News

Most churches have found a way to continue meeting despite the ongoing pandemic, but fewer met in person in January as COVID-19 cases spiked across the country. A new study from Nashville-based Lifeway Research found 76% of U.S. Protestant pastors say their churches met in person in January.

Health officials in the nation’s capital are hoping that Black religious leaders will serve as community influencers to overcome what officials say is a persistent vaccine reluctance in the Black community. Several local ministers recently received their first vaccine shots.

Divisions over race, politics, gender, and LGBTQ issues are roiling America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, ahead of a meeting of its executive committee next week.

As states continue with the initial rollout of vaccines for COVID-19, the availability for pastors depends on their location as well as the definition of “essential.” Clergy are already eligible in some states, but not in others.

Tanzania’s COVID-denying president is calling on citizens for three days of prayer to defeat unnamed “respiratory diseases” amid warnings that the country is seeing a deadly resurgence in infections.

While defending Southern Baptist pastors who called Vice President Kamala Harris a ‘Jezebel,’ Southern Baptist pastor Tom Ascol declared Harris was going to hell. He also consigned journalists Anne Branigin and Jake Tapper to that fate for reporting on pastors who compared Harris to the biblical character Jezebel.

Fighting in Tigray, a semi-autonomous state in northern Ethiopia, resulted in massacres at ancient religious sites as the country’s military battled the forces of the ruling party in the state, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.

After nearly two weeks of controversy following an unusual move to deny tenure or promotion to five faculty members, the Board of Trustees for Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Missouri, reversed some of those decisions in a meeting held virtually Tuesday.

Long-simmering suspicions between Orthodox and evangelical Christians have blown up recently over the refusal of the Jordanian government to allow evangelical churches full legal standing under the country's religiously-divided judicial system.

There are filters that blur “imperfections” in photos and filters that turn lawyers into cats on Zoom. Now there’s a filter to help Christians safely display the very visible Ash Wednesday mark on social media.