Decaying old churches face ‘trouble in paradise’

RALEIGH, North Carolina (AP) — About halfway through Sunday service at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church, as worshippers passed around the collection plate, a chorus of screams pierced the air.

Chunks of the ceiling in the 52-year-old church near Hickory , North Carolina, came crashing down on the crowd of 200 or so, striking about 14, who were later treated and released from nearby hospitals. A jagged piece of the ceiling, roughly 10 feet by 10 feet, dangled from exposed wires over the back pews as deacons struggled to guide panicking worshippers from the building.

“My jaw just dropped,” the Rev. Antonio Logan said. “I thought, ‘This can’t be real.'”

Caring for old church facilities is an increasingly acute problem, particularly for mainline Protestant denominations. As membership declines and budgets shrink, the beautiful edifices of American Christianity can feel like weights dragging down churches that are forced to spend money on maintenance and repairs instead of ministry, charity and other Gospel-derived imperatives.

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Indonesian Muslims told to change prayer direction

JAKARTA (Reuters) – Indonesia’s Muslims learned on Friday they have been praying in the wrong direction, after the country’s highest Islamic authority said its directive on the direction of Mecca actually had people facing Africa.

Muslims are supposed to face the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia during prayer and the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) issued an edict in March stipulating westward was the correct direction from the world’s most populous Muslim country.

“But it has been decided that actually the mosques are facing Somalia or Kenya, so we are now suggesting people shift the direction slightly to the north-west,” the head of the MUI, Cholil Ridwan, told Reuters. “There’s no need to knock down mosques, just shift your direction slightly during prayer.”

Ridwan said Muslims need not fear that their prayers have been wasted because they were facing the wrong way.

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Reminds me of a death in the movie ‘Titanic’

Elderly couple dies while trapped in home elevator

ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. – When the elevator in their home got stuck between floors, Sherwood and Caroline Wadsworth found themselves trapped with no way to call for help as temperatures rose into the 90s in the closet-sized lift until they finally died from heat exhaustion.

Autopsies on the elderly couple — he was 90, she was 89 — on Thursday pointed to a tragic end to lives they shared for more than 60 years. Police estimated they had been dead at least four days before a newspaper carrier called 911 out of concern that papers had piled up by their garage.

Police had to break into the house because the doors were locked and bolted. Inside they found no one but the Wadsworths’ cat. Then they noticed the elevator — accessed by what looked like closet doors with up-and-down arrow buttons in the walls. Once the shaft was open, they found the elevator stuck between the home’s second and third floor.

Police discovered the Wadsworths’ bodies lying in a fetal position, facing each other, Glynn County coroner Jimmy Durden said Thursday. Autopsies concluded both died from heat exhaustion. Durden estimated temperatures in the elevator reached 95 degrees.

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Cops in India turn to voodoo for curbing mishaps

NAGPUR: With regulation failing to give results, city traffic police seem to be turning to voodoo science to check road accidents. The department is convinced placing ‘pyramidical structures’ at the centre of each crossing will result in positive energy circulating in the area and reduction of mishaps.

The department has decided to introduce it at 11 mishap probe places across city. Actually, the city traffic police are merely following the lead of Nagpur rural police who have already buried pyramids at accident-prone places as per principles of Vastu, the ancient architectural science. The move was initiated after several measures to curb road mishaps failed, said sources in the department.

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