound to open the flood gates for even the wackiest of ideas. No, I am not kidding. If we eliminate God’s standard of morality we soon find ourselves with situations like this one.
A woman who grew impatient with waiting for Mr. Right has found a solution: she’s married herself.
36-year-old single mother Nadine Schweigert stood in front of 40 family members and friends as she took part in a ‘commitment ceremony,’ swapping rings with her ‘inner groom.’
Schweigert, from Fargo, North Dakota, even read vows at the wedding, promising that:
“I, Nadine, promise to enjoy inhabiting my own life and to relish a lifelong love affair with my beautiful self.”
News of her solo wedding got passed around, and within days Schweigert found herself speaking to Anderson Cooper about her motives for marrying herself. …Read More!
These days you can get a divorce citing anything from well your spouse squeezing the tooth paste tube from the wrong end to hanging the toilet roll the wrong way round. But one woman wont let her husband off easily as she says their union was for life and till death do them part. However…
At some point over the next few weeks a letter will arrive at Susan Rae’s home spelling out in cold bureaucratic legal terms the end of her 20-year marriage.
The decree absolute, requested by her university academic husband, is a document she hoped she would never see.
The mother-of-two, from Northampton has spent nearly two years desperately fighting Doug Rae’s attempt to divorce her, insisting their marriage is worth fighting for despite years of rows.
‘I believe that marriage is for life,’ she says.
‘I still love my husband. We have two sons. We are a team. I just want him to come home.
‘The love I have for him is never going to go away.’
This week, the 50-year-old former WPC cut an extraordinary figure at London’s Court of Appeal, where she made a last-ditch effort to stop the man she still loves ending their church union.
There, in front of Lord Justice Thorpe, the couple’s torturous domestic dramas were laid bare, with Susan denying that her ‘unreasonable behaviour’ was to blame for the breakdown of her marriage and arguing that examples given by her husband were nothing more than the ‘minor squabbles’ which take place in any marriage.
She claimed she was perfectly justified in removing the fuse from the family washing machine to prevent her husband from doing the laundry after he regularly ruined her clothes.
Similarly, she argued, there was nothing wrong in throwing away a packet of non-organic ham he had bought to make his sons’ packed lunches.
Meanwhile, Mr Rae, assistant dean at the University of Northampton, said his wife also hid the television aerial to stop him watching his favourite programmes. …Read More!
This is usually the last sentence that an addict will usually say before they are willing to get help. Those of you who have family members struggling with alcohol, drugs or other forms of addiction (and yup, sin too) know what I mean. This week (again) I have had to see some one I love go through denial after denial that they are struggling. Watching these 3 clips of Jeff Allen’s story and his struggles with alcohol and later coming to repentance and faith in Christ have been quite refreshing in a way.
Part 1:
I am not surprised any more (honestly) at what some of these celebrity pastors come up with. Especially from the guy with endless gimmicks who calls his flock “ferraris“, tells them that they should get a swagger and at the end of it all demands them to give him their bank direct debit details and routing numbers so that he can “joyfully” strip them of their tithes. But that is not all….
Sexperiment author and Fellowship Church pastor Ed Young, who is challenging married couples at his church to have sex for seven straight days, believes that sexual deprivation and not satisfying a spouse within the lovemaking department are sinful.
“I think one day we will be held accountable regarding how we satisfied our spouse’s sexually,” Young told The Christian Post in an interview Friday.
“I would, in fact, off of Romans 12:1 say that sex is even an act of worship because Romans 12 said we can present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is a reasonable act of worship.”
Young teaches in his new bestselling book, Sexperiment: 7 Days to Lasting Intimacy with Your Spouse, that depriving a spouse of sexual intimacy is a sin. …Read More!
This is a very wonderfully passionate sermon clip where Voddie Baucham preaches on the cultures wars, the relevance of preserving the sanctity of marriage and the lace that binds everything together…the centrality of the gospel in our lives.
Now you know why I got carried away and kept screaming for him to preach on. 🙂 …Read More!
Trip Lee is a lovable Christian musician who gets asked the same question over and over. (Seeing that he got married at the age of twenty one). This is what he thinks of it:
Yesterday I made a late night stop at the store to grab a few things and I had a very interesting conversation with the cashier. We made small talk as she scanned my items, and then she offered me a discount card but I told her my wife already had one. That’s when the conversation got fun. I know this conversation all too well because I’ve had it many times before. It goes something like this…
Person: What!? You’re married?
Me: Yeah I’ve been married for two and a half amazing years.
Person: How old are you? You look like a baby.
Me: I’m twenty three.
Person: You’re so young! Why in the world would you do that?
Me: Why wouldn’t I?
In 2009, I got married at the barely legal and barely respectable age of twenty one years old. During my courtship, engagement, and short marriage, I’ve been asked time and time again questions like, “Why get married so young? What’s the rush?”, and my personal favorite, “You should have waited and enjoyed your life!” …Read More!
If you glean your moral precepts from newspapers surveys, here is a little something for you…
Couples who live together before getting married could be behind the falling divorce rate, research suggests.
Researchers believe the large rise in girlfriends and boyfriends cohabiting could be acting as a ‘firewall’ stopping unstable relationships deteriorating and ending in divorce years later. …Read More!
Hardly a week goes by without Ted appearing on television. Hoping from endless talk show to talk show, he has also launched a reality television show about the gospel. No sorry about -you guessed right-himself. At every turn he seems to be drawing in the ratings for anyone who is willing to have a pandering prophet. Not only are non-Christians raising eyebrows at his antics. Why, wasn’t this the once a herculean stalwart for conservative Christian values? Now he has apparently back peddled on some of his original beliefs. This metamorphosis can best be described by Ted himself:
In a cover story for gay glossy The Advocate, Rev. Ted Haggard now says he favors gay marriage.
Haggard is the evangelical pastor who ran afoul of his Denver congregation after admitting to a three-year pay-for-sex affair with male prostitute Mike Jones. Immediately after Jones reveled their sexual association in 2006, Haggard denied being gay, saying only that he had committed “sexual immorality.” Since that time, Haggard has said he’s undergone intensive counseling. On February 6, 2007, Tim Ralph pronounced Haggard “cured,” adding that Haggard is “completely heterosexual.” Read More
I was rudely awoken this morning by my wife. It being Thanksgiving in America this week I thought we mere mortals in the rest of the world would at least get a wink of sleep and tranquillity as America feasted on stuffed turkey. Not so. Well, my beautiful wife showed me this headline article that suggests that apparently over one million husbands and wives in England should now head once again up or rather down the aisle to repeat their marriage vows. Yeah, exciting stuff. But why? Was God asleep when they were married and joined in Holy matrimony before Him? No, apparently Church of England vicars have not been choosing their words right for the last thirty years: Read More
A Twisted Crown of Thorns ® 