BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (RNS) — Months before the annual observance of the bombing that rocked a congregation, a community and the nation, Sixteenth Street Baptist Church has been getting ready.

Renovations were taking place in June: fresh paint and new technology for the classroom spaces in the basement. Just as at worship services, Sunday school attendance ebbs and flows each week, depending on the number of longtime members and curious tourists. This Sunday (Sept. 15), which marks the 56th anniversary of the attack that killed four young girls, the church hopes to unveil the refurbished space where visitors can watch videos about kindness, caring for all humans no matter their race, and the civil rights history of the church and its community.

“After you leave this place, we don’t just want you to experience history,” the Rev. Arthur Price Jr. said in a June interview at his church. “We call the four girls ‘angels of change’ and our hope is that people will leave inspired, become agents of change as a result of what happened here.”

“We’re adding more content about not just what happened in 1963 but how the church was organized and the tension that was going on in the city during that time,” Price said in a subsequent interview about the church that was at the forefront of the civil rights movement before and after the bombing.

The pastor…

Two football players at a prep school in Tennessee donated clothes to a freshman student who was being bullied for wearing the same clothes over and over.

According to Faithwire, Kristopher Graham and Antwan Garrett, football players at MLK College Preparatory High School in Memphis, noticed that freshman Michael Todd was being bulled.

Graham and Garrett went home to their own closets and found shirts, pants, socks and shoes to give to Todd. They brought the clothes to Todd at school.

“He wasn’t smiling or anything, and I was like ‘I think this is going to make you smile.’ We’re in the same third period and I apologize for laughing at you, and I want to give you something to make it up,” Graham said.

“When I saw people laughing at him, and bullying him, I felt like I needed to do something,” he added.

Todd told CBS News reporters that he’s been bullied all his life— mostly for his clothes. Before Garrett and Graham gave him the clothes, he said he was bullied every day for three weeks after schools started.

“I really don’t have clothes at home. My mom can’t buy clothes for me because I’m growing too fast,” Todd shared before noting that he was “shocked” by the gift from the football players.

“I was very happy, I was shocked completely,” Todd added.

“You guys are the best guys in my entire…

In the past eight months, nine women have been wheeled out on gurneys from the Margaret Sanger Planned Parenthood abortion facility and sent to a hospital, according to Lifesite News.

In the most recent incident, a woman was wheeled out partially covered with a sheet. The ambulance pulled out with lights only and turned on its sirens a block away, according to witnesses.

Another one of the patients was “distraught and in visible pain.” Pro-life activists who station themselves outside of the facility have been recording the hospital visits. Operation Rescue, a national pro-life organization, predicts that the Margaret Sanger Planned Parenthood is on track to have at least 24 medical emergencies this year, triple the highest documented in a single year.

“The Margaret Sanger Planned Parenthood is a very dangerous place for women and their unborn babies. This abortion facility cranks out botched abortions at a very troubling rate,” said Troy Newman, President of Operation Rescue. “A full investigation into patient care and safety practices should be conducted, but given it is New York, any investigation there is likely to be done with a blindfold when it comes to Planned Parenthood.”

Operation Rescue, a nonprofit committed to recording abortion abuses, has kept track of these incidents in order to publicize the brutality of abortion not only for…

A new BBC video resource produced for schools and geared toward British children ages 9-12 teaches that there are more than 100 gender identities and that people who are critical of transgender ideology “just don’t know any better yet.”

The nine-video “Big Talk” series shows children ages 9-12 asking adults about a range of topics, including puberty, sex, different-looking families and gender. 

The English-based Christian Institute was among the first groups to report on the series. 

Asked what the different gender identities are, a teacher in the “Identity” video says, “So we know we’ve got male and female, but there are over 100, if not more, gender identities now.”

She adds, “You’ve got some people who might call themselves genderqueer, who are just like ‘I don’t really want to be anything in particular, I’m just going to be me.’”

An accompanying teacher’s guide includes suggested questions to ask children. Among them:

“What’s the difference between sex and gender?” 

“What are the different gender identities?” 

“What do you think transgender means?” 

“When do people feel like they want to change gender?”

“What does stereotypes mean?”

The teacher’s guide also suggests a “descriptive writing” project for students in which they will imagine what it would feel like…