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CULTIVATE MINISTRIES NEWSLETTER…..May  2019

●P.O. Box 35038, ABQ, NM 87176●
719-630-1222
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Greetings in Jesus…!

I just want to say thank you so much to those of you who continue to help keep this ministry going through your prayers and support. I also want to thank you for your notes of encouragement they help more than you know. You guys heroes of this ministry in so many ways every day.

Christian Holidays Highlight Christian Persecution

The horrible bombings on Easter highlighted in many ways the state of Christianity worldwide and that state is ever increasing persecution of Christians. I found the following articles very interesting.

Sri Lanka bombings part of the ugly anti-Christian pattern around globe

John L. Allen Jr., Special to The Washington Post.

“It is shocking that people who gathered to celebrate Easter together were consciously targeted in this malicious attack,” read a statement from German Chancellor Angela Merkel in response to the bombing of three Christian churches and three high-end hotels in Sri Lanka that killed at least 321 people and injured hundreds more.

Yet the shocking thing about the carnage is that it is not shocking — and instead forms part of an ugly, predictable global pattern.

On major Christian feast days, somewhere in the world, some number of Christians are likely to be killed for no reason other than that they chose to attend religious services. Because Christmas and Easter are the holiest days on the Christian calendar, churches tend to be especially full, presenting ripe targets for anti-Christian hatred.

In 2012, a car bomb exploded near a church in Kaduna, Nigeria, while Easter was being celebrated, killing 41 people in an attack suspected of being the work of the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram. In 2016, 75 people died and more than 300 were injured when bombs exploded in a park in Lahore, Pakistan, as Christians were celebrating after Easter services. The following year, Coptic Christians in Egypt were forced to scale back Easter celebrations after bombings at two churches on Palm Sunday the week before, which opens the Easter observances, killed more than 40 people.

A similar pattern applies to Christmas. In 2011, for example, Boko Haram claimed responsibility for bombings across Nigeria on the holiday, including an attack on St. Theresa Catholic Church in Madalla, on the outskirts of Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja, that left 37 people dead and 57 injured.
Christians today are the most persecuted religious community on the planet, in part because there are simply more of them than any other religious group. Thirty-one percent of the planet’s population is Christian, according to Pew Research Center, compared with Islam’s 24 percent.

Of the world’s 2.2 billion Christians, roughly two-thirds live outside the developed West. The majority are poor, and many live in rough neighborhoods where religious freedom is more honored in the breach than the observance. Often, those Christians also belong to ethnic, linguistic and cultural minorities, meaning they’re doubly or triply at risk.

Estimates of how many Christians are killed yearly around the world because of their faith vary widely, from thousands to the tens of thousands, but it is certain that at any hour of the day, a Christian somewhere is being martyred. Much of this violence, though, occurs in places the Western media typically overlook.

Christians are hardly the only endangered religious believers, as indicated by the recent shootings in mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, which left 50 people dead. Sri Lanka’s state minister for defense says the government’s investigation indicates that the Easter bombings, for which the Islamic State claimed responsibility, were launched in retaliation for the Christchurch attack.

Note. The above statement that the attacks being retaliation to the Christchurch attack is not true because the Sri Lanka government was warned of the bombing plans in Sri Lanka by other countries well before the Christchurch incident happened.

It is important to note that the threat to Christians doesn’t come exclusively from Islamist radicalism. Extremist currents of all stripes, both state and nonstate actors, frequently target Christians and their churches for a bewildering cluster of motives — including a mistaken identification of Christianity with the West and Western foreign policy.

A responsible approach to this human rights scourge by public authorities would feature systematic education in religious tolerance, including debunking stereotypes about Christianity being “foreign” — in the Middle East, for instance, the roots of Christianity reach back centuries before Islam. It would also involve aggressive security measures at Christian sites on major feast days, given the possibility of violence.

Until such a mobilization occurs, Christians will continue to be forced to celebrate Christmas and Easter in the grim and certain knowledge that some of their fellow celebrants around the world will not live to see the next day.

John L. Allen Jr. is the editor of the Catholic-news website Crux and the author of “The Global War on Christians.” This column was originally published by The Washington Post.

Sri Lanka: Why was it so hard to say the victims were Christians?

By John Stonestreet and Roberto Rivera

Christian Post

The death toll from the Easter Sunday terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka continued to climb all week. As of Thursday, the official count was 359 dead.

Reading and listening to reports about the attacks, it’s apparent that the number of victims in Sri Lanka isn’t the only uncertainty. Many people, especially politicians and media outlets, seem to be having trouble deciding how to identify the victims. I don’t mean individual names. I mean identifying what the large majority of victims had in common besides being Sri Lankan: They were Christians.

