By Leonardo Blair, Christian Post Reporter Follow | Tuesday, September 15, 2020

Southern Baptist Convention churches are being encouraged to use an alternate name, “Great Commission Baptists,” in another step by the world’s largest Baptist denomination to distance itself from its racist past amid ongoing racial unrest.

The alternate name, which was approved for use by SBC messengers in 2012 “as one fully in keeping with our Southern Baptist Convention identity,” has been drawing a lot of interest from church leaders around the country in recent weeks, the denomination’s president, J.D. Greear, told Baptist Press. It will also be the focus of the SBC’s 2021 Annual Meeting under the theme “We Are Great Commission Baptists.”

“In the last month we started receiving emails from around the country with pastors and leaders asking about using the name. By making this our annual meeting theme and encouraging the use of the alternate name, we do not in any way want to minimize the significance of our past, either its accomplishments or its failures,” Greear said.

“Utilizing ‘Great Commission Baptists’ is simply one more step to make clear we serve a risen Savior who died for all peoples, whose…

After a yearlong battle between the city of San Antonio and the Federal Aviation Administration, Chick-fil-A will be allowed to reopen in the San Antonio International Airport, according to the Dallas Morning News.

The fast-food chain will be offered a location in Terminal A of the airport “at reasonable and customary terms,” an FAA spokesman said. But Chick-fil-A will likely not come back.

“We are always evaluating potential new locations in the hopes of serving existing and new customers great food with remarkable service,” a statement released by the chain said. “While we are not pursuing a location in the San Antonio airport at this time, we are grateful for the opportunity to serve San Antonians in our 32 existing restaurants.”

Earlier last year, the San Antonio City Council made national headlines when it declined to extend a lease to the Atlanta-based chain after criticisms surfaced of Chick-fil-A’s donations to Christian groups with a history of “anti-LGBTQ policies,” according to an article by ThinkProgress, a liberal-leaning news site. The charities included the Salvation Army and Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Several months later, Christianity Todayreported that Chick-fil-A would stop supporting these groups financially.

But the San Antonio Council’s actions created a strong backlash amongst Texas conservatives, prompting a “Save…

China has banned the house church Zion, a 1500-member congregation, after they refused to install surveillance cameras in their church. China threatened to close down the church if they did not comply and have now come through on their threat.

According to Christianity Today, even though the church had been able to gather without registering for some time, the Chinese government claimed that the church was banned because without registering first, its gatherings were illegal.

The Chinese government also confiscated what it called “illegal promotional material” from the church, Reuters reports. It is unknown what the “illegal” material consisted of, but one guess is it was mostly Bibles and church literature. This happened despite the country’s constitutional guarantee of religious freedom to churches. Reportedly, Xi Jinping, who took office 8 years ago, began completely disregarding this right in China’s constitution and began shutting down churches left and right and persecuting religious minorities.

However, religious asylum seekers who founded The Epoch Times have long reported on the Chinese affronts to any religion that doesn’t worship the state and its leaders. The paper cited the Tiananmen Square massacre, where China famously slaughtered religious adherents to a different form of Buddhism from the official, government-sanctioned versions.

In recent…

A California megachurch that defied its county’s health restrictions and held indoor services has changed course and is now holding outdoor services in its parking lot.

North Valley Baptist Church in Santa Clara, Calif, had tallied more than $50,000 in fines, with its pastor, Jack Trieber, recording social media-style videos urging the county to back down.

But on Sunday, Trieber led the congregation in an outdoor service and indicated the church would be in the parking lot for the near future, although he still hopes the two sides can come to an agreement. Attendees stayed in their cars and tuned to a radio station to hear him, honking their horns in place of “amens.”

Trieber said he came to the decision to hold outdoors services after much prayer and fasting.

“We have been so conditioned in America [that] we have to fight everything,” Trieber said.

Trieber read from Exodus 14:14 – “The Lord shall fight for you” — and said he was handing the battle to God instead of personally fighting it. In Scripture, Trieber said, “God fought many of the battles with the people doing nothing.”

“I believe the battle is the Lord’s,” he said.

Santa Clara County had filed a lawsuit against the church but has dropped it in light of the church moving its services outdoors, he said.

“To me, that’s a victory,” Trieber said.

Trieber urged…

(RNS) — The Salvation Army is kicking off its annual red kettle campaign more than two months early this year in hopes of meeting an increased need for assistance during the coronavirus pandemic.

“The Salvation Army recognizes that there is literally a tsunami of human need in our country right now,” Commissioner Kenneth Hodder, national commander of the Salvation Army, told Religion News Service ahead of the campaign launch on Monday (Sept. 14). “We also recognize that our iconic red kettle campaign, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, will be more difficult this year.”

Traditionally starting around Thanksgiving, bell ringers have stood outside stores and beside red kettles where passersby could donate to help those in need at Christmastime.

In 2020, ringers will be trained about social distancing and provided with masks, Hodder said. Donors will be encouraged to consider making contributions by using their phones to scan a QR code in person or via a Salvation Army website.

“As a result of the fact that a number of retail stores have closed, we simply have lost the ability to place kettles at a number of places,” said Hodder, whose organization had 30,000 kettles on street corners and at retail locations last year.

Some of the people who have been donors in the past are now among those seeking assistance.

“We’ve had a dramatic increase in the number of people who…

There’s good news for parents who grew up watching VeggieTales: A new batch of episodes is being released, and they’re just as funny and Bible-based as the originals.

The new series, called The VeggieTales Show, follows the familiar cast of Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber as they organize a variety show for a live audience. Each episode includes plenty of hilarious backstage antics, but it also includes a Bible story with a lesson for children.

The VeggieTales Show is streamed on TBN’s kid-focused service, Yippee.

Co-creator Mike Nawrocki calls it “the Muppet Show meets classic VeggieTales.”

“One of the things that we always concentrated on with VeggieTales is that core biblical component – God made you special and He loves you very much,” Nawrocki told Christian Headlines. “The really fun thing about this new series is that, because of the way that it’s structured, we typically will tell two short stories in the context of the 22 minutes, and one of them will always be a Bible story. And sometimes we have two Bible stories in there.”

Nawrocki, who voices Larry the Cucumber, Jerry Gourd and Jean-Claude Pea, said he’s always viewed VeggieTales as “a resource” to “help parents pass on biblical values to their kids.” Nawrocki and Phil Vischer created VeggieTales during the 1990s.

“Bob and Larry [and] the cast of characters remind kids…

By Leonardo Blair, Christian Post Reporter Follow | Monday, September 14, 2020

“Can I promise you something? If I don’t kill your sister then I am fake,” Sylvester Ofori, the self-styled prophet and leader of Floodgates of Heaven International Ministries in Orlando, Florida, threatened his brother-in-law last Monday before storming off.

A day later, Ofori, 35, who has more than 60,000 followers on social media, gunned down his wife, Barbara Tommey, 27, just before 9 a.m. near the front door of Navy Federal Credit Union on the 4600 block of Gardens Park Boulevard, the Orlando Police Department said.

In an affidavit cited by the Orlando Sentinel, witness told detectives that Ofori was holding a gun and was following his wife as she walked toward the bank. She knocked on the doors to get someone to let her in but Ofori shot her once and she collapsed a few feet away from her husband.

Witnesses say he then walked over to her as she lay dying and shot her a few more times in the head. He then walked back to his rented Dodge Journey, and drove away “as though nothing happened.” His wife was pronounced dead at Orlando Regional Medical Center later that morning.

Tommey’s sister…