Marsha Scipio has been named director of Baptist World Aid, the community development arm of the Baptist World Alliance.
Scipio, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago, currently serves as associate minister and youth pastor at Berean Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York. She is also the founder of Women Who Minister, an ecumenical conference dedicated to the “spiritual rejuvenation” of women in ministry.
Carmelo Domenic Licciardello, an evangelical performing artist known as Carman, died on February 16. He was 65.
The musician had been hospitalized in Las Vegas for complications after surgery to repair a hiatal hernia, according to a press release posted on his Facebook page.
Carman came to fame during the mid-1980s heyday of contemporary Christian music with the release of his hit song “The Champion.” His 1991 record Addicted to Jesus was Billboard’s Christian album of the year.
Candace M. Lewis has been named president-dean of Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta, the first woman to serve in that role in the school’s 138-year history.
Lewis, an ordained elder in the Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church, most recently served as executive director of the denomination’s national resource for church planters. Previously, she was a district superintendent in the Florida Conference and the founding pastor of New Life Community United Methodist Church in Jacksonville, Florida.
Lydia Lopez was demonstrating in a picket line in 1968 to support Mexican American educator Sal Castro, who had been removed from the classroom after participating in student walkouts protesting racism in East LA schools, when UCLA professor Juan Gómez-Quiñones told her of a party at the Church of the Epiphany.
Aliyah Muzamil, a single mother of two, was without electricity for three days and nights during Texas’s deep freeze last month. One night, the three of them slept in her car to keep warm. One day, they ran out of food.
“I left my kids with my neighbors and went to the masjid to grab hot meals they were giving out,” said Muzamil, using the Arabic word for mosque. “I assumed not many people would be out because of the extreme cold.”
On February 4, the International Criminal Court found Dominic Ongwen, a trusted lieutenant in the Lord’s Resistance Army, guilty of 61 counts of murder, rape, sexual enslavement, and the “forced pregnancy” of women—a charge not previously lodged in that court.
In founding the guerrilla group known later as the LRA in 1987, Joseph Kony declared that its purpose was to restore the dignity of the ethnic Acholi people in northern Uganda and to call them to return to the dictates of God’s law.