The default identifier by left-leaning politicians on Twitter was “Easter worshipers.” Seeing a phrase that hardly anyone ever uses repeated by so many was, well, just weird. In fact, when I first saw the trending “Easter worshipers” controversy blow up on Twitter, I wondered aloud if this was a redo of the made-up controversy over Starbuck’s red cups at Christmas from a few years ago. Like then, I wondered if a few isolated examples were being blown out of proportion.

I don’t know who originally decided to use the expression “Easter worshiper,” but it definitely caught on. So much so that it almost looks like there must have been a memo somewhere advising people to use the expression instead of calling the victims “Christians.”

President Obama tweeted “The attacks on tourists and Easter worshipers in Sri Lanka are an attack on humanity.” Leaving aside the fact that Christians, not “humanity” writ large, were the ones attacked, it’s still an odd choice of words.

Even odder was Secretary Hillary Clinton’s response: “On this holy weekend for many faiths, we must stand united against hatred and violence. I’m praying for everyone affected by today’s horrific attacks on Easter worshipers and travelers in Sri Lanka.”

“Holy weekend for many faiths?” OK, Jews celebrated Passover on Saturday, but as the New York Times podcast “The Daily” pointed out from the start, the group behind the attacks targeted Catholic churches and attacked on Easter Sunday, which is holy to only one faith: Christianity. But even they struggled to identify the victims as Christians, preferring instead to call them “non-Muslims” on a number of occasions. And more than one NPR program I heard described how the rampant anti-Muslim environment of Sri Lanka contributed to the attacks.

Even if we dismiss the odd victim nomenclature as an anomaly, many commentators talked as if it were the buildings instead of the people inside them, and their beliefs, that were the terrorists’ target.

This seeming denial or at least ignoring the fact that victims were targeted because they were Christians is so odd that it prompts the question “Why?

As Ross Douthat of the New York Times helpfully explained, at least part of the answer is that many Western commentators have trouble seeing Christianity and Christians as anything but privileged. However true or not that may be of Western Christians — and now is not the time to debate that — the events in Sri Lanka are, to paraphrase the opening line of Rick Warren’s “The Purpose-Driven Life,” not about us.

It’s about, as Douthat put it, “Christians like the murdered first communicants in Sri Lanka, or the jailed pastors in China, or the Coptic martyrs of North Africa, or any of the millions of non-Western Christians who live under constant threat of persecution.”

The reluctance to call them “Christians” trivializes their suffering; obviously, not in God’s sight or in ours, but in the eyes of the non-Christian world. It’s as if they died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, like someone who gets run over by a bus while crossing the street.
Whatever gripes you have with American Christians, in much of the world Christians “live under the constant threat of persecution” and, as we saw this past Sunday, even death. Why? Because they are Christians!

As I’ve said before, the failure to do more to protect them is a disgrace. And failing to call them by their proper name, “Christians,” adds gratuitous insult to already-grievous injury.

Same Number, Same Site, NEW Address

The Phone number will remain the same as always
(719) 630-1222 for Calls, Voicemail & Text messages

Please do leave a voice message when you call.

The website cultivateministies.org will remain the same as well
The e-mail address is now mail@cultivateministries.org

Please let me know if we need to update your address or other information.

THE NEED FOR DISCERNMENT IN THE LAST DAYS

We are told in the last days that false prophets and false teachers will increase and that deception will be pervasive in the world and in the church. What are the new spirituality movements and methods that are consistently springing up and entering the church?

Discernment is the need of the hour for our survival and keeping the faith of biblical Christianity. In this lecture series, we use some of the “worst” examples to show the dumbing down of the church in discernment, which has resulted in the church becoming deceived. We will learn where and from whom this originated in modern times. Revelations that contradict the Bible, Dominionist goals of the New Apostles and Prophets, people claiming to go to heaven, prophetic interpretation of tattoos and piercings, New Age healing, drunken stupors, and becoming frozen and silent. What is passing for revelation and Bible teaching is astounding. We need to understand what is taking place and stand firmly in our faith. How do we identify and refute these deceptions? How can we protect ourselves and others?

The Bible tells us to grow in discernment, so we can mature and help others who are easily deceived. Being grounded in the core doctrines of the faith and building on them makes one immune to the many deceptions that surround us today. This two-part lecture series will show us why we need discernment and help us learn how to become a discerning Christian.

We are airing and making this 2 part DVD series The Need for Discernment in the Last Days available this month for a gift of any amount.

50 Reasons Why The Rapture is Close
Dave Reagan

Dave Reagan is one of the top Bible prophecy experts in the nation, and he takes you on an incredible journey through 50 Bible prophecies in this DVD and how each is being, or has been, fulfilled. Jesus IS coming soon! This is a great DVD to get fired up with and pass around!

