With the surge in COVID-19 cases now considered manageable, Samaritan’s Purse’s Central Park field hospital unit has stopped receiving new patients and will pack up and leave in approximately two weeks.

The Christian ministry and its partner hospital, Mount Sinai Health System, released a joint statement Saturday saying the partnership had resulted in 315 coronavirus patients receiving “high-quality medical care” within the field hospital tents.

“We are grateful for this opportunity to work together to save lives and reduce suffering,” the statement said, according to New York City Public Radio. “Now that the surge in COVID hospital admissions is reaching manageable levels, we will stop admitting new patients to the Central Park field hospital as of [Monday] May 4.”

New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson previously had said Samaritan’s Purse wasn’t welcome in the city due to the organization’s biblical views on sexuality. “Hate has no place in our beautiful city,” he tweeted last week. But Franklin Graham, president of Samaritan’s Purse, said on Monday his organization treated “everybody the same.” The organization is privately funded.

Samaritan’s Purse requires its volunteers to agree to a written affirmation “that marriage is exclusively the union of one genetic male and one genetic female.”

Hate has no place in our beautiful city. 6/6

— NYC…

A senior army chaplain is under fire from twenty-two chaplains under his command because he sent them an email encouraging them to read John Piper’s new book Coronavirus and Christ. They are calling for him to face military discipline, including a possible court-martial for what they say is a violation of their freedom of religion, Desiring God reports.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Mark Esper asking him to investigate the action taken by Colonel Moon H. Kim, who is the command chaplain of U.S. Army Garrison Humphreys in South Korea. Kim sent an email to thirty-five military chaplains from his Army email address with a link to a free copy of Piper’s e-book and told them, “This book has helped me refocus my sacred calling to my savior Jesus Christ to finish strong. Hopefully, this small booklet would help you and your Soldiers, their Families and others you serve.”

In the letter to Secretary Esper, the MRFF said Colonel Moon’s actions were “clearly meant as a full-fledged endorsement and validation of what the book espouses and proclaims. This, in CLEAR effect, especially to the recipients of his shocking e-mail, Chaplain (Colonel) Kim is likewise endorsing and validating the same dictates as established by the author of this book.”

The MMRF specifically took issue with the theology Piper is known to…

As churches continue to stay closed amid COVID-19, free resources are being offered by Tyndale Bible and the Institute for Bible Reading (IFBR) for communal Bible studies.

“One of the things that we’ve seen recently in the midst of this is that reading the Bible by yourself can be lonely. You’re there alone to wrestle with your questions. And so … we want to bring people together,” senior director of mobilization for IFBR Paul Caminiti, told The Christian Post.

In the past few years, Tyndale, a book publisher, and IFBR, an activist think tank, have collaborated to produce the Immerse Bible Reading Experience, which has been growing in popularity.

The program features a six-volume Bible aimed at providing the “best reading experience possible.” Each chapter of the Bible is displayed “according to its literary genre” and void of annotations, section headings and chapter and verse numbers. Additionally, the Scripture is formatted in a “single-column setting.”

Amid stay at home orders due to COVID-19, together the organizations decided to launched a new 10-day virtual Bible “book clubs,” called Immerse From Home. The program offers an online communal Bible study of books Luke through Acts.

“This initial engagement with Scripture would be centered around the big stories of the first century: the life of Jesus, and the birth of the early church,” Caminiti…

The governor of a province in Pakistan is encouraging all universities to require that a study of the Quran become part of the college syllabus.

According to The Christian Post, Punjab Gov. Chaudhry Muhammad Sarwar said the Quran will help students “win favor of Allah Almighty” and become “good human beings through the right understanding of the Holy Quran.”

The governor, who is chancellor of universities, has asked a seven-member committee to bring him recommendations on how to implement a study of the Quran into the syllabus.

The group’s recommendations are due May 22.

Meanwhile, a statement from CLAAS-UK, a Christian legal advocacy organization, says forcing non-Muslim students to study the Quran will have a “negative impact.”

“It is sad that for minorities, especially Christians who are living in large numbers in Punjab, their religious and fundamental rights are totally ignored,” Nasir Saeed, director of CLAAS-UK, said. “No alternative program has been announced for non-Muslim students of Punjab universities.

“It will promote bigotry and hatred against non-Muslims in Pakistani society, something which is already on the rise,” he added.

In 2017, the National Assembly and Senate in Pakistan voted to pass a bill that would make the teaching of the Quran mandatory in all schools and colleges in the country.

The Compulsory Teaching of…

Nine out of 10 Protestant churches in the U.S. did not meet in-person during the month of April amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and few pastors say they will resume all normal activities right away when government restrictions are lifted, according to a new LifeWay Research poll.

The survey of pastors showed that 90 percent of Protestant churches did not meet in-person during April – a similar finding to a previous poll in which 93 percent of churches did not meet in-person the final week of March. Most state and local governments did not begin restricting in-person meetings until the middle of March.

Even on Easter Sunday, 93 percent of Protestant churches did not meet.

Churches out West are the most likely to say they never halted in-person meetings.

“By the end of March, the gravity of the pandemic had changed churches’ behavior across the nation,” said Scott McConnell, executive director of LifeWay Research. “The need for precautions did not change throughout April and churches maintained their temporary avoidance of gathering physically.”

Few churches have plans to resume all normal activities when government restrictions and guidance are lifted. For example:

• 16 percent of pastors say they’ll resume “all normal activities” right away.
• 23 percent will wait a few additional weeks and then resume activities gradually.
• 7 percent will resume meetings for…

(RNS) —  The Rev. Jim West was feeling terrified as the state of Tennessee — and the church he pastors there — prepared to reopen after a month under stay-at-home orders.

But he was also looking forward to it.

“I just hope everything goes okay and nobody gets sick because that would be a nightmare,” he said on Tuesday afternoon (April 28).

West’s church — Petros Baptist Church in Petros, Tennessee — planned to reopen in phases in May, starting with Wednesday night adult Bible study, which West called its “least occupied service” and resuming Sunday services, usually attended by about 120 people, on Mother’s Day, with social distancing guidelines in place.

One church member had made hundreds of masks with “religious themes” for people to use, according to the pastor.

West submitted the reopening plan to his church leaders and to health officials in Morgan County, which has had fewer than 10 reported cases of COVID-19, according to the Tennessee Department of Health.

Then everything changed.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed an executive order later on Tuesday that allows many businesses across the state to reopen but “strongly encouraged” houses of worship to continue virtual services.

West wrote Wednesday on the church website he was “gutted” to share the news the church now likely wouldn’t be reopening until June.

“I was really…