Leave your Jesus at the door - My brother eMailed me a this report found on FoxNews.
Evangelical Group Banned From Tulsa Housing Projects, Chapter Leader Says
I did a search to find more information but oddly, neither Google News nor Bing, had much news covering this story. It looks to me like it was first reported by Charles Biggs on Tulsa Beacon here:
Government tells Bible clubs to not mention God or Jesus
Biggs reports:
The City of Tulsa and the federal government may shut down summer Bible clubs in poor apartment complexes because someone thinks federal policy prohibits religious activity.
A leader of the Bible group said she was told unless club leaders agree not to say “God” or “Jesus” during their lessons at public community centers, they would be forced to take their Bible classes elsewhere.
For more than 10 years, Child Evangelism Fellowship has conducted Bible lessons for children in federally subsidized housing projects. This summer, an employee of Youth at Heart, a United Way agency formed in 2003, informed CEF that according to federal policy, the Bible clubs could continue in the centers but leaders couldn’t say the names of God or Jesus.
“I received a call from the program director of Youth At Heart (Margaret Berry-Biggs), which holds the contracts on Tulsa Housing apartment recreation centers, notifying us that they wanted us to continue holding 5-Day Clubs in the apartment complexes this summer, but they are now under different guidelines due to government and city funding which now bans all groups which do ‘religious’ instruction from using their building facilities,” said Dayla Koehn of CEF. “She told me we were more than welcome to come as long as we didn’t mention God or Jesus. We would need to just teach stories that would encourage the children to love others and develop good moral character or we could probably hold clubs outside.”
This story came out on June 4th and Biggs reports that CEF does not receive any federal monies. The FoxNews report by James Osborne was released today and he does include a little more information in that CEF had a similar problem before with a school who said they couldn't use the school facilities because of the faith based bent of the organization. That was fixed with a letter from the Liberty Council to the school explaining equal access. So I imagine this latest attempt to keep CEF from preaching the Gospel will meet a similar fate particularly based on the rest of Biggs report in the Tulsa Beacon.
But this kind of story really isn't all that unusual. My own church used to work closely with a local public school in tutoring Elementary School age children. We had great success in educationally helping the children. But after a time they cut us off and the gist of it was the whole "Separation of Church and State" argument.
So every so often stories like this crop up. Typically during Democratic administrations. I think there may be a greater sense of freedom to look negatively on Christianity during such administrations. Likewise I imagine one could attempt to make an argument for a reverse effect during Republican control, though I would argue that true conservatism is more concerned with freedom of speech than the liberalism that we find ourselves gripped in today.
My worry is that we will see more stories like this in the days and years to come. Our government is making moves that I would call Fascist in design (and I'm including many in the Republican camp too) and the more I learn about the organization ACORN and President Obama's ties to it the greater my conern grows.
