Tony and Lauren Dungy are offering help to Hillsborough County in Tampa, Florida as part of the Salvation Army’s campaign to raise funds for a new state-of-the-art emergency shelter.

According to ABC Action News, the non-profit Christian organization announced that the Dungy’s will serve as honorary chairs for the fundraising campaign. The Salvation Army hopes to raise $6.5 million through the campaign in order to build a 39,000 square-foot facility that will offer social services and residence to those who need it.

“We are in it together as a community and when one part of the community is hurting, we all should hurt and so there are things that we can do,” Tony, an outspoken Christian and NFL hall of fame coach, said. “Maybe I can just do a little, but if I team up with other people together, I can do a lot and that’s, I think, our message. We really want people to know, no matter how small you think your gift is, it can be part of something big.”

Lauren then stepped in to emphasize the importance of this project “especially during this time with COVID.”

“There’s a need to help others to bless others that are experiencing challenges,” she added.

Tony echoed Lauren’s sentiments saying, “God can use all of us, especially in times like this.”

Tampa area commander for the Salvation Army, Captain Andy Miller, shared with ABC…

(RNS) — A historic New York City church has decided to devote $200,000 — about a tenth of its budget — to provide housing assistance and youth anti-racism training.

The Rev. Jacqueline Lewis, the African American leader of the multiethnic Middle Collegiate Church, said the initiative is a way for her church to make amends. She noted that the church began after Dutch Reformed settlers bought the land that eventually became Manhattan from the Lenape, a Native American nation, in an unfair transaction. Its early clergy also included slaveholders.

“We are doing reparations,” she said of the plans for a portion of the church’s $2.3 million budget for the fiscal year that started July 1.

Half of the $200,000 is aimed at addressing the needs of New Yorkers whose CARES Act unemployment benefits may have been lost as of July 31, “so they don’t lose their housing,” she said. Many have lost jobs during the coronavirus pandemic and can no longer afford rent and mortgages.

The other $100,000 will be used for partnerships with organizations that assist “homeless Black and brown queer teens” and to help form “a peacemaking, anti-racist cadre of young people who are learning what adults are learning about anti-racism and how to make a more just America.”

Lewis, the senior minister of the 1,400-member church that dates to 1628, said the congregation is able to take these steps because of the money…

(RNS) — A life-sized statue of the Rev. Billy Graham will be installed in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall collection sometime next year, replacing a statue of a white supremacist that both the state of North Carolina and the U.S. House want removed.

Last week, a North Carolina legislative committee approved a 2-foot model of the statue depicting the famous evangelist who died in 2018.

The sculptor, Chas Fagan, will now begin working on a life-sized model that will have to be approved by a congressional committee. Fagan has previously created several statues of religious figures, including St. John Paul II for Washington’s Saint John Paul II National Shrine, as well as Mother Teresa for the Washington National Cathedral.

The U.S. Capitol, Statuary Hall collection consists of 100 statues of prominent people — two from each state. Graham, a North Carolina native who was born on a dairy farm in Charlotte, will take the place of Charles Aycock (1859-1912), a former governor.

Aycock was one of the masterminds of the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, race riot and coup, in which a local government made up of Black Americans was overthrown and replaced by white officials. North Carolina’s other statue is of Zebulon Vance (1830-1894), a former governor and U.S. senator who was also a Confederate military officer.

With statues to white supremacists and Confederate leaders toppling across…

JOS, Nigeria, August 4, 2020 (Morning Star News) – A Muslim Fulani herdsmen raid on a village in central Nigeria’s Kogi state on Wednesday (July 29) killed 14 Baptist Christians, including 13 members of an extended family, sources said.

Police said the wife, mother, all the children and other relatives of one man – 13 in all – were killed in the 2 a.m. attack on Agbadu-Daruwana. He also lost his younger brother, an aunt and uncle and a sister-in-law, Kogi State Command Commissioner of Police Ede Ayuba said in a statement.

“In that family, it is only one person that survived,” Ayuba said.

Leaders of the All Africa Baptist Fellowship posted on the group’s Facebook page that the victims were members of the Bethel Baptist church in Agbadu-Daruwana, part of the Lokoja Baptist Association of Kogi State Baptist Conference.

“They have since been buried,” the post read. “All the community members, mainly Christians, have all fled. Please pray for God’s intervention against antichrist in the land.”

Area resident Rachael Nuhu told Morning Star News in text messages that the assailants were Fulanis, predominantly Muslim cattle herders who also have attacked surrounding villages.

“They invaded the village armed with guns and riding motorcycles,” Nuhu said. “They were speaking in the Fulani language as they attacked our people. This is not the first time they’re…

State-approved churches in China that were forced to close due to the pandemic are being allowed to reopen only if they use their sermons for “patriotic education” and to support the Communist Party, according to a new report.

In one region of China, pastors even were required to slander the United States.

The controversy involves churches that are part of the Three-Self movement and that are allowed to operate legally under government restrictions.

The report was released by Bitter Winter, a watchdog that monitors violations of religious liberty in China.

“Those that fail to meet the prerequisites are not allowed to reopen,” Bitter Winter reported.

In June, the Religious Affairs Bureau of Zhengzhou, the capital of the province of Henan, released a list of 42 prerequisites for churches that want to reopen. Among them, churches are to “intensify patriotic education” and “study China’s religious policies,” Bitter Winter reported. 

Churches also must promote the so-called “four requirements,” a nationwide campaign that originated in 2018 and involves: 1) requiring religious communities to ritually raise the national flag, 2) promoting the Chinese constitution and laws, 3) promoting “core socialist values,” and, 4) promoting “China’s excellent traditional culture.”

In Henan, one church was not allowed to reopen because officials did not approve the…

Democrats will require taxpayer funding of abortion, restore federal funding of Planned Parenthood, and work to overturn state-level pro-life laws under a Biden administration, according to a draft platform by the Democratic National Committee.

Democrats will adopt a new platform at their convention in Milwaukee Aug. 17-20 but released the draft platform in late July.

The draft includes much of the language from the 2016 platform, which for the first time called for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, a federal legislative provision that prohibits taxpayer funding of abortion. It took effect in 1980 and must be renewed each year. Prior to the Hyde Amendment, roughly 300,000 abortions each year were performed using taxpayer funds.

The draft supports restoration of Title X federal funds to Planned Parenthood that were pulled by the Trump administration. It also calls for federal assistance to be used to pay for abortions in other countries.

“Like the majority of Americans, Democrats believe that every woman should be able to access high-quality reproductive health care services, including safe and legal abortion,” the draft platform says. “We will restore federal funding for Planned Parenthood, which provides vital preventive and reproductive health care for millions of women, especially low-income women and women of color, and LGBTQ+ people, including in…

John MacArthur responded to a pastor’s criticisms of his church’s decision to reopen in defiance of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s second round of lockdown orders, saying his church is “not spreading anything but the Gospel.”

“We are a church that has a reputation for the last 50 years of obeying the government,” MacArthur, senior pastor of Grace Community Church in Los Angeles County, California, said in a Monday interview with Fox News’ Shannon Bream. 

“We are a friend to this society, to every level of this society. We have been given awards and accolades and plaques from the city government, the police department, all in authority, because they recognize what an honorable congregation this church has been,” he said. 

“But never before has the government invaded the territory the belongs only to the Lord Jesus Christ and told us we can’t meet, we can’t worship, we can’t sing,” the pastor continued. “There’s no power given to the…