The increase in coronavirus cases in China’s prison system has sparked concern among the loved ones of church leaders and other Christians imprisoned for their faith. 

On Friday, China announced that more than 500 prisoners in five prisons in three provinces had contracted the virus, also known as COVID-19, which has so far sickened almost 80,000 people and killed more than 2,000 people, the South China Morning Post reports.

Nearly half of the cases were in Rencheng jail in Jining, located in China’s eastern province of Shandong. Officials said a prison guard had shown COVID-19 symptoms in early February and that 200 prisoners and seven officers subsequently tested positive for the virus.

According to persecution watchdog International Christian Concern, Christian human rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang has been incarcerated in the same province, and his wife Li Wenzu has not been able to learn about his updates, as her regular visit time on Feb. 13 “was canceled due to the ongoing spread of coronavirus.”

Concerned about the health of her husband, she called Linyi Prison and asked to speak to Wang on the phone, only to be quickly shut down by the staff.

As the coronavirus continues to spread, ICC urges Christians to “pray for protection for Christians who are still incarcerated in the Chinese cells.” The organization specifically named pastor John Cao, elder Hu Shigen, pastor Zhang Shaojie, pastor Bao Guohua, and “others whose lives could be greatly endangered if the epidemic reaches their prisons.”

More than half of the COVID-19 prison cases were in the central Chinese province of Hubei, the epicenter of the epidemic, with 230 cases at Wuhan Women’s Prison and 41 cases at Shayang Hanjin Prison. Another 34 cases were identified at Shilifen Prison in Zhejiang province, also in the country’s east.

Additionally, authorities found 10 suspected cases among prisoners in the three provinces, including some at a juvenile detention center.

Hundreds, if not thousands of Christians are thought to be detained in prisons across China. Christians are among several persecuted religious minorities including Uighur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong in the Communist-led country.

SOURCE: Christian Post, Leah MarieAnn Klett

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The U.S. Supreme Court announced Monday that it will hear a case that could have huge implications on the rights of Christian and other faith-based adoption and foster care agencies to turn away LGBT couples on grounds of religious beliefs. 

The country’s high court will hear the case brought on behalf of a Catholic foster care parents who sued the city of Philadelphia for no longer placing children with Catholic Social Services because the organization does not place children in the homes of lesbian or gay couples.

The case of Fulton v. Philadelphia dates back to 2018 when city officials moved to stop the placement of children in homes of foster parents affiliated with CSS of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and Bethany Christian Services of Greater Delaware Valley.

Both organizations prohibited the placement of children with same-sex couples and the city argued that it wanted to prevent discrimination against the LGBT community.

While Bethany Christian Services eventually agreed to change policy to continue working with the city, foster parents and others who’ve worked with CSS filed a legal challenge to the city’s move on grounds that it violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Plaintiff Sharronell Fulton had fostered as many as 40 kids during her 25 years of working with Catholic Social Services. Fellow plaintiff Toni Simms-Busch is a former social worker who adopted her foster children through CSS.

According to Becket, CSS was the “most successful” foster care agency in the city. The city stopped partnering with the organization at a time when the city admitted there was an “urgent” need for as many as 300 new foster families with over 6,000 kids in the system.

The plaintiffs were defeated in both the federal district court and federal appeals court. The Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the city last April.

In its ruling, the Third Circuit contended that the First Amendment “does not prohibit government regulation of religiously motivated conduct so long as that regulation is not a veiled attempt to suppress disfavored religious beliefs.” The court also rejected the argument that city officials acted out of anti-religious bias.

CSS had argued that city officials displayed an anti-religious and anti-Catholic bias during a meeting between city leaders and leaders from CSS in 2018.

SOURCE: Christian Post, Samuel Smith

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“For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed”—Malachi 3:6 (ESV).

Change in life is a guarantee. We can fear it, ignore it, gripe about it, become anxious, or we can embrace it. I’m struggling right now to embrace a forced transition from Windows 7 to Windows 10. My thoughts are “if it ain’t broke, why change it?”

Waiting until the last minute to make the switch, I was thankful my techie brother-in-law was available to download and install the new operating system. It’s like going from crawling to walking in 60 seconds with lots of stumbling along the way.

