(RNS) — The son of the late evangelist Billy Graham, the head of an anti-abortion ministry, and the co-founder of Liberty University’s Falkirk Center are among the conservative Christian leaders scheduled to speak this week at the Republican National Convention.

Several of the political figures scheduled to speak are also known for their faith, including Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, who has spoken often about his Seventh-day Adventist faith. In a break with precedent, the sitting secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, also will speak at the convention. Pompeo, an outspoken Christian, has spoken before on “Being a Christian Leader.”

Neither the convention nor President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, which released the list of speakers over the weekend, has announced the faith leaders who will open and close each day of the convention in prayer.

But the Trump campaign included Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Catholic archbishop of New York, in an email with Monday’s lineup, and Dolan confirmed in a statement last week that he had been invited to pray.

The cardinal said that his prayer is not an endorsement of any candidate, political party or platform and that he would have accepted an invitation to pray at the Democratic National Convention, as well. He previously prayed at the Democratic gathering in 2012 and Trump’s inauguration in 2017.

“Prayer is…

Several reports have revealed that hospitals in Xinjiang, China forced families exceeding the designated number of children allowed under the Communist regime to have abortions.

Hasiyet Abdulla, a Uyghur obstetrician who currently lives in Turkey, spent over 15 years working in several Xinjiang hospitals, as well as the XUAR Hospital of Traditional Uyghur Medicine.

Abdullah told Radio Free Asia that hospitals keep track of the pregnancies from each family planning unit in its archival records and enforce strict regulations intended to limit Uighurs and other ethnic minorities to three children, The Christian Post reports.

She explained that women who did not wait long enough between children to get pregnant again would have abortions done by the hospitals. Additionally, intrauterine devices (IUDs) would be implanted following the pregnancies.

“Every hospital had a family-planning unit that was responsible for implementation — who had how many kids, when they’d given birth to them — they tracked all of this,” she said.

“The regulations were so strict: there had to be three or four years between children. There were babies born at nine months who we killed after inducing labor. They did that in the maternity wards, because those were the orders,” she added.

Even if mothers were “eight and nine months pregnant,” babies still had to be aborted. Abdulla noted that babies…

A congregation in Massachusetts has raised money through a car wash and through their website to help the victims of the recent massive explosion in Beirut.

St. George Orthodox Church of Boston held the car wash on Saturday, with the youth raising thousands of dollars while cleaning a couple hundred vehicles.

The Very Rev. Timothy J. Ferguson, head pastor of the church, told The Christian Post that the congregation felt inspired to hold the charitable event due to the many personal ties to Lebanon.

“Our community, my parish that is to say, is about 60% immigrants from Lebanon. And so there were a lot of people who were directly affected by the explosion that took place there,” explained Ferguson.

“So they wanted to reach out and respond. It was an initiative on the part of the teenagers, the young people in the parish.”

While…

Welcoming energy could be felt through the phone when Sam Collier picked up and said “Hello.”

I’ve seen Collier up close several times at events, and frankly, he is a “what you see is what you get” kind of guy.

That being said, Collier, an Atlanta native and one of the teaching pastors at North Point Community Church in Atlanta, believes that God has given him a greater story to tell.

Collier’s story, which has a lot of twist and turns, started out with what he would call rejection and abandonment.

Collier was born into a life that was deemed unsafe and placed in the foster care system where his parents, the Colliers, would adopt him. Collier is clear that if it hadn’t been for his adoptive parents his life would have taken a completely different path. In fact, just the mention of his parents’ names causes Collier to light up and get excited. In Collier’s new book A Greater Story he paints a clear picture of why faith and adoption are very important to him.

According to IFoster and other leading foster care/adoption advocacy groups, the number of kids in America’s foster care system is estimated to be around 400,000 to 440,000 kids, many of them, kids of color. Collier knows that with figures like these, he’s a blessed man to have the parents that God has given him.

“My dad was never surprised, in fact, he normalized greatness,” Collier shared, noting that for this reason,…

A pastor of a Georgia megachurch who also is running for U.S. Senate said last week he believes legalized abortion is “consistent with” Christianity and he would “fight” to ensure it remains legal.

Raphael Warnock, senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and a Democratic candidate trying to unseat Republican U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler in November’s election, made the comments to WGAU’s Tim Bryant.

Bryant asked Warnock how the pro-choice views of the Democrat Party “square with” his “role as a minister, a leader of a church, a man of God.”

“I believe that healthcare is a human right,” said Warnock, who has served as senior pastor of the church since 2005. “And I believe that it is something that the richest nation in the world provides for its citizens, and for me reproductive justice is consistent with my commitment to that.

“I believe unequivocally in a woman’s right to choose, and that the decision is something that we don’t want government engaged in – that’s between her and her doctor and her minister. And I will fight for that in the United States Senate, and at the same time continue to fight so women can receive the kind of services that they need in order to have a healthy pregnancy and healthy babies. We have a maternal death rate in this country that is exceedingly high, particularly to be the richest country…

Current and former Black employees at Planned Parenthood and the NARAL Pro-Choice America say they faced “racism, pay inequity and lack of upward mobility” at their jobs.

According to CBN News, Some 26 employees of Planned Parenthood affiliates and of the NARAL Pro-Choice America told BuzzFeed News about the discrimination against Black staff and other people of color. Another 16 employees with other reproductive rights groups also reported the same.

“I’ve worked at plenty of nonprofits, and I have never been treated so horribly in my life as I was at Planned Parenthood, to the point where I grew very depressed, had a lot of anxiety, and cried in the bathroom almost every day,” said a former Planned Parenthood employee in Washington DC.

In June, the CEO of Planned Parenthood of Greater New York was fired after being accused of racism and poor management. Staff accused the CEO of a “toxic” atmosphere that didn’t have a human resources department.

“After years of complaints from staff about issues of systemic racism, pay inequity, and lack of upward mobility for Black staff, highly-paid consultants were brought in three separate times to assess the situation,” a letter signed by hundreds of Planned Parenthood staff in New York reads. “Each time, employees of color were brutally honest about their experiences, but nothing changed.”

A…

Jerry Falwell Jr. and his wife Becki disclosed on Sunday that she had an “inappropriate personal relationship” that resulted in threatened blackmail from the man, although they added, “Our love has never been stronger.”

Falwell’s statement apparently was sparked by a Reuters story that quotes the man, Giancarlo Granda, who denies he was blackmailing the couple. It was published Monday.

Falwell said he and his wife “agreed that this was the right time for me to share more of our story, because the Liberty community deserves to hear it directly from me and from us.”

Falwell took an “indefinite leave of absence” last month from his role as president of Liberty University.

“During a vacation over eight years ago, Becki and I met an ambitious young man who was working at our hotel and was saving up his money to go to school. We encouraged him to pursue an education and a career and we were impressed by his initiative in suggesting a local real estate opportunity,” Falwell said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “My family members eventually made an investment in a local property, included him in the deal because he could play an active role in managing it, and became close with him and his family.

“Shortly thereafter, Becki had an inappropriate personal relationship with this person, something in which I was not involved — it was…