“I must affirm definition of marriage as between one man and one woman,” said Jodi Craiglow, of the Miami Valley Presbytery in Ohio. She directly addressed gay PCUSA members, saying, “As much as my heart breaks for your pain and frustration, I must simply hold to the standard of the God I love.”

General Convention is also notable for its sheer ostentation and carnival atmosphere. For seven straight nights, lavish cocktail parties spilled into pricey steakhouses, where bishops could use their diocesan funds to order bottles of the finest wines.

Evangelicals were entrepreneurial and started new churches, while Mainline Protestantism “doesn’t value entrepreneurship.” The “negative side” is that the evangelical world is “almost all male” dominated with “loud white guys like me,”

Pregnancy help centers have expanded dramatically, with Care Net's affiliates growing from about 550 in 1999 to 1,130 in 2010. Meanwhile, abortion clinics have shrunk from about 2,200 in 1991 to 689 in 2011

The country’s most visible Christian entrepreneur is Stephen Tong, founder of the Indonesian Reformed Evangelical Church, which despite its name has much in common with the Pentecostal worship style. In 2008, the church opened its Messiah Cathedral in Jakarta, a classic megachurch seating 6,000, a grandiose structure that would not look out of place in Seoul or Singapore.

“I know some officers who’ve been ordered by their commanders not to speak to the press, whereas those who have been supportive of the policy are brought out before the press. We have a double standard.” -- R. Crews

Let me try this illustration. You are trying to impress someone, maybe a girl you want to date. However, your mother insists you take your ugly and socially inept cousin along with you…You know that if you don't cut the cords from this cousin you ain't going to get the girl. Of course, if and when you do get the girl your cousin is still your cousin. You can't hide him forever.

The portion where Dr. Butterfield is the most critical (and appropriately so) is where she helps us see where our spiritual formation is too often superficial and how the church frequently allows us to frolic in our biblical immaturity.

Conference is being organized for October 27 and 28, 2012. Dr. Wiley Smith and Dr. Sharon Kuhn will be attending as family physicians, but they would love to have a contingent of other specialists, pharmacists, nurses, and the like to come with them to speak. Present students would be welcome too.

We dare not try to cut Christ in pieces, as if we could receive him deliverer from sin's guilt but not from its dominion, or as Savior but not as Lord. Nor can we cut ourselves in pieces, severing our body from our soul—as if we could give our heart to Jesus and keep the title deed to our body. It's precisely because our bodies are too important to the biblical drama that they cannot be exempted from biblical discipleship.