Churches for decades have relied on tried and true methods of fundraising when tithes and offerings left vision-thick congregations in a lurch.

But Wabash Christian Center has taken a unique approach to supplying ministerial needs. Eschewing fundraising altogether, the 20-year-old fellowship collects Marlboro Miles to outfit its church.

Smokers for years collected Marlboro Miles from packs of cigarettes and redeemed them through the company’s product catalogue, which featured prizes ranging from T-shirts to camping tents.

Marlboro added “Spiritline” in 2008 and the congregation took full advantage.

“That’s how we got our new steeple,” said Reverend Tom Shipley. “Sucks to have that Marlboro logo on it but, you gotta do what you gotta do.”

Shipley encourages his congregants to toss their Miles into the offering plate, often reminding them of the church’s needs. In December, a set of red and white Marlboro choir robes arrived just in time for the Christmas pageant.

Shipley keeps the youth group in the main service, knowing they can contribute to the church’s projects. The teens hope to have a Marlboro skate park installed by June. A half-pipe arrived two weeks ago after Lucas Hawes, an avid smoker, donated five years of Miles.

The church has remodeled its sanctuary with new pews, a pulpit and stained glass—all ordered from Marlboro. The latest addition was a silverplate communion set.

But the avant-garde money stream is not without controversy.

Dr. Melody Rudd, a researcher at Indiana Institute for Orthopraxy, said Miles circumvent traditional faith routes and may ultimately encourage Christians to abandon waiting on the Lord.

“We’re about half-way down that slippery slope,” Rudd said. “It started with the indulgences, continued with the bake sales, and here we are. Pretty soon, they’ll scrap tithes and offerings forever and just pool their money for Powerball.”

Shipley disagreed. The 47-year-old pastor believes his church is taking its cue from scripture.

“The Lord promised to give us beauty for ashes,” he said.

R.J. Reynolds plans to unveil its church catalogue for Camel Bucks in 2009.

“Corey used to just sit in the corner and listen to his iPod all the time, so we were really excited when our efforts to get him to talk and participate more seemed to be working,” said youth pastor Allen Kisner. “Then we started listening to the things he was saying and talking about, and we started to wonder if maybe Corey sitting quietly in the corner wasn’t so bad after all.”

Tait, now a 16-year-old 11th grader at nearby Eastern Plains High School, is a big fan of Battlestar Galactica and the popular massively multi-player online role playing game World of Warcraft. Thanks to the aforementioned efforts to get him to reveal more of his personality, he’s no longer shy about it.

“Once he started talking, it was all about power levelling, mana and cylons,” said Katrina Tappan, the youth group’s 12th-grade president, and by all accounts the student most instrumental in coaxing Tait out of his shell. “Not only does he talk about that stuff all the time, which, like, no one even understands, but he talks about it really loud and passionately. He even manages to start arguments with people who don’t even know what he’s talking about. It actually gets uncomfortable pretty fast.”

Although Tait’s unorthodox taste in television and video games have been giving his peers second thoughts about their efforts to get to know him better, it’s his sense of humor that really has the leadership of the youth group concerned.

“Corey never used to joke around with the other kids,” Kisner said. “We always thought that was a bad thing, but then we heard some of his jokes. It’s hard to explain without giving what would probably be pretty offensive examples, but I guess you could call it a weird mix of inappropriate practical jokes, knock knock jokes, ethnic slurs and misogyny – actually quite disturbing.”

Despite all of these concerns, tactics for returning to the days of a shy Tait have been elusive.

“Getting him back in his shell has proven to be even harder than getting him out,” Tappan said. “We’ve thought about having a music night when everyone can just bring in their iPods and listen to them all night, and he still doesn’t seem to participate much when we play sports, so we’re trying to do more of that. You know, whatever it takes to go ahead and hide that back under the bushel.”

The lawsuit, filed in US District Court last week, claims that Matthews gave herself a severe deep thigh bruise while slapping her thigh to the beat of a worship tune in an effort to get the congregation clapping nearly a month ago. The suit further claims that the church was criminally negligent in not providing Matthews with a headset, which she says would have allowed her to clap her hands instead of her thigh. Matthews said she asked church leaders to provide a headset on numerous occasions and complained about ongoing thigh pain.

Matthews is seeking remuneration for lost wages, saying she has been unable to perform her duties at her job as a dog trainer.

A weekend crusade for little people held last week at his Santa Ana church was virtually unattended, even though guest speakers included Verne Troyer of Austin Powers fame, and Bushwick Bill of Geto Boys. Each gave their testimonies to a crowd of five – Huber and his family.

Huber, often derided by local pastors who fish for congregants among Orange County’s elite, likes to remind his colleagues that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

VATICAN CITY — An unprecedented summit of Christian leaders convened here earlier this month to take part in a summit to address what many fear could be the greatest spiritual crisis of our time — a shortage of prayer.

“With the global economic crisis touching more and more lives around the world, we have just one question,” said Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley. “Where is all of the extra prayer that these people need going to come from?”

A portion of the summit, which included both evangelical and Catholic leaders from around the world, was focused on finding alternative sources of prayer to solve the looming prayer gap over the long term, but the vast majority of the sessions targeted ways to get Christians to reduce their need for prayer and become good stewards of what leaders are calling “supernatural resources.” All of these discussions culminated in a loud and clear message to Christians: reduce your prayer footprint.

