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.
A grant program for rural United Methodist Churches in North Carolina aims to help congregations see their food pantry ministries within the larger picture of hunger in America.
The project, called Come to the Table, offers mini-grants of up to $1,000 to rural Methodist churches in North Carolina that are providing nutrition assistance to food-insecure families. It’s funded through the Duke Endowment.
Alabama is amending its lethal injection procedures to allow a condemned inmate to have his spiritual adviser in the execution chamber, state lawyers wrote in a February 25 court filing.
The move comes after the US Supreme Court sided with Alabama inmate Willie B. Smith III, who had sought to have his pastor in the chamber. Alabama had previously argued that only prison staff should be allowed in the chamber for security reasons.
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.
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.”
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.