Making changes is difficult when you’re set in your ways or happy with the status quo. It’s even more challenging when it’s imposed on you. I’m trying to remain positive as I learn the intricacies of this new system.

Most of us don’t like to make changes unless it is something we choose. We like things to be familiar and predictable. Knowing what to expect when we wake up each morning brings comfort and peace. But life is in a constant state of change.

I’m technologically challenged and learning a new program at age 66 is something I’d rather not embrace. However, I realize the challenge is good for my brain cells. That’s the positive about my computer upgrade.

Once I’ve conquered Window 10, I’m sure I’ll discover more positive things about the new program. As I told a friend, I can’t change it, so why moan about it. Moaning about the inevitable doesn’t solve any problems. However, we usually moan the inconvenience.

SOURCE: Assist News, Carol Round

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“This is going to be a very long conversation.”

The Bible Project’s latest podcast series starts with those words by Jon Collins, followed quickly by Dr. Tim Mackie’s wry chuckling. For the Bible Project to preemptively call something a long conversation is saying something indeed, seeing as previous series on the podcast have lasted six to 20 hours. Collins flips through the papers in his hands, sounding both amused and preemptively tired.

“When we did the God conversation—which turned into a 20-episode podcast—it was about 40 pages of notes,” Collins says. “And here, in my hand, are 41 pages of notes on the Sabbath.”

Mackie, the author of the short novel in Collins’ hands, chimes in excitedly: “I started reading and writing and collecting notes a couple of months ago. … I’ve learned so much as I’ve been preparing for this conversation.”

“Our office whiteboards are just filled with your Beautiful Mind notes all over the place,” Collins says.

“Pretty much I’ve just been living and breathing, reading and rereading the Torah over and over again. I’ve just been noticing and collecting all these observations,” Mackie says, and then begins describing the significance of the number seven and its relation to Sabbath. But this theology chat between two friends is not a dry discussion held in the back room of a seminary, but rather the central focus of one of the most popular Christian podcasts and cseries on the planet.

The Bible Project, which debuted in May 2014, features Mackie and Collins, two friends passionate about presenting the Bible as a unified story using beautiful art. Along with Mike McDonald—The Bible Project’s director of strategic relationships—they run the Bible Project as basically a small animation studio, entirely funded by patrons’ donations. Those donations give them the ability to share everything they produce free of charge.

They produce quite a lot. To date, the Bible Project has created 140 videos in English, with plans to continue releasing 18-20 new videos every year for the foreseeable future. More than 700 videos have been translated into 21 different languages, with localization teams on the ground worldwide. The Bible Project also has a podcast series, basically a behind-the-scenes peek at the conversations Mackie and Collins have while creating the videos’ content. (Mackie often acts as the scholar, breaking down complex Greek and Hebrew concepts, while Collins asks questions and organizes Mackie’s ideas in structures and metaphors a layman can digest.) The podcast gets more than 1 million downloads per month. This year, the organization will launch new projects, including seminary-level classes you can attend from home (at no cost) and partnerships with Cru, Compassion International, Young Life and Alpha USA. Mackie even has ideas for expanding into the virtual reality space.

No one involved in the Bible Project imagined it would grow so large. In a retrospective video posted Dec. 2, Mackie and Collins explain that the organization started with a simple idea.

“When we started the Bible Project five years ago, we actually didn’t have a grand vision of what it could become,” Mackie says. “We had an idea that the Bible’s hard to understand—at least for us and a lot of other people—so let’s make it easier to understand using cartoons we’ll put up on the internet.”

“Let’s make these really beautiful [and] explain the Bible really well so they are of a lot of value,” Collins says.

“But we want to give them away for free to everybody,” Mackie says.

“So that meant we thought it would just be a side gig, and we would use freelancers as money came in,” Collins says. “We’d make videos slowly. But we had no idea how supportive and enthusiastic [viewers] would be about this project.”

Meet the Team

The team’s passion to share the Word of God around the world stems from its leaders’ own life-changing encounters with the Bible. McDonald was raised Bahai but became a believer in Jesus Christ at 19 after a missionary to Turkey gave him a Bible.

