Ministry

Justin Buzzard, a 47-year-old California pastor, joined San Jose City College as a defensive end decades after an injury ended his playing career. He says the comeback is about finishing something he started. Teammates less than half his age have embraced him.

Days after a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck western Colombia, Christian relief organizations are shifting from search operations to long-term rebuilding. Local churches are housing displaced families. Aid workers say supply routes remain difficult.

Police in Wenzhou, the Chinese city sometimes called 'China's Jerusalem,' raided a house church and took founding pastor David Tang into custody along with six colleagues. All seven have since disappeared with no word on their whereabouts. Advocacy groups say the raid fits a pattern of tightening pressure on unregistered congregations.

A man received a life sentence for the crucifixion-style killing of a pastor. Prosecutors described the murder as ritualistic and premeditated. The pastor's congregation attended the sentencing.

Scholars trace how questions about The Passion Translation's rendering of Scripture went largely unexamined as the paraphrase spread through churches. Critics say added phrasing is presented as translation. Its publisher has defended the work as devotional.

A writer describes broad support for school choice among Black pastors he encounters, driven by frustration with local public schools. The position cuts against the alignment of many of their congregations' political leaders. Pastors frame it as a question of children's futures.

For a decade a Catholic-run home in Washington offered young women affordable housing alongside the sisters who ran it, as they studied and started careers. Residents describe an unlikely community built across generations. The house is now closing and the community is saying goodbye.

The World Council of Churches issued support for the Armenian Apostolic Church in its standoff with the Armenian government. Clergy have been detained and church property contested. The council urged authorities to respect the church's independence.

The Trump administration is directing nearly $2 billion to religious and community organizations working in global health and disaster relief, including World Vision and Samaritan's Purse. It is the largest such allocation in more than two decades and follows deep cuts to USAID. Critics question whether faith-based groups can absorb the scale of the work.

The former Disney Channel star said a stay at a monastery reoriented his life and career away from what he called Hollywood's secular default. He now builds projects around faith and family.

A United Methodist pastor who is his party's Senate nominee said he believes atheists and people of other faiths will be in heaven, drawing criticism from evangelical leaders. He defended the remarks as consistent with his denomination's teaching.

Mel Gibson revealed that the two forthcoming sequels to "The Passion of the Christ" will be performed in English rather than ancient languages and will unfold in a non-linear structure. The films aim to carry the story past the crucifixion into the resurrection.

A new analysis of Southern Baptist Convention data finds adults made up the majority of baptisms for the first time in years, a shift from a tradition long weighted toward children. Researchers point to a wave of adult conversions rather than church-raised professions.

A missionary pilot abducted abroad has been released and is safe, both the president and the sending organization confirmed. The agency thanked those who prayed and asked for privacy as the family reunites.

In the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, pastors Juan Garcia and Javier Santolaria have continued ministering after roughly 80,000 migrants passed through the city. They describe handing out water at a public fountain during a July heat wave. Their congregations remain small but persistent.

Two regional bodies of The United Methodist Church in Georgia are merging into a single entity, a consolidation driven by membership losses during the COVID-19 pandemic and the denomination's recent schism.

The Fellowship of Christian Athletes is taking a New Jersey school district to court for barring outside adult volunteer mentors, a policy the district adopted after a complaint from an out-of-state atheist legal organization.

When an Islamic militia attacked his village in Sudan, everything Saleh had built collapsed in a single day. His decision to follow Jesus had already cost him family ties, and he found hope again only after fleeing to South Sudan.

For years, people in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo have lived through ongoing ADF atrocities. A Congolese bishop describes families who have lost loved ones, homes and everything they had amid armed conflict and Ebola in North Kivu.

The skies above Kansas are set to fill with worship and prayer next month at a free open-air event headlined by Bethel Music and rapper KB, with Westboro Baptist Church announcing plans to protest what it calls 'satanic tunes.'

Theologian N.T. Wright is urging Christians to approach accounts of near-death experiences with caution, warning that visions of Heaven, Hell or encounters with Jesus should not become the basis for Christian belief about the afterlife.

Michael W. Smith cautioned that worship music risks turning into a celebrity industry, telling leaders that "the Lord doesn't share His glory with anybody." The veteran artist said he is nevertheless seeing genuine revival among Gen Z audiences. His remarks land amid a wider reckoning over platform culture in the church.

The daughter of Southern Baptist pastor Mike Stone has entered hospice care after a long battle with chronic illness, her family said in asking for prayer. Stone stepped back from denominational work to be with her. Churches across the convention have organized prayer chains.

Groups of Catholic sisters have begun keeping vigil outside immigration offices where Haitian families report for check-ins, praying and documenting arrests. "Even the nuns are mad," one organizer said. The presence has complicated enforcement optics in several cities.

Church leaders in Sudan describe a campaign of destruction and displacement as the civil war grinds on, with congregations scattered and buildings shelled or seized. Aid workers say Christian communities in contested regions are especially exposed. Relief efforts are struggling to reach them.

The administration announced $2 billion in funding routed through Christian relief and development organizations, months after dismantling much of the traditional aid apparatus. Supporters say faith-based groups deliver more per dollar. Others warn the shift ties humanitarian work to religious identity.

