A youth pastor stepped in to protect a wounded teenager during a shootout at a party in Syracuse over the weekend.

According to the Christian Post, Nitch Jones, pastor of youth and young adult affairs at Zion Hill World Harvest Baptist Church was attending the annual “Rye Day” Party, which is held by local businessman and philanthropist Ryedell Davis for his birthday. Jones, who is 32 years old and has one child, was running the voter registration booth at the party when shots rang out, CNY Central reports.

Officers arrived on the scene after they received a complaint about a stolen vehicle.

According to CNN, as they exited their vehicles, hundreds of people were running away from the party yelling that people were shooting.

Jones described the scene in a Facebook video Sunday morning. He said he had not been to sleep since enduring the gunfight between rival gangs in which 9 people were injured by as many as 6 gunmen.

Jones said, “I have never been inside of a live warzone in my life.” He continued, saying, “I have been around or in the vicinity of someone shooting. But I have never been in the middle. Literally, we were in the middle … of a warzone, a battle, where guns were spraying all around us, where guns were spraying right in front of us and people were getting hit and they were feet in front of us.”

Then Jones described seeing the 17-year-old, who was the youngest of the…

Calling it a “moral issue,” the Mississippi Baptist Convention Board on Tuesday urged the state legislature to change the state flag, which has incorporated the Confederate battle flag since 1894.

“Our position on this is not motivated by politics,” Shawn Parker, executive director-treasurer of the Mississippi Baptist Convention Board (MBCB), said at a press conference. “It is not motivated by economics. It is not even motivated by athletics. Our position on this is motivated by our understanding of the teaching of Jesus Christ.”

Parker read a statement that was unanimously approved by the 15-member MBCB Executive Committee and signed by Parker and every living past president of the convention. The current convention president also signed it, as did the head of the MBCB Christian Action Commission.

The Mississippi Baptist Convention Board is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. About 2,100 churches are part of the Mississippi Baptist Convention.

The Mississippi state flag incorporates three red, white and blue horizontal stripes and the Confederate battle flag, which is known more commonly as the rebel flag. Although the battle flag was not the official flag of the Confederacy during the Civil War, it remains the most well-known flag from that era.

The MBCB statement references two Bible verses: Matthew 7:12 (“do to others what you…

(RNS) — A new study examining Americans’ response to COVID-19 shows that with the exception of white evangelicals, a majority of Americans are not comfortable returning to in-person religious services.

The results of the survey suggest that despite political pressure to reopen houses of worship — from President Donald Trump as well as leading conservative Christians and religious liberty advocates — Americans aren’t quite ready to take a seat in a sanctuary.

The survey from the American Enterprise Institute showed that 64% of Americans said they were “somewhat uncomfortable” or “very uncomfortable” attending in-person worship.

Even among those who reported their congregations offered in-person worship in the past week, 56% of respondents said they chose not to go.

“We’re seeing among lay people a significant amount of discomfort in going back to formal in-person religious practices,” said Daniel Cox, a research fellow at AEI who led the study. “People are equivocating and uncertain about whether they feel comfortable attending.”

The study, conducted in late May and early June among 3,504 Americans, comes amid ongoing, politically charged campaigns to reopen. Last month, the president demanded that states allow places of worship to reopen “right away” and said he would override state governors who refused.

On Tuesday (June 23), Trump was scheduled to…

President Donald Trump was recently asked in an interview if he believes that he was appointed to the office of the presidency by God “for such a time as this.”

On Monday, CBN News Political Analyst David Brody sat down to discussed a myriad of topics with the President, including his support from evangelicals and claims by some that he was chosen by God for the presidency.

In the interview, Brody noted that former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have both asserted that God put Trump in the White House. He then asked the president if he believed that to be true.

Trump skirted around the question but noted that Dr. Ben Carson had expressed the same sentiment to him while he was running against him in the 2016 Presidential election.