“I read through Matthew that night,” McDonald says. “I didn’t have language for it at that point, but that was when I decided, ‘This is the guy that I’m going to follow.’ So for me, even my coming to faith was through the Scriptures. It wasn’t through somebody telling stories or going to church on Sunday or even hearing it through an evangelist. It was sitting down with the Gospel of Matthew, reading it cover to cover in four hours, and going, ‘Wow, Jesus is Lord. That is huge. I think this is obviously what’s going to shape and change my life.’”

Mackie grew up in Portland, Oregon, but always resented being taken to church by his parents. He was more interested in the free-spirited skateboarding lifestyle and saw the church as an embodiment of “the man” he was rebelling against. But that changed when he discovered a local ministry, SkateChurch, which sponsored and ran a local skate park. (The organization has been reaching Portland-area skateboarders for Christ for more than 30 years.) Every week, he’d come to skate and hear a short message about Jesus. Eventually the gospel worked its way into his heart, and by age 20, he was following Jesus. He started attending the nearby Multnomah Bible College.

“I had a couple friends [who] had all gone to SkateChurch,” Mackie explained during a 2018 podcast with Preston Sprinkle. “We all became Christians around the same time, started following Jesus, and so we signed up for classes together. A number of us went overseas within a year. We went and spent a summer in the jungle with [Wycliffe] Bible Translators—you know, like super, super intense. I came back and was like, ‘I want to follow Jesus. I want to do whatever.’ So I signed up for Greek, naturally. … I became a Bible nerd. I got hooked.”

Mackie got his Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible and Jewish studies at the University of Wisconsin, only to realize he had little interest in becoming a university professor. He started teaching classes on biblical theology at Blackhawk Church in Middleton, Wisconsin. When he moved back to Portland, he got a job teaching part-time at Western Seminary and also served as teaching pastor at Door of Hope Church. He soon reconnected with Collins—a friend from his time at Multnomah—who had since started two digital communication companies that specialized in creating animated explainer videos for organizations like Google, P&G and Nike.

As Mackie explains it to Sprinkle, Collins was the first one to pitch the Bible Project: “[John] pitched the idea to me of, ‘Hey, I make these videos. You’re a Bible nerd. We’re friends. Let’s make some videos and see what happens.’ So it was really truly like just kind of a harebrained idea. We spent a year and a half—just [as] a side project—making the first two videos.”

The rest is history. When the Bible Project began expanding and going global, Mackie and Collins reached out to McDonald—who attended church with Collins at Imago Dei Community. McDonald had run a nonprofit called Hear the Cry focused on international justice and compassion work for 10 years and, in his words, “was ready to hand that off … and do the next season.” He was excited to use his international experience to help the Bible Project go worldwide.

The Bible Project has moved twice—from a basement to the back office of a web development shop to its current base of operations, a shared office with Imago Dei Community. In 2016, Collins left his other businesses to work full-time on the Bible Project. Today McDonald describes the operation as a combination between a pastoral ministry and an animation studio.

“John ran two major, large studios here in Portland doing explainer videos,” McDonald says. “… He was able to bring [those systems] with him. Having a staff of 70-80 people at some of those agencies, he learned in the for-profit model how to run a business, and then was able to bring that over, which was very helpful when it comes to the animators and illustrators and everything else. And then Tim was a pastor and a teacher. So you’ve got this whole pastoral feel to the office as well.”

In the retrospective video, Collins says all of this growth has only been made possible by supporters: “We keep growing because we’re doing more than just making videos. We believe the Bible is brilliant, literary genius, and [using] visuals and animation, you can bring that to life in new ways.”

SOURCE: Charisma News 

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The Hallmark Drama Channel will broadcast the Movieguide® Awards Gala and Report to the Entertainment Industry on Feb. 24, 2020 at 11 p.m. EST/PST, 10 p.m. CST. The show will be available on the Hallmark Everywhere app beginning Feb. 25. The program celebrates the wholesome, true, good and lovely things about the entertainment industry. The ceremony honors movies and TV shows that promote an uplifting worldview.

“This gala further encouraged me that good news is making a difference in Hollywood,” said Dr. Ted Baehr, founder and publisher of Movieguide®. “Audiences crave family-friendly entertainment, and we are seeing industry executives recognize and reward that desire.”

