An Egyptian committee has approved the legalization of 127 churches in the country.

According to CBN News, the churches previously were operating illegally. 

Legal churches must obtain state approval in a process that had been criticized for being too restrictive and slow. In response, thousands of churches set up without permits.

“Egypt has a long history of regulating the building of churches, but many churches were not able to complete this process,” said a release from the International Christian Concern. “Instead, they were built illegally.”

The churches must only be used for religious activities, according to a media release.

But in 2016, the Egyptian government passed a new law that aimed to speed up the legalization process. International Christian Concern says that more than 1,000 churches have been granted permits since the law change.

Under the new law, a cabinet committee of the prime minister and the ministers of justice, housing and antiquities, review church requests for approval.  

In late 2018 after more than 100 churches were approved, the president of the Protestant Churches of Egypt said the process would continue to improve.

“I am pleased,” said Andrea Zaki. “The process has been slow in the beginning, but I think going forward it will be better.”

According to Open Doors USA, Christians in Egypt are still…

A major national conference for graphic designers and illustrators has disinvited a Christian speaker, apparently because he serves at a well-known church that affirms the Bible’s teaching on sexuality.

The Circles Conference announced this week that David Roark, the communications and resources director at The Village Church in Flower Mound, Texas, would not be speaking at its conference Sept. 18-20 in Richardson, Texas.

The move came after the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) released an open letter saying it would not participate in the conference because the speaker roster included an employee of The Village Church, an organization “that does not meet our standards of inclusion because of openly discriminatory policies and practices towards women and the LGBTQ+ community.”

The Village Church is a Southern Baptist Convention and Acts 29 congregation. Its pastor, Matt Chandler, is an author and one of the more well-known evangelical ministers in the United States. He and Roark wrote the book Take Heart: Christian Courage in the Age of Unbelief.

“Since the beginning, one goal of Circles Conference has been to bring people of different world views and creative backgrounds together,” the Circles Conference’s Ismael Burciaga wrote in the letter to members. “While cultivating a collaborative and…