President Trump is under fire for referring to certain countries as “s—hole countries” and questioning why we are allowing so many people from these countries to immigrate to the U.S.

Following the alleged comments, Trump tweeted:

The language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used. What was really tough was the outlandish proposal made – a big setback for DACA!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 12, 2018

Although the President denies this statement, a firestorm quickly ensued.

Thabiti Anyabwile, pastor of First Baptist Church in the Cayman Islands, which are located south of Cuba, wrote a piece in The Gospel Coalition in which he details the beautiful diversity of the Body of Christ, and his subsequent distress over the President’s comments about immigrants and places that are very different from the U.S.

“This is my immigrant family, my true brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus. We have been a diverse family from the start, from the time we were sent from a larger diverse congregation of brothers and sisters. I look out on embodied, relational evidence of the reconciling power and reality of Jesus Christ,” said Anyabwile.

Anyabwile went on to explain why the President’s comments were so hurtful to him and so insensitive to many immigrants:

“I’m a pastor, not a…

Who would steal a 400-pound church bell?

That’s the question baffling the parishioners of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church near Norris, S.D., where the hundred-year-old bell has chimed for news, services and emergencies from atop its small wooden tower.

The bell was swiped between Dec. 30 and Jan. 6, the church’s pastor guesses, and would be welcomed back with thanksgiving and forgiveness.

“(B)ecause that’s what we do in the Church,” the Rev. Lauren Stanley said in a Facebook post appealing for the bell’s return.

“Losing this bell — having it stolen from us — means that we have lost a part of our community,” Stanley said in an email. ” … (I)t is still part of who the people are. We have members who remember it being used all the time, and for them, this is an appalling attack on us as a community, and the loss of a community member, as it were.”

St. Paul’s is one of 11 churches in the Rosebud Episcopal Mission spread across the Rosebud Indian Reservation, home to members of the Lakota Sioux. All 11 churches have bells, some in towers atop the main church building and others — like St. Paul’s — in small towerlike stands adjacent to the sanctuary.

The Episcopal Church founded its mission to the Lakota peoples in 1875 and St. Paul’s Episcopal Church was founded there on tribal lands in 1890. Many of the mission’s bells were donated…

The suspension of a popular evangelical university chaplain has highlighted tensions over same-sex marriage in a growing Protestant denomination that forbids it but also takes pride in its willingness to allow congregants to hold opinions contrary to church doctrine.

The Rev. Judy Peterson, ordained in the Evangelical Covenant Church and pastor at its flagship North Park University in Chicago, presided at the wedding of two men in April. That act resulted in her suspension and then a petition drive calling on ECC leaders to place a moratorium on their guidelines forbidding clergy to officiate at same-sex weddings. The petition had more than 4,270 signatures as of Thursday (Jan. 11).

Members of the ECC — which has more than 850 churches in North America, with about 225,000 weekly attenders — have grappled with the issue much as have other Protestant denominations. Other ECC pastors also face disciplinary action for taking part in the nuptials of gay couples or affirming them in other ways.

But some congregants hope the church’s tradition of tolerance for those who take issue with its official stances could lead toward a more amicable resolution in the ECC on an issue that has split other churches.

Peterson, in a statement released by Mission Friends for Inclusion, an LGBTQ-affirming network of ECC members, wrote that in officiating at the…