By Samuel Smith, U.S. Editor Follow | Wednesday, September 23, 2020

The 850-member Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., is suing Mayor Murriel Bowser over her ban on outdoor church services of more than 100 people during the coronavirus pandemic, arguing that the gathering restriction has been applied unfairly. 

Represented by attorneys at the First Liberty Institute and WilmerHale, LLP, the church led by 9Marks co-founder Mark Dever filed a complaint in federal court on Tuesday arguing that the city has violated the First and Fifth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. 

“For CHBC, a weekly in-person worship gathering of the entire congregation is a religious conviction for which there is no substitute,” the legal document reads. “The Church does not offer virtual worship services, it does not utilize a multi-site model, and it does not offer multiple Sunday morning worship services.”

In March, Bowser issued an executive order that, among other things, barred CHBC and other churches from gathering for indoor and outdoor in-person worship. According to the lawsuit, the city is prohibiting worship gatherings of over 100…

A new report from the Center for Studies on New Religion’s publication Bitter Winter reveals China is spying on and censoring any religious teacher to make sure they don’t mention God.

The Center for Studies on New Religion, a human rights organization focusing on abuses by the Chinese Communist Party’s regime, published the report in an effort to help end the crackdown.

According to the report, Chinese authorities will monitor teachers and make sure they refrain from mentioning anything about democracy, freedom, religion or God.

The report also says that religious teachers are already considered a threat to the Chinese Communist Party simply because they are religious, regardless of what they have taught. The report cites complaints from multiple teachers in both colleges and elementary schools. The teachers were kept anonymous so the Chinese Communist Party cannot find and persecute them for speaking out about the regime’s treatment of its own citizens.

One teacher noted that they “were observed during every class.” Bitter Winter goes on to summarize the rest of what she stated, writing, “She added that the Chinese Ministry of Education adopted Opinions on Building and Improving a Long-term Effective Mechanism for College Teachers’ Ethics Construction in 2016, demanding teachers ‘not say or do anything against the Party line in their educational or teaching activities.’ Student informants planted in classes…

(RNS) — In his first meeting as leader of the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee, the Rev. Rolland Slade called on other committee members on Tuesday (Sept. 22) to be responsible “to shepherd and to protect” survivors of church sex abuse.

Slade, senior pastor of Meridian Baptist Church in El Cajon, California, announced that the issue is “personal” for him because his wife is a survivor.

“For the last 40 years of my life, I have been in touch with a survivor of sexual abuse in the church,” he said to the 70 people attending the virtual meeting. “In fact, we’ve been married 39 years. So when I say it’s personal, it’s personal. And I encourage you to listen. You don’t have to solve it but you need to listen and share with them how much you care and what has happened to them is not what God would have happen in the church.”

Slade was elected in June as the first African American chair of the committee that runs the business of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination between its annual meetings.

The issue of sexual abuse has been a growing focus of the denomination, the country’s second-largest Christian group, but has been particularly pressing since a series in the Houston Chronicle last year cataloged some 700 cases of alleged abuse by Southern Baptist pastors and other leaders over two decades. Mike Stone, the committee’s previous…

The conservative and pro-life movement has a historic opportunity to reshape the court for generations by filling the current vacancy with a justice who will rule based on the “written text of the Constitution” and not their personal views, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley said Tuesday.

Speaking to a virtual Values Voter Summit, Hawley (R-Mo.) said Republican presidents in the past often have not lived up to their promises to nominate conservative justices. President Trump, he added, is the “first president of my lifetime who has said, straight up, ‘I’m gonna nominate pro-life judges.’”

The vacancy was created when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who supported Roe v. Wade, died Friday. 

“This is a turning-point moment,” Hawley said. “…. We’ve got an opportunity here as conservatives – those of us who believe in the right to life, those of us who believe in religious liberty. This is a moment where we’ll be able to shape the future of this court for decades to come.”

The current Supreme Court, Hawley said, “has made it all too clear that we do not have a working pro-Constitution majority.”

“We do not have a working pro-family, pro-life majority on the United States Supreme Court,” Hawley said. “This is the chance to get one.”

Hawley and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins referenced past GOP Supreme Court nominees who have not ruled the way…

Over the weekend, worship leader and activist Sean Feucht continued his “Let Us Worship” tour across two Florida cities as thousands of Christians poured out their hearts and souls before the Lord.

