The pastor of a 3,000-seat California church said he will stop fighting Santa Clara County and hold services in the church parking lot as per local COVID-19 guidelines after fines rose to over $112,000. The county said it will not forgive the fines.

Jack Trieber, the pastor of North Valley Baptist Church in Santa Clara, has chosen to obey the county’s directives banning indoor services, according to ABC7News.

The church was being fined $5,000 for every service it held as well as fines for other violations such as singing.

ABC7News reports that Trieber told his congregation in an outdoor meeting this week that senators told him they had given President Donald Trump the pastor’s personal phone number and if he would be willing to receive a call from the White House. But the pastor said he didn’t want to take that course of action.

Trieber also reportedly said he has put on hold a campaign that was aimed at flooding local government offices with one million emails from supporters. “I don’t wish anything evil to happen with authorities. Tonight was the right decision to move out here,” he was quoted as…

The city of Niles, Illinois, has dropped all four “disorderly conduct” citations against Romanian Pastor Daniel Chiu who had been asked to pay a fine of $800 for holding morning and evening worship services on two consecutive Sundays.

Announcing the dropping of all charges against Chiu of the Logos Baptist Ministries, Christian legal firm Liberty Counsel said it will now ask the Supreme Court to review the case in the federal lawsuit against Gov. J.B. Pritzker “for his unconstitutional executive orders discriminating against churches.”

“It is beyond belief that a pastor would be charged with ‘disorderly conduct’ for peacefully and safely holding a church service,” Liberty Counsel founder and Chairman Mat Staver said.

“Think about it — a pastor who survived communist Romania is charged with ‘disorderly conduct’ for holding a church service in America — the land of the free,” he added. “This is shameful. The repression against the church under communism failed, and it will not succeed here in America.”

“While Gov. J.B. Pritzker removed all restrictions on churches and…

Nicole Weider, the executive producer of “Switched,” a movie about what it would be like for a popular girl and social media star to walk a day in the shoes of a girl who lacking in confidence, opened up on her faith and how God gave her purpose and fulfillment after she gave up trying to do things her way.

Before becoming a Hollywood star, Weider had a successful career in modeling, but she never felt fulfilled. She thought her career didn’t leave a positive impact. “It’s interesting because when I was involved in commercials and modeling and doing things without God and doing things that did not have a faith message, I was constantly faced with scrutiny and felt like I never measured up,” Weider told Fox News. “I was actually hurting my self-esteem, but when I gave my life to God it’s amazing how he opened up so many doors.”

Before becoming a Christian, Weider was known for being one of the Victoria Secret angels. In another interview with The 700 Club, Weider warned teen girls not to get swept up in trying to always look like a model to find approval and validation from others, because it leads to a life of depression, anxiety, and not having a true sense of self. In the interview she states how she used to say to herself: “Nicole, this isn’t what you’re meant to do. You’re not meant to just be parading your sexuality for pictures, and I started feeling really bad…

President Trump on Thursday said he soon would establish a national commission to promote “patriotic” history in America’s schools and counter what he called “propaganda” that is teaching students to be “ashamed of their own” country.

The president made the comments on Constitution Day at the National Archives Museum during a White House conference on American history.

The new commission will be called the 1776 Commission and promote “patriotic education,” he said. Trump said he will sign an executive order to establish it.

“It will encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history and make plans to honor the 250th anniversary of our founding,” he said.

Trump made the announcement during a speech in which he criticized a “radical movement” within the nation that is attempting to “demolish” American history.

“We can’t let that happen,” he said.

The U.S. Constitution, he said, was the “product of centuries of tradition, wisdom and experience.” No political document “has done more to advance the human condition or propel the engine of progress,” Trump said.

“Our mission is to defend the legacy of America’s founding, the virtue of America’s heroes, and the nobility of the American character,” he said. “We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms, and teach our children…

An Icelandic church recently received backlash after running a cartoon ad featuring a bearded Jesus with breasts, makeup, and in a white dress.

According to the Daily Mail, the advert first appeared on the National Church’s Facebook page on September 11, which has since been deleted. The ad was meant to be used as a means to introduce young people to Sunday school.

The graphic apparently showed Jesus dancing under a rainbow shaking his breasts while pointing to a church. Several children are also shown across the advert.

In response to the controversy, the Icelandic church has issued a statement apologizing for their actions.

“’The 2020 Assembly of the National Church regrets that the picture of Jesus in a Sunday school – has hurt people. The goal was to emphasize diversity, not to hurt people or shock them,” the church said.

Petur Georg Markan, a media representative for the Church of Iceland, explained the necessity to share various forms of Jesus as the church’s way to endorse diversity.

“In this one, we see a Jesus who has breasts and a beard. We’re trying to embrace society as it is. We have all sorts of people and we need to train ourselves to talk about Jesus as being ‘all sorts’ in this context,” Markan said.

