According to First Liberty Institute, a legal religious freedom organisation, Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley has taken part in the Lyon County School District community flyer distribution program for years.

The program allows community organisation to share flyers about various activities including outdoor programs, sports leagues, and Halloween parties.

However, the school district changed its policy in June after a parent complained about the church’s religious speech on the flyers.

It refused to distribute flyers about Calvary Chapel’s Outdoor Excursions program, Harvest Festival, and Youth Nights (which include basketball and air hockey) because they included phrases such as “worship music”, “good news” and “devotional”.

It also asked for cross images and a Proverbs quote to me removed from one of its flyers.

Stephanie Taub, Counsel for First Liberty, which is defending the church, said the district should end “its discriminatory new policy”.

She added: “The First Amendment requires school districts to be neutral toward religion.

“They may not single out a church’s flyers for censorship, and they may not force a church to scrub the flyers of any religious language. That is hostility toward religion.”

Amber Williams, Associate Attorney with Lipson Neilson, which is also supporting the church said: “Not only is this practice…

A new version has been created so it does not seem like God leads people to commit sins.

For decades the French have prayed “Lead us not into temptation” found in Matthew 6:9-13.

Instead, Catholic priests will ask worshippers to pray “Do not let us enter into temptation”. This way, the responsibility of a person sinning is placed on the person, not God.

The French Conference of Bishops approved the change earlier this year. 

However, Monsignor Guy de Kerimel, the French Catholic Church’s chief liturgist told AFP: “In itself the translation wasn’t wrong, but the interpretation was ambiguous.”

Whether or not a new version was needed was a controversial debate between theologians for almost two decades.

But the national council of evangelicals of France, CNEF, doesn’t agree with the change.

According to AFP, the group acknowledged that the new version does not implicate God in a person sinning, but said “it waters down God’s sovereignty”.

French-language Protestant churches have also approved the change. 

As he has done in similar encounters, Francis told the priests and nuns gathered in Chittagong’s

Holy Rosary Church on Saturday that he was ditching the eight-page speech that he had prepared and would instead speak to them from his heart.

“I don’t know if it will be better or worse, but I promise it will be less boring,” he quipped.

And then for the next 15 minutes, Francis drew laughter from the crowd, mixing paternal advice on how to tend to religious vocations with gentle warnings about the havoc that gossip “bombs” can wreak when lobbed in closed religious life.

“How many religious communities have been destroyed because of a spirit of gossip?” said Francis, adding that he was speaking from personal experience. “Please, bite your tongue.”

History’s first Jesuit pope has frequently lamented the damage gossip can do within the church, where vows of obedience, strict hierarchies and closed communities can breed jealousies and resentment.

It is a message Francis has brought to ordinary parishes riven by divisions and to the top of the Catholic Church leadership. His most famous iteration came in his 2014 Christmas greetings to the Vatican bureaucracy, when he listed the “terrorism of gossip” as one of the 15 maladies his closest collaborators were suffering, alongside “spiritual Alzheimer’s” and a “pathology of power”.

The Bangladeshi edition was far more jovial in tone. It was a humour-filled end to a tense diplomatic trip that saw Francis maintain public…

Forty-seven local schools constructed a range of different-sized angels to flood the building. They are placed all over the Cathedral, from the gallery to the font.

The pupils made them collectively, with some schools giving a model which has a piece of fabric from every student on it.

Others are papier mache, and some children have written prayers on their angels.

Jane Whittington, a school officer with the Diocese of Guildford education team, told Premier they were made by reception age group students through to age 16-year-olds.

“The smallest ones are about 30 cm high and they’re perched on windowsill and little ledges the largest one are just under six foot with quite a lot of them at about real-size child height.

“All the way around the Cathedral we’ve dotted angels around; some are hiding, peering down from the gallery, some are in the treasury, peering down from ledges and shelves in there, round behind the font and so on.

“So, when people some to visit they will have to hunt for them,” she said.

She added that she hopes the angels will attract non-Christian families to the Cathedral to see their children’s work.

She told Premier: “We’ve always had a school art exhibition at the Cathedral over Christmas and we know that lots of children to bring their families to see their art over Christmas.”

To launch the…