Pastor Joel Osteen hosted a major baptism meeting at Lakewood Church over the weekend and hundreds of people from all over the world came out to be baptized.

Approximately 690 people were baptized and over 500,000 others tuned in on Facebook Live to experience the baptisms, a Lakewood rep told The Christian Post.

In a Facebook video of the event, Osteen and a leader in his ministry are seen standing in a large swimming pool at Lakewood Church on Saturday as hundreds wait in line.

“It’s the first command of the Lord Jesus,” Osteen says in the video livestream before starting the ceremony.

Lakewood Church offers baptisms ever Saturday night after their service but they only do major baptisms twice a year.

“The Watson family from long island, follow pastor, they follow the church on Sirius XM, they watch him online, they were going upstate New York to go on a family vacation but they heard that they were doing the water baptism and they turned the car around they drove all the way [here], to get baptized as a family,” a video testimonial explained.

Another mother and daughter who live on opposite coasts of the United States, met in Houston, Texas, to get…

(RNS) — For millions of Americans, summer is the season for short-term mission trips. Church groups take off for faraway places where sharing God’s love involves construction projects, teaching Bible lessons at camps and bringing medical care to people who seldom if ever see a doctor or a dentist.

But for mission trip operators, it’s also time to weigh the risks and rewards that come with bringing the well-intentioned face-to-face with real-life hardships in far-flung locations.

This year’s many risks, from fuel-price riots in Haiti to violent unrest in Nicaragua, have forced a fresh reckoning with thorny questions: How much risk is too much? And how do trip leaders balance safety with a perceived imperative to take risks for the gospel?

“God tells us we should go, and that command hasn’t changed,” said Nathan Norman, spokesman for Praying Pelican Missions, a Minneapolis-based operator of mission trips. “But we must use wisdom and not have people in unnecessarily risky situations that would put them in harm’s way.”

Praying Pelican has had a challenging season. When riots broke out in Haiti in July, the ministry diverted all of its planned Haiti trips to countries thought to be safer, if flights were available. Political unrest in Nicaragua prompted the organization to cancel one Nicaragua trip; participants backed out of others. Itineraries changed at the last…

Beni Johnson, co-pastor of Bethel Church in Redding, California, is being treated for a cancer diagnosis that “shocked” her.

“When this all began in March and I walked out of the doctor’s office shocked. I asked Jesus, ‘what do I do now?’ I heard Jesus tell me, ‘just love me’. I said, ‘I can do this’. There has been so much peace and at times those decisions that have to be made the peace has helped me navigate through,” Johnson revealed in a series of Facebook posts this week.

She said she is now going through “being healed of cancer” after having tumors removed from one of her breasts.

“In March I was diagnosed with breast cancer. They found two lumps in my right breast. Fortunately they caught it early and remove the tumor diagnosed with breast cancer. Because I watch over my body they were able to catch the cancer early and I had the two tumors removed,” Johnson said in a post on Tuesday.

She explained, however, that during her treatment for the tumors she discovered that she has a mutation on her BR2 gene which puts her at a high risk of developing breast, ovarian and a number of other cancers.

“One of the things that I was tested for during this time was my DNA to see if I had the BR Gene….

Members of a city council in West Virginia continued their recitation of the Lord’s Prayer Tuesday night, despite a lawsuit by the Freedom From Religion Foundation over the practice’s constitutionality. 

The city council of Parkersburg, W.Va., begins each meeting with the prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance.  

Parkersburg attorney George Cosenza told WTAP-TV the city council will say the prayer until a court tells it to stop. 

“A court will have to interpret whether the city council engaging in that behavior, even if it’s before the meeting starts, violates the establishment clause,” Cosenza said. “And I think it’s going to get a little tricky there, when you specifically say that type of prayer at a public event.”

Members of North Parkersburg Baptist Church attended the meeting to show their support for the practice, according to WTAP.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation and two of its members filed suit in federal court on July 31, alleging the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer is unconstitutional.

“The City Council’s recitation of the Lord’s Prayer has the primary effect of both advancing religion and expressing Defendant’s preference for Christianity above all other religions and nonreligion,” the suit states. 

