JOS, Nigeria, September 20, 2019 (Morning Star News) – A decade after Boko Haram began a bloody campaign to impose sharia (Islamic law) on all of Nigeria, Christian leaders say some areas are still under the control of the terrorists.

The Rev. Mohammed Abubakar Naga, chairman of the Borno state chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), told Morning Star News that the terrorists are still active in the northeastern part of the country where the group originated and has displaced thousands of people, effectively closing many churches.

“Gwoza East, especially the hills, has been taken over by Boko Haram,” Pastor Naga said by phone. “The terrorists still attack Christian communities there. This is even with the presence of personnel of the Nigerian army in the area.”

After beginning a violent campaign to establish an Islamic caliphate in northern Nigeria 10 years ago, Boko Haram has killed an estimated 35,000 civilians, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The agency said 37 aid workers lost their lives in the course of serving those displaced by the attacks.

Two of the many pastors Boko Haram killed in northeast Nigeria’s Borno state include the Rev. Faye Pama Musa, then secretary of the CAN’s Borno state chapter, slain on May 14, 2013 after the terrorists followed him from his church…

The only abortion clinic in Toledo, Ohio, is no longer offering surgical abortions.

Capital Care of Toledo – formerly Capital Care Network and under new ownership – surrendered its ambulatory surgical facility license effective Sept. 10, according to the Toledo Blade. 

The Ohio Department of Health inspected the facility in June, and the clinic had submitted a plan to correct deficiencies, the newspaper said. But the clinic chose to forego the license.  

“ODH made a follow-up phone call to CCN to clarify some information in the plan of correction at which time staff reported that CCN was under new ownership who did not wish to renew its ASF license and was performing non-surgical [medical] abortions only,” a department spokesman told the Blade. 

Pro-life groups celebrated the news, even though medical abortions still will be offered at the facility. 

“After years of legal trouble with proper licensure and inadequate safeguards, this is a victory for not only the pro-life movement, but for the women of Ohio,” Stephanie Ranade Krider, vice president of Ohio Right to Life said in a statement. “This clinic has acted in a reckless and above the law manner, putting women’s health and safety at risk for years. Two years ago, this same facility perforated a woman’s bowel before shuttling her in an employee’s vehicle to a nearby…

A psychiatry professor at Johns Hopkins University says children should not be allowed to medically change their genders because the treatments are similar to a “frontal lobotomies.”

“[Doctors] don’t have evidence that [the treatment] will be the right one,” said Dr. Paul McHugh, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “Many people are doing what amounts to an experiment on these young people without telling them it’s an experiment,” CBN News reports.

“You need evidence for that, and this is a very serious treatment. It is comparable to doing frontal lobotomies.”

McHugh said there could be longterm negative impacts in using the hormonal treatments used for gender transitions, which McHugh says are “reckless and irresponsible.”

McHugh said he believes that children struggling with gender dysphoria are likely dealing with mental health issues or “being driven by psychological and psychosocial problems.”

“I think their mental problems, often depression, discouragement, are the things that need treatment,” he said. “I’m not positive about this. It’s a hypothesis, but it is a very plausible hypothesis, and it would explain why many of the people who go on to have treatment of their body discover they are just as depressed, discouraged, and live just as…

ASHEVILLE, N.C. (RNS) — Poor people have often told pastor Brian Combs that the hardest thing about standing at highway intersections holding up a cardboard sign and begging for money is not watching the windows roll up or hearing the click of automatic doors locking.

It’s seeing people avert their eyes.

So when Combs, pastor of Asheville’s Haywood Street, and his friend artist Christopher Holt began talking about collaborating on a project, they envisioned a fresco on an entire wall of the sanctuary featuring images of the poor and downtrodden.

When completed later this month, the 27-foot-by-10-foot composition will illuminate in bright colors the faces and gestures of the people who visit Haywood Street Church’s principal ministry — The Welcome Table, a dining room with a reputation as one of the best places to eat in this mountain town known for its creative spirit.

To Combs and to the hundreds of poor who stop in for a meal each week, the fresco is intended to make the invisible visible.

“The primary intent of church, in my opinion, is to communicate something about sacred worth,” said Combs. “In God’s sight, you are anything but a throwaway. You’re priceless. You’re royalty. That’s one task of urban ministry we take seriously.”

The fresco’s composition is loosely based on the Beatitudes, the nine blessings recounted by…

RNS) — The United Methodist Church’s deadline for petitions for its next global meeting passed Wednesday (Sept. 18), setting the terms for a final reckoning with LGBTQ issues that have divided the denomination for more than 40 years. 

The UMC’s General Conference 2020, to be held in May in Minneapolis, will consider the structure of what church leaders hope can be an amicable, and orderly, breakup of a worldwide church that is the second-largest Protestant denomination in the United States. The various plans come in response to a vote earlier this year by the church’s decision-making body to strengthen language barring LGBTQ United Methodists from ordination and marriage.

That decision came in February at a special session of the General Conference that approved the conservative Traditional Plan, which centrists and progressives in the church have rejected and adamantly resisted. The resulting chaos has led some churches to withhold money from the denomination or to call for schism.

Bishops in areas that are growing within the denomination and widely seen as conservative, such as the Philippines and African countries, have urged unity in recent statements, even as moderates, most of whom are based in the United States, are optimistic about the prospect of formal separation.

“It’s not a divorce. It’s giving life to expressions of the church that are now…