“And he said to me, ‘you know, you’re gonna win,’” Trump said, quoting Carson. “I said, ‘Ben, I’m running against you. What are you telling me?’ He said, ‘you’re going to win because God put you here for this occasion.’”

“I said, ‘what a lovely thing to say.’ That was the first one that I heard, from Ben Carson. And it was during the campaign, I was running against him, and he was saying, I’m gonna win. He’s a very high-quality guy. He’s done a great job in the administration.” Trump told Brody.

When asked again if he bought into the idea of being…

JUBA, South Sudan, June 24, 2020 (Morning Star News) – Following calls from mosque leaders in east Khartoum, Sudan to rid their “Muslim area” of South Sudanese Christians, several Christians were attacked there and in neighboring Omdurman this month, sources said.

At the end of evening prayers at a mosque in the Al-Jerif East area, on the eastern bank of the Blue Nile River in Khartoum’s East Nile Locality, imams on June 6 called for residents to rid Christian South Sudanese from the “Muslim area,” a source who requested anonymity told Morning Star News. Attacks on Christians in the area followed that evening and the next day.

In a separate attack on Saturday (June 20) in Omdurman, across the Nile River west of Khartoum, young Muslim men shouting the jihadist slogan “Allah Akbar [God is greater]” stabbed a Christian to death in a street assault on him and four other South Sudanese in the Shigla area, said another source on condition of anonymity.

Mariel Bang is survived by his wife and four children ranging in age from 1 to 4 years old, the source said. Bang was 35.

Besides the death of Bang, he added, the attack left one of the other South Sudanese Christians in critical condition. The other three Christians assaulted were women who sustained minor injuries, he said.

“We will burn this place,” one of the assailants said, according to the source.

Khartoum…

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said Monday the state will bar state-funded travel to Idaho as a result of two new laws, including one that limits participation in girls’ sports to biological girls.

Both Idaho laws have received nationwide attention.

The Idaho Fairness in Women’s Sports Act requires biological sex – and not gender identity – to be used in determining who plays on high school and college sports teams. In Connecticut, two transgender athletes who are biologically male but identity as female won 15 state high school track titles.

The other law, the Idaho Vital Statistics Act, prevents the changing of a person’s sex on a birth certificate.

“Where states legislate discrimination, California unambiguously speaks out,” Becerra said. “The State of Idaho has taken drastic steps to undermine the rights of the transgender community, preventing people from playing sports in school or having documentation that reflects their identity. Let’s not beat around the bush: these laws are plain and simple discrimination.”

California now bans state-funded travel to 12 states it says discriminate against LGBT individuals. The others are Alabama, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas.

A press release from Becerra said the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act “overrules…

Former and current employees at a New York Planned Parenthood clinic says the ex-CEO of the Greater New York clinic was abusive and had a history of “systemic racism.”

According to Faithwire, Former CEO Laura McQuade was fired from the top spot at the clinic after more than 300 Planned Parenthood current and former employees signed a letter calling for her termination.

“The CEO of Planned Parenthood of Greater New York (PPGNY), Laura McQuade, has proven to be a toxic leader and autocrat, and we, the current and former staff of Planned Parenthood of Greater New York, write this letter to demand her immediate removal,” the letter said.

“We are expressing our profound lack of confidence in Laura McQuade, our Chief Officers, and our Board of Directors. In her two-and-a-half-year tenure, McQuade has created a culture of fear and intimidation; we have witnessed her cull dissenters and surround herself with enablers. Through abusive behavior and financial malfeasance, we have watched her fundamentally threaten the fiscal and operational viability of Planned Parenthood’s largest affiliate and its 900 employees.”

McQuade was named CEO of the clinic in 2017. Previously, she was in charge of the Planned Parenthood of the Great Plans affiliate.

Employees reported that McQuade would allegedly “berate” and “yell,” “slam her fists,” and “verbally abuse,”…