According to CBN News, the tour first met on Saturday evening at Lake Eola Park in Orlando. While Saturday’s forecast was rainy, that did not stop believers from attending.

In a post on Instagram, Feucht noted how people were giving their lives to the Lord, including drug addicts and prostitutes.

“Last night drug addicts and prostitutes off the streets were running to the altar to get saved!! The harder it rained, the more God kept pouring His Spirit out!!” Feucht wrote.

As one woman gave her life to Christ, she vowed that “she’ll NEVER BE A PROSTITUTE ON THE STREETS AGAIN!!!!” he added. “ITS HARVEST TIME IN AMERICA!!!!!”

On Sunday, the tour continued in West Palm Beach at the Meyer Amphitheater where thousands more experienced a powerful move of God.

The city, however, had blocked off the stage forcing Feucht and his band to assemble the event on the ground, according to a video by Feucht. The worship leader also noted that the tour had met in 11 cities across the nation in 10 days.

“We’re all so undone by the explosion of the miraculous we experienced! Bodies healed, marriages restored, salvations, baptisms and FIRE!!! I’ll never forget it!” the worship leader…

Despite gloomy predictions for Thailand at the onset of the global pandemic, an evangelical church-planting mission in the Southeast Asian country has experienced dramatic growth.

According to Christianity Today, church members of Free in Jesus Christ Church Association (FJCCA) celebrated the baptisms of 1,435 people in a single day, nearly three times larger than 2019 when 520 people were baptized.

“It is truly a mystery to the world as to why Thailand has been spared during the COVID pandemic,” said Bob Craft of Reach a Village ministry. “We believe it is the merciful hand of God to allow the gospel to spread at this crucial time.”

COVID-19’s warpath first hit Thailand and several experts believed recovery would be overwhelming and slow. However, at the beginning of September, Thai authorities celebrated 100 days without a new COVID-19 case.

FJCCA focuses on “word of mouth conversations, house gatherings, and in-person testimonies” to spread the gospel. For this record-breaking baptism, Christians from 200 villages in five provinces traveled to Chon Daen, the headquarters of FJCCA. Twenty ministers dunked new believers into waist-deep reservoir waters for two hours. Many of these new believers had never heard of Jesus until this year; more than 75,000 villages in the majority Buddhist country have no churches.

“Thank you all brothers and sisters who have one…

A slight majority of pastors say they believe their congregation will experience a decline in attendance once the COVID-19 pandemic crisis is over, according to a new Barna survey.

The poll, released Monday, showed a record-high 51 percent of senior pastors and executive pastors believe their church attendance will decline after the pandemic – 46 percent believing it will decline “slightly” and 5 percent decline “significantly.”

The survey was part of Barna’s weekly Church Panel, which launched in March and is in its 17th week.

A total of 17 percent of pastors say they expect attendance to grow, while 27 percent of pastors say they expect it to stay about the same.

During the first week of the survey, only 16 percent of pastors said they expected attendance to decline.

Meanwhile, a record-tying 65 percent of pastors say their churches are “open for normal use, with some precautions in place,” while 15 percent are either closed or open only for staff. Another 16 percent of churches are only open for small gatherings or meetings. Only 2 percent of pastors say their churches are opened for normal use with no precautions.

Barna also found that:

• 29 percent of small groups are meeting as usual, while 15 percent are meeting either outdoors or practicing social distancing when gathered. One-fourth (27 percent) are meeting in real-time using video or conference calls,…

A little more than half of pastors expect their worship attendance to decline after the COVID-19 pandemic is over, according to a new report by the Barna Group.

Barna recently released the findings of week 17 of their Church Pulse leader survey, which drew from a poll of 422 Protestant pastors taken Sept. 10-18.

Because each weekly survey has a different number of respondents, Barna reported the margin of error as varying between 4.77% and 7.65% depending on the sample.

For week 17, 46% of pastors said that they expect attendance to have “declined slightly” by the end of the crisis, while 6% responded that they expect it to have “declined dramatically.”

This is the largest percentage of respondents to believe that worship attendance will have “declined slightly” since March 20, which was week 1 for the report.

For the first six weeks that the church leader survey was done, those who said it would have “declined slightly” was below 20%. Since week 12, the total has been 40% or higher.

Despite the sense that attendance will decline, 92% of respondents said that they were either “very confident” or “confident” that their church will…