Some of the nominees include 1917, Little Women, Toy Story 4, The Lego Movie: The Second Part and multiple Hallmark programs, including some of its premier Christmas movies. For the full list of nominees, click here.

Hallmark stars Jen Lilley and Andrew Walker host the awards ceremony.

“I’m beyond ecstatic to be hosting,” Lilley said in an interview with Movieguide®. “It’s not lost on me that it’s such an honor, and I don’t take it lightly. I’m just incredibly humbled to have been asked and we’re going have so much fun.”

In addition, the program will feature a performance from American Idol alum Colton Dixon, and Kathy Lee Gifford will be presented with the Visionary Award.

A red carpet preceded the event, with Movieguide® TV host and Gala producer Evelyn Carroll conducting interviews with each person who walked the carpet. Though the hour-long special won’t include red-carpet footage, the interviews are available on movieguide.org.

SOURCE: Movieguide

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On Oct. 25, 2019, bestselling rapper Kanye West released Jesus Is King, his ninth studio album overall but his first as a self-described Christian artist. From beginning to end, the album is about his relationship with Jesus, his joy at being saved and his awe for the God who loves him. The album is profanity-free and features no sexual or violent content.

Jesus Is King immediately triggered strong and polarized reactions. Many conservatives and evangelical Christians exuberantly expressed their love for the album. In a column for National Review, Andrew T. Walker breathlessly said West possessed “the anthropology of C. S. Lewis, the economics of Wilhelm Röpke, the cultural mood of Wendell Berry and the defiance of Francis Schaeffer.”

Meanwhile, longtime fans of West expressed their frustration, calling the lyrics corny and West an attention-seeker. The Daily Beast ran a headline calling Jesus Is King “fake Christianity at its finest.”

Even some Christian leaders expressed skepticism toward West’s sudden pivot into Christian music—including Tyler Burns, a Pentecostal pastor featured in last month’s “Tomorrow’s Charismatics” feature. Burns, writing for The Washington Post, noted that West appropriated the sound of gospel music while discarding the theology of the black church that is meant to accompany it.

He concluded, “While Jesus Is King feels like it should be a cultural moment of celebration for all Christians, it should come as no surprise that many black Christians question who this moment will ultimately empower.”

West’s Christian faith has only continued to dominate news headlines since Jesus Is King‘s release. The album hit No. 1 on Billboard charts during its debut week. West has spoken and performed at Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church. In January, West replaced comedian John Crist as the headliner at the Strength to Stand Student Bible Conference in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, alongside Hillsong Young & Free. Over the span of 2019, West went from the artist who released the blasphemous album Yeezus to a bona fide Christian celebrity, in some cases being treated with the authority of a leader.

Naturally, such a drastic transformation also sparks many questions:

Is Kanye for real?

Will his conversion stick?

And should such a young, immature Christian ever be given so much authority and access to major platforms?

In fact, believers who only recently began paying attention to West may be surprised to learn he’s been wrestling with God his entire life. Though unlikely to assure those doubting West’s sincerity—and ultimately, West’s faith is between him and God—this story will review West’s long and troubled relationship with Christianity over two decades in the public eye.

Jesus Walks

By all accounts, West was raised in a Christian household and could be considered at least a nominal Christian for most of his life. While speaking with Osteen at Lakewood Church, West shared that he grew up going to church “three times a week,” thanks to his father.

“For me as a kid, going to church on Wednesday instead of going to basketball practice or getting to play video games got to be a little bit boring,” West says. “My mom had me in church twice a week, definitely on Sundays. We actually grew with the church; it was a pastor named Johnny Coleman, and we grew from a small church to a megachurch—a Chicago version. I think it grew to like five or six thousand [people]. My mom always had the records in the house, and we would be playing a lot of R&B records, but then we’d go and hear the gospel and hear worship.”

In January 2009, West told Bossip his father scared him straight when he thought about leaving the Christian faith.

“I had a conversation with my dad when I was 20 years old and [said], ‘I don’t believe in this everybody’s going to hell thing [where] everyone who isn’t a Christian is in the wrong,’” West says. “His response at that time was, ‘Well, I’d hate to see you not spend eternity with me and burn in the depths of hell.’ I was like, ‘Well … I don’t want that to happen, so let me set up this insurance plan and just do this.’”

SOURCE: Charisma News

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