(By Mateen Elass, posted on his blog). As America mourns and seeks answers to make sense of the carnage inflicted on innocent tourists in Las Vegas, some have been quick with offering solutions to prevent similar slaughters in the future. Unfortunately, such outcomes will never be possible, even if every gun were magically removed from…
(By Mateen Elass, on his personal blog). There’s a new captain at the helm, and a new course plotted for the voyage, but the good ship PCUSA continues to sink. Today, the Office of the General Assembly released its annual comparative statistical report for the denomination, highlighting numbers for 2016. Once again, it was not a…
By Mateen Elass, on his personal blog. Due to ongoing reverberations from the June 2016 PCUSA General Assembly where a “Muslim partner” led the gathered Presbyterians in a prayer to Allah seeking their conversion to Islam, newly appointed Stated Clerk J. Herbert Nelson, Jr. has published a defense of the denomination’s position on interfaith relations,…
By Mateen Elass, posted on his personal blog. My last two blogs apparently caused a bit of a ripple in the world of liberal PCUSA leaders. I learned on July 1 that General Presbyter Mike Cole, executive of the New Covenant Presbytery (whom I have met in the past and found to be a congenial…
By Mateen Elass, on his personal blog. Two days ago I reported on the travesty which occurred last Saturday in Portland at the 222nd General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA. Stated Clerk Gradye Parsons had asked some of his denominational employees to fashion a short worship service to commemorate the lives of shooting victims…
By Mateen Elass, on his personal blog. The Presbyterian Church (USA) has hammered one more nail into its own coffin — one wonders whether there is space for any further nails. Last Saturday, at the opening business session of its 222nd General Assembly in Portland, OR, the denominational leadership orchestrated an event which denied the gospel and lordship of…
By Mateen Elass, posted on his blog site. Two weeks ago, Voice of the Truth (the ministry with which I am associated) received a shipment of 3,000 New Testaments in Amharic, which is part of the Semitic language family, and the main language of Ethiopia. Last week, on our trip to Pennsylvania for an Arab…
The 2015 Comparative Statistics show another dramatic decrease in the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s membership. In 2015, the PCUSA lost 95,107 members, bringing total membership down to 1,572,660. That’s a 5.70 decrease from the 2014 membership number — 1,667,767. The denomination lost 92,433 members that year. The PCUSA’s membership has been in continuous decline since the…
By Mateen Elass, on his personal blog. It’s a Brave New World. No longer will the members of Presbyterian Church (USA) have to seek out God’s will together to know the mission of the Church. Instead, the Stated Clerk Search Committee has nominated a “priest and prophet” to lead the denomination to utopia. I will reserve personal…
By Mateen Elass, on his personal blog. Five years ago, I wrote a blog about the PCUSA decision to normalize homosexuality and predicted that one of the fall-outs of this error would be the inability of PCUSA missionaries to reach the Muslim world. Since Muslims are taught within their own Scriptures that homosexual behavior is…