Stovall Weems, senior pastor of the 12,000-member Celebration Church in Jacksonville, Florida, told his congregation Sunday that he met Jesus Christ in his home on Good Friday and was surprised by His personality.

“I want to talk to you about the experience I had Friday night where I met and I saw our risen Savior,” Weems said in a recording of his church’s Sunday service posted on YouTube.

Speaking alongside his wife, Kerri, who leads the church with him, Weems, who says he has been “walking with God” for 28 years, said he had never met Jesus like this before.

“The first thing that I was taken back with is like Jesus’ personality. This is how Jesus was when He was on the earth. I heard His voice … the cadence of His voice. I can sense His mood. I can sense His presence like He has a personality. He was fully God but many times we forget the man Christ Jesus. He came as a man so He has His own unique personality so what’s overwhelming is that He was new in that way but at the same time I felt like I’ve known Him forever. I can’t describe the closeness that I felt with Jesus. He didn’t look at me, I never saw the front of his face. He was wearing a white garment. He had brown…

A California pastor who “changed” his mind on homosexuality has announced that he will step down from the pastoral role of the church he founded over 20 years ago, which was expelled by the Southern Baptist Convention in 2014 for blessing gay unions.

Pastor Danny Cortez announced during a church sermon on March 25 that he plans to resign from his position at New Heart Community Church in Whittier, California, later this spring. Cortez made the announcement public with a Facebook post last Wednesday.

“Last Sunday I announced to my church that I am stepping down from my pastoral role after 20 years at New Heart,” Cortez wrote.

“Abby and I have been so blessed to be part of a community that helped transform our lives in ways that are immeasurable. It’s been a beautiful, crazy, radical, mysterious, amazing, unbelievable and grace filled space. A space that has been willing to risk for the sake of love, for the sake of obedience to God. The people that make up New Heart are the most beautiful people we know.”

Megachurch pastor John Ortberg insisted Monday that the investigation of multiple sexual misconduct allegations by several women against Bill Hybels, founder and senior pastor of the multi-campus Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois, was “poorly designed” and exposed the women to “grave risks.”

“I was approached over four years ago with disturbing information that I did not seek out. Along with others who received this information, I directed it to the elders of Willow Creek. The process that followed was, in my view, poorly designed and likely to expose any woman who came forward to grave risks,” Ortberg, senior pastor of the nearly 4,000-member Menlo Church in Menlo Park, California, wrote in a blog post Monday.

In an extensive investigation published by the Chicago Tribune last month, Hybels denied the sexual misconduct allegations against him, which include a consensual affair with a married woman, who retracted her claims. The Tribune report also alleged a pattern of behavior against Hybels that includes suggestive comments, extended hugs, an unwanted…

Max Lucado, the popular best-selling author and preacher at Oak Hills Church in San Antonio, Texas, has identified the one word on which all of Christianity stands upon, and said that if it turns out to be false, then the whole faith “collapses like a joke.”

“Three words in English. Just one in Greek. Egerthe. So much rests on the validity of this one word. If it is false, then the whole of Christianity collapses like a poorly told joke. Yet, if it is true, then God’s story has turned your final chapter into a preface,” Lucado wrote on Easter Sunday on Facebook.

The English translation of “Egerthe” is the phrase “He is risen.”

“If the angel was correct, then you can believe this: Jesus descended into the coldest cell of death’s prison and allowed the warden to lock the door and smelt the keys in a furnace,” the pastor said, referring to the angel who announced to Mary Magdalene and the other women who came to Jesus’ tomb following His crucifixion that He was no longer there.

“And just when the demons began to dance and prance, Jesus pressed pierced hands against the inner walls of the cavern. From deep within He shook the cemetery,” he wrote.

Hank Hanegraaff, host of the “Bible Answer Man” podcast, has tackled a challenging Bible passage posed by a listener who questioned why Jesus initially ignored the mother of a demon-possessed daughter, and even called her a “dog” in the book of Matthew.

In Matthew 15:21–28, a Canaanite woman pleads with Jesus to show mercy on her and her daughter, but He initially does not reply. When the disciples urge Jesus to leave, the woman kneels before Him and asks for help again.

“It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs,” Jesus replies.

When the woman persists and says that “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table,” Jesus hails her faith, and heals her daughter.

A listener to Monday’s podcast, a man named Lucas, asked Hanegraaff if he can shed light on Jesus’ attitude, and why at first He seemed to ignore the woman and even referred to her as a “dog.”