Startup church meets at Shiloh
Arkansas Worship Center of Faith, a newly incorporated church, held its installation service at 3 p.m. Sunday at Shiloh Seventh-Day Adventist Church, at 2400 S. Maple St. in Little Rock.
Beatrice Jenkins of Little Rock will be the church's pastor, and said it will be a new arena for her.
"Everybody knows me as a musician, so [being a pastor] will be a whole new ballgame," Jenkins said.
Arkansas Worship Center will hold services at Shiloh from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Sundays until Jenkins finds a building for her church.
The new ministry is open, Jenkins said, to anyone who would like to be a part of its board.
"We're not big on titles," she said. "Right now it's just who wants to come and serve and be a part of a new ministry that's on the move in the city to really make a difference in the community."
Her daughter, Armani Jenkins, who will be a senior at Harding University in the fall, will be part of the church's music department.
"Music has been my whole life," said Armani Jenkins, who said she looks forward to engaging in a "whole new realm of music" aside from the classical she performs with Harding's music department.
"We wish her the best," said A.J. Brown, an elder with Shiloh. "Hopefully our forces can reach some of the same people [in the neighborhood]," he said.
Before Arkansas Worship Center, Beatrice Jenkins was a co-pastor for three years with her husband, Juan Jenkins, at Great Deliverance Baptist Church in North Little Rock.
-- Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Australians more secular than ever
After decades of rapid growth, the number of Australians marking "no religion" on their census forms has for the first time surpassed Catholicism as the most common answer to a prompt in the country's 2016 census about religion, according to data released last week. If all Christian denominations are considered together, they would make up just over half of respondents.
The number of respondents who identified as nonreligious -- 30.1 percent -- almost doubled from 15.5 percent in 2001. Less than 1 percent identified that way in 1966, the year Australia lifted its White Australia Policy, which opened up immigration to non-Europeans and kicked off broader demographic changes. Australia's population has also more than doubled since then.
The census is conducted every five years.
The trend away from religion in Australia is likely to continue, as the bulk of growth in the category, perhaps unsurprisingly, is in the 18-34 age bracket. Those older than 65 were the most likely to identify as religious -- and Christian in particular, as non-Christian religious groups tend to find representation in younger immigrant populations.
Men were also more likely to say they were nonreligious than women (32 percent vs. 28 percent).
The secularizing trend has increased in recent years. Roughly 2.2 million more people identified with "no religion" in 2016 than in a previous census in 2011. The earlier increase was 1 million from 2006 to 2011.
The lowest proportion of religiosity was reported in the state of Tasmania.
-- The Washington Post
Religion on 07/08/2017