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On a somber Sunday 25 years ago, the late Rev. Billy Graham shook off the flu to try and explain how a loving God could have allowed the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building to occur. But Graham — America’s pastor-in-chief — had no answer.

At 28, Amy Downs was an unhappily married college dropout. She'd lost her faith. She weighed 355 pounds. Surviving the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was the perfect opportunity for a fresh start. 

Across the country, black clergy say the coronavirus is touching — and sometimes taking — the faithful who until a month ago were accustomed to meeting weekly in their pews. Some are mourning losses in the highest echelons of their denomination. Others are counting the dead, sick and unemployed.

Russell Moore, the Southern Baptist Convention’s top ethicist, said he saw no problem with churches applying for government loans as part of the coronavirus relief legislation enacted last month.

Even before the global coronavirus pandemic, Baptists in the South American nation of Venezuela have faced years of economic struggles, lack of resources, political turmoil, and difficulty in travel. And as they’ve done during those other challenges, they’ve continued to minister amid the threat of coronavirus and the difficulties it has sparked.

On Tuesday (April 14), U.S. President Donald Trump announced the U.S. would halt funding to the World Health Organization despite the global role of the WHO in fighting the coronavirus pandemic. Trump’s move echoes political fights decades ago as the son of a Danish Baptist preacher transformed the health arm of the United Nations to adopt a social justice approach to health across the world.

A student at Liberty University has filed a class-action lawsuit against the school alleging that students were put at “severe physical risk” when the campus reopened in March despite the pandemic and accusing administrators of profiting from the health crisis by refusing to fully refund students.

The Justice Department took the rare step on Tuesday of weighing in on the side of an independent Baptist church in Mississippi where local officials had tried to stop Holy Week services broadcast to congregants sitting in their cars in the parking lot.

As the coronavirus pandemic sweeps the globe, it adds to the life-and-death challenges of refugees in eastern Africa already threatened by conflict, lack of resources, and perhaps even devastation from billions of locusts. A Baptist pastor ministering in refugee camps in Uganda — himself a refugee from South Sudan — sees the coronavirus outbreak as the latest danger to those he serves.

Like many other ministry leaders around the world, Air Force Chaplain Dan Thompson has needed to make a number of adjustments to minister to the people he shepherds in Afghanistan. Now, when he counsels people, he sits six feet away.