FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Friday, June 12, 2015

Save America’s Churches, Inc. is proud to announce the acquisition of another endangered landmark church in the United States. Founded in 1958, the Greater Church of Philadelphia resides in an historic 122 year old building located at 2017-23 East Allegheny Avenue in the Kensington section of the city.

Slated for foreclosure in 2014, SAC stepped in and halted the legal proceedings to start negotiations to save the church. The property was appraised by the County Tax Assessor at $2.275 M with a total indebtedness of $508,681.31.

After 10 months of negotiations, Dr. Wendell Hutchins of SAC reached a settlement to save the church for $51,150.75. The agreement was signed on the 12th day of June, 2015 putting stewardship of the church in the hands of Christian Pastor Joel Barnaby.

Congratulations to Save America’s Churches and Pastor Barnaby on their heroic efforts to save and preserve this historic Christian landmark for future generations to come.

Save America’s Churches, Inc. is a non-profit organization based out of Chattanooga, Tennessee with a mission to raise the funds to purchase every shuttered and foreclosed Christian church building in America and place God-called, Bible-believing missionaries back in these churches.

For more information about how you can help, please visit www.saveamericaschurches.com or contact us at 1-844-SAVECHURCHES (1-844-728-3248).

Noted Author Malcolm Gladwell, in his intellectual adventure “The Tipping Point” investigates the ideas that little changes have big effects and that any one of those changes can be the incendiary means which leads to one dramatic moment when everything can change all at once. That moment is called…the TIPPING POINT!

Robert H. Bork, former Solicitor General and Attorney General of the United States, wrote in his book “Slouching Towards Gomorrah” – “the distinctive virtues of American life, indeed the distinctive features of Western civilization, are in peril in ways not previously seen. We are sliding into a modern, high-tech version of the Dark Ages, and we are doing it to ourselves.”

Even the cavalier liar Lucifer could not have dreamed that America’s spiritual capitulation would be so swift. Never has a nation on Earth embraced his rebellion so easily and submitted to his hell-hounds so assuredly.

Today America is eating, drinking, & indulging in every type of sinful pleasure. Her appetite is the coin with which she buys her eternity and for the most part, Satan is the lord of her good deals. America’s land is covered in the blood of her own holocaust; she has forgotten that she was Christianity’s brightest outpost, the world’s beacon of godly promise & hope! As a nation, we have bought our leisure and fleshly indulgence from a score of promising demons until now… we like the Wise Man can lament, “nothing has worked… and all is vanity” (Eccl. 12:8).

Today our dollar is weaker. Our national debt has ballooned from 250 billion dollars in 1994 to over 17 trillion in 2014.

Today our nation’s immoral proclivities make Gomorrah blush; our national decadence prevails in every facet of life: Politics, Entertainment, Music, Television, Hollywood, and Sports.

As a result, America’s Christian Churches are suffering decline. Her Christian pulpits are being silenced one congregation at a time; pews empty & lamps cold.

The ancient Judeo-Christian landmarks that once noted the indefatigable fortitude of our founding fathers’ faith have been besmirched by a Secularist army who wishes to alter America’s story; rewriting her history & cannibalizing her faith-filled glory!

America is at a Tipping Point. She is under siege. She is being mercilessly attacked, both from within and without.

Not only does she suffer from the corrosive canker of a debauched soul, but she seems to have lost her will to stand against hell’s assaulting tyranny.

False teachers checker our nation’s landscape. World leaders who once touted their Christian service and love for the Bible as electable traits, now embrace the Koran.

On August 30, 2014 our 39th President Jimmy Carter told the Islamic Society of North America, “The principles of Allah are the key to peace in the Middle East“, demonstrating incontrovertible evidence that some of our leaders are unequivocal betrayers of Truth!

Islam has the entire world civilization as its target! Islam seeks world domination through its ideology of holy war and martyrdom. Its followers believe that the tenets of their religion are best served by inciting mayhem and murder, bombings, kidnappings, mass executions, beheadings, bloodshed and terrorism wherever they are permitted residence.

In the not too distant past, world leaders who represent Islam met in Chicago to ratify a strategy to secure worship sites all over America in the hopes that they could overwhelm our American culture with the invasion of their religious influence and tyrannical power.