Reports of rising demand for exorcisms raise an old question in new clothes: is spiritual attack increasing, or are more people simply searching for spiritual answers to mental and emotional pain? Practitioners and clinicians describe a growing overlap between the two.

Uber never built new cars; it used the fleet that already existed. American churches sit in a similar position on K-12 education, with buildings, community and now funding already in place. The remaining question is whether they will use them.

After a decorated Army career that included leading the task force that captured Saddam Hussein, former Congressman Steve Russell now serves on a very different front line, flying supplies and missionaries into places roads cannot reach.

Texas Rep. and Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, a seminary student, laid out a health care plan grounded in both policy and the New Testament. Conservative outlets have seized on separate remarks about his church sheltering immigrants facing deportation.

Bethel Church has halted distribution of The Passion Translation after sustained criticism from scholars who argue the paraphrase inserts theology the underlying text does not support. Leaders framed the pause as a review rather than a repudiation.

Ahead of Pope Leo’s visit, Argentines describe hoping for something between consolation and intervention, in a country where inflation and austerity have worn down even those who benefited from the reforms. The visit is the first by a pope to Argentina since Francis, an Argentine, declined for twelve years to return home.

In a single night at the end of July, more than 70 missiles and 280 drones struck a village outside Kryvyi Rih. Among the dead was a Christian family known throughout the small community for opening their home to neighbors. The account puts names to a barrage that was reported, at the time, only as a number.

“Our American heritage is Christian,” a Texas pastor told a public meeting north of Dallas, where he and his son joined dozens of residents opposing a planned Islamic development. The dispute pits land-use process against a broader argument about what a community is entitled to preserve — a fight now recurring in suburbs across the Sun Belt.

Fighters from a breakaway faction of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North attacked Christian communities in the Nuba Mountains on July 24, killing one pastor and abducting another. Church leaders in the region say attacks on clergy have become methodical rather than incidental.

The Bethel Church leader drew criticism for teaching that the Spirit indwells all Christians but rests only on some, a distinction he frames as the difference between salvation and empowerment. Critics across the theological spectrum say the formulation creates a spiritual tier system Scripture does not.

Christian Solidarity Worldwide welcomed the release of a Baptist pastor held for two weeks by Syrian authorities over Facebook posts officials deemed offensive to Islam. His detention was among the first high-profile tests of how the country’s new government will treat its shrinking Christian minority.

A new AI tool developed under Iranian Christian leadership is being deployed to disciple new believers in countries where meeting a pastor in person can be fatal. Its designers say the hard problem is not theology but security — building something useful that cannot be turned into a list of names.

Adam Hamilton leads the largest United Methodist congregation in the country. Now he is testing whether a pastor running as a Democrat can flip a red seat and become the first Kansas Democrat sent to the Senate in nearly a century. Forecasters have already moved the race toward Democrats; Hamilton’s challenge is holding a coalition that agrees on him and little else.

A former modeling-industry scout has traded talent hunting for telecom, building a mobile carrier marketed to Christian families on content filtering and values alignment. The venture sits inside a growing parallel consumer economy — one where the pitch is less about price than about who you are subsidizing when you pay a bill.

The broken doors were repaired, the benches returned to their places, the Bibles gathered off the floor. In several Muslim-majority communities along Tanzania’s coast, small congregations have resumed meeting in buildings that still carry the marks of the attacks — and the fear that has not left with the debris.

A cafe run by Jews for Jesus has become the flashpoint in a dispute over Sabbath observance, drawing objections from neighbors and from Jewish organizations that reject the group’s premise entirely. The argument is old; the venue — a coffee shop — is new, and it has made the theology unusually public.

Troops from Operation Enduring Peace arrested a 48-year-old man suspected of taking part in an attack that killed at least 30 Christian residents of Naridon village in Kaduna State. Arrests in such cases are rare enough that local church leaders treated the news as significant in itself.

A Minnesota man has been found liable for taking nearly $150,000 from the congregation where he served as treasurer. The case is a reminder of how rarely small churches build the internal controls that catch this early.

Bear Grylls describes the conversations he had with the cast of "The Chosen" while filming "The Chosen in the Wild," including what Jonathan Roumie carries in playing Jesus. Dallas Jenkins and others opened up in ways Grylls says surprised him.

Compassion International is urging African churches to get ahead of what forecasters expect to be one of the strongest El Nino events on record, arriving in October. The organization's argument is simple: preparation done during a disaster is already too late.

Russell Moore revisits Wall-E's floating chairs twenty years on and argues the movie undersold how willingly people would trade attention for comfort. His prescription is less about screen time rules than about what attention is for.

Pastor Bob Beltz says he hopes a new film about William Wilberforce shows younger Christians what durable cultural engagement actually looked like. His pitch lands at a moment when many believers have concluded the effort is not worth the trouble.

After the longest journey from Earth in human history, astronaut Reid Wiseman's first requests on landing included a chaplain. The story opens a question the profession still argues about: whether a chaplain is a pastor, a counselor or something else entirely.

A pastor in Scotland delivered an emotional tribute to a member of his congregation whose body was discovered inside a suitcase in Athens, describing her as "precious" and recounting a life shaped by long commitment to missionary work. Greek authorities are investigating the death as a homicide. The church has asked for prayer for her family while the investigation proceeds abroad and details remain scarce.