Parkersburg’s city council isn’t the only one to recite a prayer. The city of Vienna, W.Va., does…

On Wednesday news broke about the sexual assault of thousands of children by Catholic priests in six Pennsylvania dioceses. The release of the Pennsylvania grand jury report confirmed that approximately 300 priests sexually assaulted or molested thousands of children in the past seven decades. The report also laid claims that senior clergymen, like Archbishop Donald Wuerl, played large parts in covering up the crimes of the predator priests. 

Since this news broke, many have been waiting for the church to respond. Instead, the church is handling the situation simply like, what many are calling, bad press. Sohrab Ahmari from the New York Post wrote that the Archbishop of Washington, Father Wuerl, and his colleagues “have treated the report as a PR headache rather than a moral and spiritual wake-up call.” 

Fox 5 DC had the opportunity to sit down with Archbishop Wuerl in the wake of the report. Fox 5 reports that the Wuerl said, “My efforts from the time that I reached Pittsburgh onto today, I’ve tried to do my very best to deal with this whole question of allegations against a priest. Now, remember, we’re dealing with a long spectrum of time so how we dealt with things in the late 80s and early 90s is different than the way we would today.” Wuerl continued saying, “How do you deal with an allegation, and remember now when an allegation comes…

• #top headlines
• #christian persecution

CBN reports that the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) has filed a complaint against Brigadier Gen. E. John Teichert this week. The MRFF filed this complaint to Defense Secretary James Mattis requesting an investigation into Teichert; the newly installed commander of the 412 Test Wing at Edwards Air Force Base in California is.  

According to CBN, Teichert, a Christian, is subject of this complaint because he posted links to articles, a Christmas video, bible verses and prayer requests on his personal website. 

The MRFF is claiming that Teichert’s website is violating rule against religious proselytizing that the Air Force and Defense Department have in place.

On his website Teichert describes himself in the following way: 

“John is an active duty Brigadier General who has served in the United States Air Force since 1994, and who was saved by grace through faith in Christ in 2004.  He has commanded at the wing, group and squadron levels, and is currently serving as Air Force commander. The Lord has blessed his career while burdening his heart with the need for our nation to return to its Christian foundation.  He serves alongside his amazing wife of 20 years and their three incredible children.  It is their desire to fully…

A Superior Court judge in Canada has ruled that Kofi Martin Danso, a self-styled prophet and leader of the multi-campus Miracle for All Nations church, cannot conceal his identity in a paternity lawsuit simply because he may suffer damage to his reputation and finances.

Ontario Superior Court Justice Fred Myers dismissed a request by Danso Tuesday to extend a publication ban and sealing order on a court file alleging he fathered a child with former congregant Chris-Ann Bartley, The Star said.

In addition to claims that he wanted the case private because “the matter concerns the paternity of a child which is disputed,” Danso argued to the court that making the case public threatened his “significant commercial/financial interests.” A ban on publication is typically used to protect the identities of children in family court matters.

In his request to keep the details of the lawsuit secret, Danso said that Theodora Oprea, Bartley’s attorney, told The Star that a DNA test had confirmed he is the father of Bartley’s now 6-month-old son.

Danso claims he has never been intimate with Bartley but Oprea said he is not being truthful.

The…

A private Catholic high school was within its legal right to terminate an employee who married another woman, a legal expert says.

Roncalli High School in Indianapolis placed guidance counselor Shelly Fitzgerald on paid administrative leave Sunday after officials learned of her relationship, The Indianapolis Star reported. She had worked at the school for 15 years and has been asked either to resign or dissolve her marriage, she told local media. 

Jim Bopp, an attorney and legal expert, said the school legally can require employees to follow a code of conduct because it is a religious organization. The school is exempt from the Indianapolis anti-discrimination ordinance, he said. 

“I don’t think there’s any doubt whatsoever that Roncalli enjoys 100 percent First Amendment protection for making sure in conducting their ministry that the people who are conducting that ministry, i.e. any of the employees, are conducting themselves so that they’re not hypocrites,” he told The Star.

Fitzgerald’s termination has divided the school community and received extensive local media coverage. 

“Shelly Fitzgerald was instrumental in changing so many lives,” Shawn Aldrich, a parent of a high school junior, told the newspaper.

Roncalli board of directors member Daniel Parker resigned to protest the termination. 

But the school says it was following…