The Southern Baptist Convention’s executive committee agreed on October 5 to open up legally protected records to investigators who will look into how it handled, or mishandled, cases of sexual abuse within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination over the past two decades.
On any given day, Bob Klingler, a rural chaplain in northwestern Pennsylvania, might be cleaning a flooded basement, facilitating an antiracist workshop, or leading worship from the bay of a livestock auction barn. Meanwhile, in Suffolk, England, rural chaplain Graham Miles could be answering a midnight phone call or helping a ewe give birth.
To Miles and Klingler, it’s all ministry.
The brick foundation of one of the nation’s oldest Black churches has been unearthed at Colonial Williamsburg, a living history museum in Virginia that continues to reckon with its past storytelling about the country’s origins and the role of Black Americans.
The First Baptist Church was formed in 1776 by free and enslaved Black people. They initially met secretly in fields and under trees, in defiance of laws that prevented African Americans from congregating.
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.
Victims of abuse within France’s Catholic Church welcomed a historic turning point on October 5 after a new report estimated that 330,000 children in France were sexually abused over the past 70 years, providing the country’s first accounting of the worldwide phenomenon.
The figure includes abuses committed by some 3,000 priests and an unknown number of other people involved in the church—wrongdoing that Catholic authorities covered up over decades in a “systemic manner,” according to the president of the commission that issued the report, Jean-Marc Sauvé.
The United Methodist Publishing House announced on October 4 that the sale of its Nashville property has been completed, at a price of $24.5 million. The lakefront campus was sold to R2, a Chicago-based real estate investment firm.
UMPH is the denomination’s oldest continuous entity, dating to 1789. However, recent decades have seen it contracting along with the denomination’s US membership.
In 2012, UMPH announced that it would be closing all of its brick-and-
Nigeria, a country of more than 200 million people, is deeply divided along religious lines. For two decades, violent clashes between Muslims and Christians have claimed thousands of lives. For instance, in November 2008, violence broke out among Muslims and Christians in Jos, Nigeria, a city in the country’s middle region.
About 760 people were killed. Samuel Sunkur, a Christian who was 13 at the time, said he was devastated when his aunt’s house was destroyed and razed by mobs. Afterward, Sunkur started thinking of ways to take revenge.
Pope Francis has acknowledged his increasingly vocal conservative critics, saying their “nasty comments” were the work of the devil.
Francis made the comments during a September 12 private meeting with Slovakian Jesuits soon after he arrived in the Slovak capital of Bratislava. A transcript of the encounter was published on September 21 by the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica, which often provides accounts of Francis’s closed-door meetings with his fellow Jesuits when he’s on the road.