While no formal definition of a prayer footprint exists, it is generally understood to be a rough calculation of the total amount of prayer used to address the requests and needs of a given Christian. Leaders are suggesting a number of simple steps for believers to reduce their contribution to the expected prayer shortage.

But a joint statement signed by the 200-plus summit attendees suggests that small changes in the way Christians around the world ask for and receive prayer won’t be enough.

“All available data points to Christians praying less and less while requiring more and more prayer,” the statement reads. “Eliminating obvious waste in the prayer process will alleviate prayer problems in the short term, but the long term solution will have to include both a significant reduction in the prayer footprint of the average Christian and a vigorous search for alternative sources of prayer.”

Accomplishing those goals, said summit attendees, will require a fundamental paradigm shift in the Christian community.

“We know that the average Christian prays just five to ten minutes a day, and that the number of Christians is finite,” said Focus on the Family Founder James Dobson. “This is going to lead to some tough questions. Does your sister’s ankle sprain really need to use up supernatural resources in these times? Do we need to pray for every single person who has a non life-threatening illness, or can we lump them all together into a single line item? As Christians, we need start thinking seriously about shepherding this resource in a responsible way.”

Summit attendees also began the process of establishing guidelines to help Christians calculate their prayer footprint, as well as details of a Supplication Mitigation system that allows Christians to offset an overuse of supernatural resources by purchasing prayer credits. Proceeds from the sale of these credits will go to fund research into alternative sources of prayer.

“We’ve been looking into the possibility of prayer centers in India to handle some of the anticipated prayer load,” Bell said. “We’ve also given some thought to approaching the Screen Actor’s Guild to get actors and extras in church scenes on TV and in movies to take an actual list of prayer requests when they have to act like they’re praying. These are the kinds of creative, out-of-the-box solutions we need at a time like this.”

It’s unclear whether the prayer footprint summit will be an annual event, but organizers are making an unusual request of the public.

“Please don’t pray for our efforts,” O’Malley said.

CHICAGO – A new study to be published in Christianity Today magazine exposes a dangerous wave of church subculture that has built enormous momentum over the past decade. Hazing, which until now has been almost entirely associated with college fraternities and sororities, has made its way into our churches as a method of initiating would-be small group members and filtering out those too weak to join. While most colleges have squelched hazing in recent years, a new surge in small group hazing—resulting in at least two fatalities—is causing some pastors to follow suit and ban the practice altogether.

“This has got to stop!” said Pastor Gene Appel of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, IL. “Even if there weren’t any deaths, it’s difficult for me to concentrate during my preaching when there’s someone skipping on stage behind me wearing nothing but flannelgraph characters taped over his privates! I’m sure that’s not where cartoon-Moses wants to be poking his staff.”

Events like this are occurring across the country.

The study, conducted by Christian Research International, found evidence that services in every region of the United States are being interrupted by small group hazing. The McGeorge’s small group at Hickory Square Baptist in Keene, NH required all of its 6 pledges to shout “bless you” or “gesundheit” every time their pastor said “Gethsemane” during their Easter service. Arthur Culver, a small group pledge at Kendall United Methodist Church in Miami, FL, was instructed to sit in the front row and eat and drink all of the communion elements when they were passed.

Other reported instances of hazing stretch beyond Sunday morning and into the daily lives of pledges. Sam Mills of Logan, MT was among the 4 pledges woken at 3am and instructed to shovel 9 inches of snow off Logan Church of God’s 2-acre parking lot immediately and barefoot. Terri Wendt of Sonora Bible Church in Texas was ordered to sign up for all 48 shifts of SBC’s 24-hour prayer watch in November.

“Who can measure the damage inflicted on the Kingdom due to things like this?” fumed Pastor Aaron Vang of SBC. “The only thing less effective than Terri’s last 10 or 15 prayer watch shifts is this hazing and its attempt to assemble quality small groups!”

Keith Hatter, 5-year “Alpha-Alpha-Omega” small group leader at New Faith Community in Seattle, WA, disagrees.

Pledge Clayton Briggs searches for Ezra 3:7 in a “sword drill” to avoid getting hit with “The Bible Thumper.”

“Maybe in the 80s small group pledging wouldn’t have had as good a purpose. But some churches are so large these days that there are enough people to make entire small groups out of just the cool people. There has to be a way to ensure that happens. C’mon, we don’t want just anyone signing up for Alpha-Alpha-Omega! They can go to the Forester’s group, which still allows sign-ups, thank God.”

But the sobering fact, as the study reports, is that there have been two recent deaths resulting from small group hazing. While some argue the deaths, caused by an automobile accident during two pledges’ “high-speed drive-by evangelism” duties, are atypical, many elders use the fatalities as a basis on which to ban hazing in their churches.

Leonard Kindred, principal investigator for the study, explained to THO, “We’re no longer just talking about doing the Bible study homework for the small group leaders, speaking only with small group brothers and sisters, or learning the small group anthem. We’ve recorded countless examples of dangerous spiritual activities taking place. One poor pledge was forced to eat nothing but unleavened bread for 40 days, which is the standard pledge period. He ended up in the hospital with chronic constipation and fecal impaction.”

With this study’s release, many church leaders are at a crossroads as to how seriously they will take the potential dangers of small group hazing.

Said Pastor Chris Malcolm of Sun Valley Episcopal in Fresno, CA, “I was unaware that these dangers could exist in my church, but I’ve decided to bring them up at my next small group meeting. My group has recruited like all of the best Christians in the congregation so we’ll stay on top of this issue!”