During a one-day sweep by law enforcement agencies in Michigan, 123 missing children were recovered. 

The U.S. Marshals Service, Detroit Missing Child Recovery Unit (DMCRU), U.S. Marshals Service Sex Offender Investigation Branch, Michigan State Police, Detroit Police and Wayne County Police collaborated on September 26, to conduct a series of sweeps in order to locate as many of the 301 missing children in the area. The team was able to recover 123 children, leaving 178 children still missing. 

When officers recovered the children, they interviewed them, as protocol dictates, to further understand why they were taken and to try to isolate whether they were taken to be trafficked. 

According to the report that was released last week, police were able to identify three cases were children were possibly sex trafficked. 

Additionally, authorities were able to locate one homeless teen who appeared to not have eaten in three days. Police transported the teen back to the command post and then turned him over to Child Protective Services for aftercare. 

Police were also able to obtain new information about two children that went missing in Texas and Minnesota. The DMCRU has been asked to assist the Marshal Service and other authorities on the recoveries of these two children and is actively investigating their cases at this time. 

Authorities have confirmed that this coordinated sting is…

Hurricane Michael hit Florida on Wednesday just shy of a category 5.

The hurricane unexpectedly increased in strength before it slammed into the Gulf Coast of Florida with its 155 mph winds. 

As of Thursday morning, the storm has claimed the lives of two people, one in Florida and one in Georgia, and caused a devastating amount of damage. 

The storm ripped rooves and exterior walls off of buildings, flattened neighborhoods to the ground, felled trees, caused flooding and according to the New York Times, has left around 800,000 people without power across Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. 

A vast search-and-rescue operation is underway following the storm which Florida Governor Rick Scott said, “is the worst storm that the Florida panhandle has ever seen.”

Governor Scott said his biggest concern is the loss of life, as many are expecting more casualties to be reported as rescue missions push on. According to the New York Times, rescuers fear that they will discover bodies under the mass amounts of rubble that is littering the streets. 

CBS News reports that the storm also cause storm surges of up to six to 14 feet in some areas.

One major concern in Florida is the condition of two hospitals in Panama City, which Gov. Rick Scott said were damaged during the storm.

Michael made landfall on Wednesday afternoon near Mexico Beach, Fla. as a Category 4.  At around midnight…

The percentage of clergy in the United States who are women has exponentially increased over the past several decades, a new report shows.

Dr. Eileen Campbell-Reed, a professor of practical theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas, has released a new report titled “State of Clergywomen in the U.S.: A Statistical Update.”

According to Campbell-Reed, the report is designed to fill a data gap on female clergy that has existed for about 20 years since previous major multi-denominational studies of women’s church leadership were published.

With the assistance of three graduate assistants, Campbell-Reed’s team contacted denominational offices, researched online data and received data from the Association of Theological Schools in the U.S. and Canada to assemble a “snapshot” of today’s clergy gender demographic.

“I knew waiting for another big study might take 20 more years, and I wanted to understand the landscape of women’s progress in leading the church now,” Campbell-Reed said in a statement.

In the 1960s, sociologist Wilbur Bock used census data to suggest that women comprised just 2.3 percent of clergy…

A controversial debate about racism in the United Pentecostal Church International is now raging in the denomination after an interracial couple who led one of the denomination’s churches in Missouri for 15 years announced their exit from the group on Sunday.

With some 42,000 congregations globally serving nearly 5 million members, the UPCI is the world’s largest Oneness Pentecostal denomination. It emerged in 1945 after racism and Jim Crow laws caused white Pentecostals to split from the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World — an interracial organization at the time.

While the UPCI has since opposed “racism, prejudice, and segregation” and proudly states that it is an organization that is predominantly non-white globally, Pastor Adam Medina of New Destiny Apostolic Church in Maplewood and his wife Dawn say the church body isn’t doing nearly enough stateside. And that’s why they are now part of a group called Apostolic International Ministries and have renamed…