Belief in afterlife ages well. As Americans get older, their confidence in the afterlife increases, according to a recent survey of people over 50 conducted by AARP, the advocacy group for seniors. Seventy-three percent of older people believe in life after death, and two-thirds of those believers say that confidence has grown with age, according to the survey. While 86 percent of the people who responded say there is a heaven, and nine in 10 of them believe they will go there, they are less sure about other people. People who believe in heaven say an average of 64 percent of others will get there, too. Among those who say they believe in heaven, 29 percent believe admittance is based on faith in Jesus Christ, 25 percent believe “good people” go to heaven, and 10 percent think everyone will go there.
Committee recommends Haggard's successor. New Life Church, the Colorado megachurch that lost its senior pastor, Ted Haggard, to a sex and drug scandal last fall, expects to have a new leader soon. Brady Boyd, an associate senior pastor at Gateway Church in Southlake, near Fort Worth, has been chosen by the pastoral selection committee as their nominee to lead the Colorado Springs church. Boyd, 40, previously was senior pastor of Trinity Fellowship Church in Hereford. Boyd was slated to begin spending three Sundays, starting Aug. 12, with the congregation, during which time they will have opportunities to get acquainted with him before they vote Aug. 27 on whether to accept him as pastor.
Lutherans defer bid to change clergy standards. Efforts to eliminate a celibacy requirement for gay Lutheran ministers failed at a recent churchwide assembly, but delegates urged bishops to refrain from disciplining sexually active homosexual pastors. After five days of debate among delegates from the 5-million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, voting members deferred any changes in clergy standards until a special task force on sexuality releases its report just prior to the next assembly, in 2009.
No sanctuary from cyberspace. According to a new 20-city survey on “email addiction” released by AOL, Washington, D.C, is the most afflicted city in the nation. But Atlanta led the way in checking e-mail in church, with 22 percent confessing to peeking at their portable device during services, according to the survey. Houston and Denver tied for second in the checking-email-in-church category, with 19 percent in both cities confessing to the deed. Washington placed third with 18 percent, followed closely by Los Angeles (17 percent), Sacramento and Phoenix (15 percent) and Tampa (13 percent). AOL says the survey, which was conducted online, included 4,025 respondents 13 and older from 20 cities around the country. They measured a city's number of email addicts by the percentage of residents who have more than one email account; how many times they check their email each day; how often people check personal emails while at work; the percentage of people who e-mail more than once a day while on vacation; the time spent writing or reading email; and the percentage who admit to an email addiction.