However, the words of Jesus still live. After Peter declared Jesus to be the Christ, the Son of the living God, Jesus said, “…the gates of Hell shall not prevail against the church.” The Church that Jesus built is invincible! The imagery of this passage is often misunderstood. Jesus was not suggesting that the Church would be impervious to attacks from Hell. The word “gates” is not suggestive of offensive weaponry; but rather a word used to describe a barricade. So Jesus, when speaking of the strategy of Hell, was stating that the “gates of Hell” were more like a prison, and Hell’s plot would be that it would try to contain or imprison the Church.

We will not be contained, nor will we withdraw; but we pledge to give our all – our very lives, our time, our talent and our treasures toward the furtherance of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the preservation of Christianity and the Saving of Christian Churches in America.

LOUISVILLE—The growing trend of former church buildings being turned into mosques and Islamic centers has reached Kentucky’s largest city where even some once-thriving Southern Baptist facilities are now occupied by Muslims.

“On a trip to England a few years ago, I recall seeing dozens of churches that had become mosques and wondering how it could happen there; now it’s happening here,” said Paul Chitwood, executive director of the Kentucky Baptist Convention.

Todd Robertson, pastor of Antioch Baptist Church in Louisville, said the religious makeup of the Bible Belt is rapidly changing with declining membership in many Christian congregations and growing participation in Islam and other religions.

“We have at least three former Baptist churches in Louisville that are no longer Baptist churches—two are mosques and one is a Sikh temple, and that’s a reality that’s troubling for many of us,” he said.

Robertson is urging Kentucky Baptists to “think strategically” to find ways to revitalize shrinking congregations and to protect the assets of those that end up closing. He is among those leaders calling for churches that have weakened to the point of closing to donate their buildings and property for church plants rather than putting them up for sale.

In Kentucky and throughout the Southern Baptist Convention, the number of Christian converts has been in steady decline in recent years, while other religions have been experiencing rapid growth. Louisville, for example, now has more than 20 mosques.

“This should be a call to action for Kentucky Baptists to get serious about telling others about Jesus,” Chitwood said.

Since becoming head of the KBC three years ago, Chitwood has preached the need for church revitalization. He has put together a troop of regional consultants to work with local churches on growth strategies, while also embarking on an ambitious push to plant hundreds of new churches across the state.

The needs are obvious: The number of new believers being baptized fell from 14,984 in 2012 to 13,970 in 2013, a decline of roughly 1,000.

“We are on the brink of a massive transfer of kingdom assets,” Robertson said. “I’m talking about property—buildings and things like that—of churches that, in their heyday of the ’50s and ’60s, were exploding with growth.”

Robertson said many of those churches are now on the brink of closing. Some, he said, will end up throwing their building on the market “and having it bought by who knows who for who knows what.”

Former church buildings typically need only minor renovations to be used as mosques and Islamic centers and are generally less expensive than constructing new ones from the ground up.

“We have to face the reality of it,” Robertson said. “We’ve got to look ahead and think how we are going to strategically address this issue so that we continue to leverage the assets that God has blessed us with for the sake of the kingdom so that the gospel will continue to be proclaimed.”

Robertson warned that unless Kentucky Baptists think strategically about how to change the tide of shrinking congregations, they’re going to see increasing numbers of church buildings turned into places of worship for other religions.

“Now, I know they’re just buildings, and that’s not the church, but yet I see them in the grander scheme as kingdom assets,” he said. “I think we should have a very different mindset about what happens to those assets.”

Source: Kentucky Baptist Convention (see article here)

Growing up in 1960’s America, it was normal for life to revolve around the local church. My, how times have changed.

On a trip to Memphis, just this past week, I was stunned as I viewed three churches that had recently closed their doors. Unfortunately, what had once been thriving venues for sharing the gospel, were darkened, lifeless structures.

The sad truth is that Muslim organizations will probably attempt to buy these structures because it affords them the ability to immediately begin Islamic worship services and avoid the strenuous zoning process usually required for new churches.

It is time for Christians to get serious about Christianity and the local church. The population of the USA is exponentially increasing. We do not need to close churches. We must find a way to save America’s existing churches and open new ones to evangelize this nation.