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.
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.
After the death of its founding pastor a few years ago, membership at Cullen Missionary Baptist Church in Houston took a nosedive.
André Jones, the current pastor, said that with fewer donations supporting the upkeep of a building equal in size to a city block, “we had more space than we knew what to do with and didn’t have the people or resources to pay for it.”
Though the electricity was turned off in all buildings on the site, visitors arriving at Crystal Springs camp on September 12 for its official decommissioning were embraced by the sacred power of the place. Until its closing in 2019, Crystal Springs had been a United Methodist camp and retreat center for 160 years.
But earlier this year, Michigan Area United Methodist Camping sold the Dowagiac, Michigan, campgrounds to the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi. The United Methodist group could no longer maintain the grounds, due to increasing costs and declining membership.
Women in Black Baptist circles knew that it was only a matter of time before one of their own was named to lead a major church organization.
Female clergy describe having a sense of anticipation for years before the elevation of Gina Stewart this summer to president of the Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Society, a 124-year-old movement of about 10,000 volunteers and contributors based in Maryland.
A coalition of more than 40 American Muslim groups is leading a global boycott of Hilton Hotels over its involvement in a hotel project in Xinjiang, China, where a Uyghur mosque was bulldozed to make way for the building.
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.