xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
Britain’s Church Mission Society, with 200 missionaries around the world, decided recently that a place that needs one the most is the town of Telford, England (population 150,000), where fewer than one in a hundred residents attends an Anglican church. (Said a CMS spokesman, “These days the CMS goes to the hard places and takes on the hard cases.”) (The Church of England might have a larger problem, according to a July survey by Bangor University researchers: 3 percent of its clergy doubts the existence of God, which works out to nearly 300 non-believing ministers.)
A growing number of historical sites in Mecca (perhaps even including the home of the Prophet Muhammad) may soon fall to urban renewal as developers plan skyscrapers with stores and condominiums, according to a July Reuters dispatch. (Ironically, many devout Wahhabi Muslims support the demolition, hoping to prevent people from worshipping such “sacred” buildings instead of concentrating on their proper duties in Islam. Those Wahhabis view only the Grand Mosque, which is the destination for the annual hajj pilgrimages, as untouchable.)
The New Born Fellowship Christian Center in Rochester, N.Y., recently adopted a several-weeks-long “Spiritual Warfare” theme that featured its pastor, Warren Meeks, delivering sermons while in military fatigues (and asking congregants to wear fatigues, too), to battle the spirits opposing U.S. troops overseas and those challenging American youth with drugs and gangs. Meeks also brought in an Army missile, to help with the message, according to a report on WHAM-TV.
In June, the Arab Balad party went to court in Haifa, Israel, challenging ultra-nationalist Jews of the Gush Katif settlement, who were virulently opposing the government’s mandatory withdrawal from Gaza. However, the Balads’ complaint had little to do with sovereignty or religion. The party has for years used orange as its organizing theme color and filed the lawsuit to make the upstart Gush Katif stop using orange in its own materials.
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or [email protected] or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.) NEWS OF THE WEIRD