A recent book by Allan Walker titled Signs of The Times details and updates much of the information Dave Reagan covers in this DVD. The scripture contains 109 specific prophecies from the Old Testament which were literally fulfilled during Christ’s first coming. The revelation of the second coming of Christ is one of the most important and most frequently mentioned doctrines of the New Testament. One out of every twenty-five verses in the New Testament refers either to the rapture of the church or to Christ’s coming to reign over the world. Current events are fitting into the precise pattern outlined by the prophets of the Bible. This DVD contains the original presentation and an updated one by Dave Reagan as well.

This is not available on the resource list and will be available again this month. Get 50 Reasons Why the Rapture Is Close for a gift of any amount this month.

STILL READY TO REBUILD:
Current Plans to Rebuild the Temple

by Dr. Randall Price

If you watched the 50 Reasons Rapture’s Close DVD you know the Temple is a key event in the end times.

What is happening today to rebuild the Temple? 25 years ago Dr. Price and Thomas Ice wrote the book, Ready to Rebuild, describing for the first time the plans by Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple and how this fits with the prophetic Scriptures that speak of a last days Temple before the return of the Messiah.

Since that time the Temple Mount has been a continual source of conflict, making it today the main religious impediment to any peace process in the Middle East. Despite the ban by the Muslim Waqf on Jewish prayers on the site by Jews or Christians, Jewish plans have continued to recover the site and rebuild the Temple.

This presentation by Dr. Price, first given at the Pre-Trib Research Center conference in Dallas, TX, explains why Jews have not yet accomplished their goal, but also reveals the latest attempts to make possible a soon rebuilding of the Temple. Dr, Price shows recent archaeological discoveries related to the Temple and its priesthood, political changes that affect the status of the Temple Mount, and the new work of organizations such as The Temple Institute to prepare for the resumption of the sacrificial system. The conclusion is that the Jewish people are “Still Ready to Rebuild.”

We are airing and making this DVD available this month for a gift of any amount, just ask for the Still Ready to Rebuild DVD.

THE FUTURE OF FOOD

This month we will air an expose of the award winning documentary; The Future of Food.

The Future of Food offers an in-depth investigation into the disturbing truth behind the unlabeled, patented, genetically engineered foods that have quietly filled grocery store shelves.

From the prairies of Saskatchewan, Canada to the fields of Oaxaca, Mexico, this film gives a voice to farmers whose lives and livelihoods have been negatively impacted by this new technology. The health implications, government policies and push towards globalization are all part of the reason why many people are alarmed by the introduction of genetically altered crops into our food supply.

Shot on location in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, The Future of Food examines the complex web of market and political forces that are changing what we eat as huge multinational corporations seek to control the world’s food system. The film also explores alternatives to large-scale industrial agriculture, placing organic and sustainable agriculture as real solutions to the farm crisis. (88 minutes)

This DVD The Future of Food is one you want to share with friends and family and will also be available this month for a gift of any amount.

“RED FLAG LAWS” ALLOW GUN CONFISACATION FOR UNSPECIFIED REASONS

Colorado became the 15th state to enact a “red flag” law that authorizes court orders forbidding gun possession by people deemed a threat to themselves or others. The new law, which has drawn strong criticism from Second Amendment advocates, including some county sheriffs, illustrates the civil liberties concerns raised by such attempts to identify and disarm people prone to suicide or homicide.

The law allows a long list of people, including law enforcement officers, current or former household members, and people related by blood, marriage, or adoption, to seek a temporary “extreme risk protection order” (ERPO) against someone they believe “poses a significant risk of causing personal risk to self or others in the near future.” The standard of proof at this stage, when the “respondent” does not have an opportunity to respond, is a “preponderance of the evidence,” meaning he is more likely than not to pose a significant risk.

Depending on what counts as a “significant risk,” the probability that the subject of a temporary order actually would have used a gun to hurt himself or someone else may be quite low. If 10 percent is significant, for example, that probability might be around 5 percent (51 percent times 10 percent). So even if judges are weighing the evidence with such precision, they will be taking away the Second Amendment rights of people who almost certainly would not have committed suicide or murder.

In practice, judges will be inclined to err on the side of what they take to be caution. When the only evidence comes from someone who believes the respondent poses a threat, judges will rarely, if ever, decline to issue a temporary ERPO. The possible downside of rejecting a petition—the death of the respondent or someone else—will weigh heavily on the judge’s mind, while the temporary deprivation of the subject’s constitutional rights will seem trivial by comparison.

