Christianity Today passes along a bit of encouraging news — “Family Christian Stores Buys Itself, Pledges to Give 100% of Profits to Widows and Orphans“:
The largest chain of Christian retail stores in America, Family Christian Stores, has bought itself from its private equity owners, reports Publisher’s Weekly. …
PW’s Lynn Garrett reports that the new owners, FCS’s management team plus three Atlanta-based investors, “pledge to contribute 100 percent of [FCS] profits to Christian ministries serving widows and orphans in the U.S. and abroad.”
Cool. I only hope that when they refer to “ministries serving widows and orphans” they don’t mean the sort of thing suggested in this comment to an earlier post from Christianity Today:
Adoption has always been the answer to orphans. The problem today is there are not enough babies thanks to the legal murder of babies.
That’s someone calling herself “Original Anna,” neatly summarizing what she and many anti-abortion Christians believe is “the problem today” with orphans — we aren’t producing enough of them to meet demand.
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This is not an encouraging story. But from what we have seen over the years from the religious right, it is not a surprising story:
Lisa Biron is associated with the Alliance Defending Freedom, a group of lawyers who, according to their website, are committed to keeping “the door open for the spread of the Gospel” by advocating for “religious liberty, the sanctity of life, and marriage and family.” In Concord, she worked with the ADF in defending a Pentecostal Church on Mountain Road in its tax fight against the city.
She recently served on the board of directors at Mount Zion Christian Schools in Manchester, according to the school’s headmaster.
On Biron’s Facebook page, which was taken down in recent weeks, she had listed the Bible as her favorite book.
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Perfectnumber628 asks, “Are we allowed to question abstinence?”
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: “Allowed” by whom? The folks who insist you’re not “allowed” to question abstinence — or to question anything else they tell you either — should not be allowed to dictate what you are and are not allowed to do.
The evangelical Powers That Be will never allow you to live your faith. They will only allow you to live theirs, and you will never, ever be able to live their faith to their satisfaction. So live yours instead.
Worrying about whether or not you are satisfying people who can never be satisfied is a waste of time. Worrying about not upsetting people who are perpetually upset is also a waste of time.
If you have questions, then ask questions. And don’t worry about permission from the Powers That Be.
But then perfectnumber628 already figured that out, as she writes:
God gives us freedom. [God] doesn’t want us to live in fear. So let’s follow God and ask those questions.
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