“Especially because it’s really important that each and every person see themselves in Jesus and that we don’t…

Families who want to watch Disney Plus movies without the coarse language and adult content can now do so thanks to a new service from ClearPlay.

The Utah-based company announced in recent days it was expanding its service to include Disney Plus titles alongside what was already offered: titles from Netflix and Amazon Prime. Filters are available for Disney Plus’ entire Marvel library as well as recent additions, such as Hamilton and Mulan.

The service allows families to filter out coarse language, sexuality and violent content. The filters can be customized.

ClearPlay’s announcement about Disney Plus titles came just a few weeks after it said it was adding titles from Netflix. Its website says “families can enjoy the show together” without the “scenes and language you don’t want” your family to see.

ClearPlay CEO Matt Jarman told Christian Headlines the service is popular for titles that are PG or PG-13 and need only minor changes to become kid-friendly.

“ClearPlay works best for popular movies that are already ‘pretty close’ to being family-friendly,” Jarman told Christian Headlines. “We are the solution for when your neighbor can ‘almost’ recommend a movie, but then adds the caveat, ‘Well, there is this one scene, though.’ There is also a lot of demand for movies that families may watch without filtering, but really really like having…

On Wednesday, Ohio’s Republican governor Mike DeWine signed a new bill into law prohibiting public officials from shutting down houses of worship across the state despite the COVID-19 pandemic.

The legislation, House Bill 272, will go into effect in mid-December in the state, Cleveland.com reports.

In March, DeWine stated that he did not plan on calling for houses of worship to be shut down, he did, however, postpone the state’s March primaries, a move that earned him widespread criticism. Under the new legislation, postponement of elections will not be permitted.

Sen. Terry Johnson, a co-sponsor of the bill, explained to Cincinnati Fox affiliate WXIX that he is thankful that the state is protecting religious freedom unlike other states that have imposed forced closures on religious communities.

“During the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen several states encroach on Americans’ First Amendment right of worship and assembly, disregarding it completely by forcing the closure of places of worship and religious institutions,” the state Senator said. “While I am thankful that no such order was imposed in Ohio, this amendment is a preemptive step should we ever find ourselves in this situation again.”

According to the Huffington Post, the vote was mainly split between both Republicans and Democrats in the State legislature, where the majority of Democrats were in opposition to…

In an “us vs. them” culture, Christians are called to embody the gentleness of Christ, which is the “secret weapon” to diffusing anger, easing tension, and defeating evil and injustice. 

That’s according to Scott Sauls, senior pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tennessee, who in an interview with The Christian Post, said he’s “concerned” by the number of professing Christians “caught up in partisan bickering.”

“It’s easy to conflate our Christianity with our politics as if the two were one and the same,” he said. “The reality is, neither the political left nor the right is clean in terms of their representation of the Kingdom of God.”

Sauls, who previously served as the lead and preaching pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City alongside Pastor Tim Keller, encouraged Christians to “become more nuanced in our political engagement, become willing to critique the party that we align with, and also affirm the party that we don’t align with.”

“In some respects, we ought to feel politically homeless,”…

The organization, Evangelicals for Social Action, is changing the group’s name to Christians for Social Action, the organization announced this week.

According to The Christian Post, in a statement, the Christian scholar-activist group says the word “evangelical” has become a polarizing term.

“Today the word ‘evangelical’ in the popular mind has largely political connotations,” Ron Sider, the organization’s founder and president emeritus, said in a statement.

“For significant numbers of people, it signifies a right-wing political movement irrevocably committed to Donald Trump. Many young people raised in evangelical churches are turning away in disgust–abandoning evangelical churches and even sometimes the Christian faith itself. And the larger society thinks of evangelicals not as people committed to Jesus Christ and the biblical gospel but as pro-Trump political activists.”

Sider said he hopes the change will help the group welcome more people.

“We believe it will help us win a listening ear with more people. And it certainly will avoid people refusing to even take a minute to see who we are because they see a word that for many people immediately signals political folks,” he said.

The change comes as popular evangelical Christians have become more vocal on a select number of issues, Sider says.

“They identified more and more with the politically conservative part of…

By Leonardo Blair, Christian Post Reporter Follow | Friday, September 18, 2020

As someone who grew up as “poor white trash” in a blue collar neighborhood in Texas, Matt Chandler, lead pastor of teaching at The Village Church in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, says he understands why some white people would find “white privilege” a “stunningly offensive” term.

The term, which the Alberta Civil Liberties Research Center defines as “the unquestioned and unearned set of advantages, entitlements, benefits and choices bestowed upon people solely because they are white,” has become a lightning rod as conversations about racial justice ramped up in evangelical circles and the rest of the nation amid ongoing social unrest.

“When you start talking about privilege to someone that had my background, I can get pretty offended by that pretty quick simply because I knew what it was like to be poor white trash. And for you to say I had some special kind of privilege when I was growing up would be stunningly offensive to me,” Chandler explained Wednesday during an episode of Exponential’s candid conversations.

And he isn’t the only one.

Just over a…