A temporary ERPO lasts for up to 14 days, at which point the judge has to schedule a hearing where the respondent finally has a chance to challenge the claims against him. The respondent has a right to a court-appointed attorney if he cannot afford legal representation or would rather not pay for it. If he does not show up at the hearing, the court can issue an ERPO without any adversarial process.

To obtain an ERPO at this stage, the petitioner must present “clear and convincing evidence” that the respondent poses a significant risk. Unlike with the temporary, ex parte order, that risk need not be “in the near future.” The judge may consider “any relevant evidence,” including, but not limited to, recent threats or acts of violence, violations of civil protective orders, violations of previous ERPOs, criminal convictions involving violence or cruelty to animals, unlawful or reckless use of firearms, a “history of stalking,” drug or alcohol abuse, recent acquisition of a firearm, a job requiring the respondent to carry a firearm, and “any available mental health evaluation or chemical dependency evaluation.” While some of these factors are clearly relevant, others, such as illegal drug use or the purchase of a firearm, may have little or nothing to do with the question of whether the subject poses a significant threat to himself or others. Furthermore, the judge is authorized to consider literally any other fact or allegation that he deems relevant.

If the judge issues an ERPO, it lasts for 364 days unless the subject seeks early termination and shows by clear and convincing evidence that he does not pose a significant threat. That case will be hard to make, especially since “significant risk” is undefined and judges will not want to take the blame should something terrible happen after they terminate an order. The petitioner has a right to seek an extension of the order before it expires, based on the same standard of proof.

The law gives the respondent a civil cause of action against someone who files a “false or malicious” ERPO petition, allowing him to recover damages, costs, and attorney fees. But knowing falsehoods or maliciousness will be difficult to prove, and in any case the more likely scenario is one in which the petitioner sincerely but mistakenly believes the respondent poses a “significant risk,” whatever that means. With everyone from ex-girlfriends and former roommates to grandparents, in-laws, and second cousins empowered to seek ERPOs, the opportunities for maliciousness or honest error are multiplied.

The basic problem, as with other “red flag” laws, is that the process is rigged against the respondent from the beginning. Once a temporary, ex parte ERPO is issued (as it probably will be), there is apt to be a bias in favor of extending it and against terminating it early, since the respondent already has been deemed a threat (even if the standard of proof was initially weak), and the possibly deadly consequences of letting him possess guns will loom large. Given that bias, the indeterminacy of “significant risk,” and the difficulty of predicting a respondent’s behavior, it seems inevitable that the vast majority of people who lose their constitutional rights under this sort of law will pose no real threat to themselves or others.

Note over 25,000 people were stripped of their right to bear arms under these laws last year.

INNOCENCE BETRAYED
The TRUE History of Gun Control

170,000,000. That’s the number of civilians that have been murdered by their own governments in the 20th century alone.170,000,000 men, women, and children who were defenseless to protect themselves.170,000,000 victims of gun control.

You have never seen anything like Innocents Betrayed, in this DVD you will learn how governments have historically deprived people of firearm and then wiped them from the face of the earth. 58 minutes that will open eyes. Destroy myths. Change minds. Save lives. Innocents Betrayed shows what happens when the government alone has all power. Innocents Betrayed shows how licensing and registration were key elements to disarming populations, leaving them vulnerable to methodical slaughter. Innocents Betrayed shows how the “rest of the world” lost 170,000,000 innocent, non-combatant men, women and children.

“It can’t happen here.” It already has. Innocents Betrayed documents mass murders and vicious brutality in the US as a result of gun control. The victims left disarmed and powerless, by law. See with your own eyes the facts that the mainstream media has is ignoring and concealing. Get this DVD Innocents Betrayed for a gift of any amount this month.

The 30 Club…

Many of you are already members of our 30 Club. Thank you for this greatly! You truly are helping us to pay for the airtime! Plus this is a great deal for you. As mentioned, DVDs are normally $20.00 each but through the 30 Club, you receive all DVDs aired. That is an $80.00 value for a gift of $30.00 or more each month. If you’ve not yet joined the 30 Club, you might want to do so now. It looks like 2019 is going to be one very interesting year! Just let me know when you write if you’d like to join our 30 Club.

Or you can subscribe via credit card at the website cultivateministries.org   Thanks!

Prayer Request….

I would ask that along with your prayers for Cultivate Ministries and its very faithful and generous supporters that you would consider praying for the persecuted Church worldwide and our Nation, leaders and especially for the Radio Stations and their owners, families and employees. They do a great, demanding and often thankless work in getting the ever important gospel message gets out in these late days. Thanks!

Ending Note: 

I just wanted to again say thank you so much for those of you who help keep this ministry going through your prayers and gifts of support.  If it weren’t for you guys, this ministry would have been taken out long ago.

Many blessings and my sincere Thanks:
Dudley