This article originally appeared on lutheranworld.org
On September 26, Bertha Godfrey Munkhondya became the first woman ordained in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Malawi.
In a congratulatory letter to Munkhondya and the ELCM, Lutheran World Federation general secretary Martin Junge expressed gratitude for Munkhondya’s willingness to serve the church.
Pat Robertson, who turned a tiny Virginia television station into a global religious broadcasting network, is stepping down after a half century running The 700 Club on daily TV, the Christian Broadcasting Network announced on October 1.
Robertson, 91, said in a statement that he had hosted the network’s flagship program for the last time and that his son Gordon Robertson would immediately take over.
Robertson’s CBN started broadcasting on October 1, 1961, after he bought a bankrupt television station in Portsmouth, Virginia. The 700 Club began production in 1966.
Emma Jordan-Simpson has been named the next president of Auburn Seminary. She succeeds Katharine Henderson, who announced last year that she would be stepping down after a decade of leadership at the Presbyterian-founded institution in New York.
Jordan-Simpson comes to Auburn from the Fellowship of Reconciliation USA, where she was executive director. Prior to that, Jordan-Simpson was the executive director of the New York branch of the Children’s Defense Fund. She also serves as executive pastor at Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn.
Albert Raboteau Jr., the “godfather of Afro-Religious studies,” died from complications related to Lewy body dementia on September 18. He was 78.
For most of his career, Raboteau was considered one of the preeminent scholars of both Black religious history and American religious history. His 1978 book Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South, which centered the perspectives of enslaved people, is still seen as one of the definitive books on the origins of the Black church.
The founder of one of the world’s largest megachurches has died, according to news reports from Korea. The English-language Korean Herald reported that Cho Yong-gi died at a Seoul hospital on September 14. He was 85.
Cho, known in the United States as David Yonggi Cho, was the founder of the Yoido Full Gospel Church, a Pentecostal megachurch with hundreds of thousands of members.
Timothy Stewart, the first international president of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, has died, his denomination announced.
The Bahamas pastor served three years of his four-year term and presided over the virtual annual session of the historically Black religious group in August. He died on September 17 at age 64.
“Dr. Stewart faithfully served the Progressive National Baptist Convention for over 3 decades, making history in 2018,” the PNBC said in a statement. “He was the first President from the International Region in Progressive’s 60 year history.”