An educational choice advocacy group is supporting two lawsuits in Washington and Maine, arguing that laws in the states unconstitutionally discriminate against religious school and other faith-based organizations regarding public funding.

The Institute for Justice’s lawsuits comes after the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2017 that decided a Missouri church should not be barred from secular aid programs.

In Maine, the organization is advocating for three families that filed a legal challenge against a policy of prohibiting religious schools from the state’s school choice program.

In many parts of Maine, the cities aren’t large enough to be zoned for public high schools, so the state offers families money to be spent on their schools of choice, including both private and public schools.

Under the law, however, families cannot use the money to send their children to religious schools.

“By prohibiting tuition payments for children whose parents choose to send them to sectarian schools, it forces parents to either forgo the benefit of tuition funds for their child or forgo their right to send their child to the school of their choice,” the lawsuit filed with the U.S. District Court of Maine states. “Defendant has no compelling, substantial, or even legitimate interest in denying tuition-eligible students and their parents sectarian options while allowing private…

In early August, President Donald Trump invited a group of pastors to the White House to discuss prison and criminal justice reform. Trump sat at the table with a group of African American pastors for the meeting he called “President Trump Meets with Inner City Pastors.” 

Among the pastors who attended the meeting was South Carolina pastor John Gray of the Relentless Church.

Gray opened the meeting in prayer saying, “God, we thank you for an opportunity to speak about the hearts of those who sometimes cannot fight for themselves.”

Gray continued, “We thank you for this moment to be able to share our hearts with the president. Dr. King said, ‘We cannot influence a table that we are not seated at,’ so we pray that this conversation will be fruitful and productive and honoring of the best traditions of this nation.”

According to Christianity Today, the pastors in attendance received mixed feelings from the press, their communities and congregations. While Fox 10 Phoenix described footage of Gray’s prayer as “POWERFUL,” a black ministers coalition described it as heartbreaking in an open letter to the pastors who attended the meeting.

In the letter the coalition of 50 ministers wrote, “We need not remind you of the posture of the Prince of Peace, our Savior from the streets, when He stood before Herod and Pilate. He didn’t even pray for…

Ken Parker, a former Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, attended the Charlottesville, Virginia, rally last year to “stand up for [his] white race.”

Parker, who was both a KKK Grand Dragon and an American Neo-Nazi, might have describe himself as being filled with hate a year ago, but since the rally in Charlottesville, Parker has completely reformed and found a new faith in Jesus Christ. 

NBC News reports that Parker was one of the hundreds of white nationalists who gathered around the Robert E. Lee statue in the city’s Emancipation Park for a “Unite the Right” Rally. The rally turned into a riot and left one dead, injuring several others.

Parker told NBC News the protest “was thinly veiled as an effort to save our monuments, to save our heritage.” 

He continued, “We knew when we went in there that it was gonna turn into a racially heated situation, and it wasn’t going to work out good for either side.”

After the rally was broken up by law enforcement and declared an unlawful assembly, Parker and other members of the KKK reportedly dispersed. This was when Parker met filmmaker Deeyah Khan, who was making a documentary on hate groups.

Parker told NBC News “She was completely respectful to me and my fiancée the whole time. And so that kind of got me thinking: She’s a really nice lady. Just because she’s got darker skin and believes in a…

The world’s most committed Christians reside mostly in Africa, Latin America and the United States – the latter being an outlier among wealthy nations, according to a new Pew Research Center report. 

Pew examined 84 countries with large Christian populations and asked self-identified Christians a series of questions to gauge their commitment to their faith. In 35 of those countries, “at least two-thirds of all Christians say religion is very important in their lives,” Pew reported Aug. 22. Among those 35, all but three countries reside in Africa or Latin America. The three exceptions are the United States, the Philippines and Malaysia. 

The data reflects the “broader pattern of Christianity’s ‘march southward’ from wealthy countries to developing ones,” the Pew report said. 

The U.S., though, is an “outlier” among wealthy countries in its commitment among self-identified Christians, with 68 percent saying religion is very important in their lives. Among European countries, it’s: 

• 
  Greece, 58 percent. 
• 
  Spain, 30 percent. 
• 
  Italy, 23 percent.
• 
  France, 12 percent.
• 
  Germany, 12 percent.
• 
  United Kingdom, 11 percent. 

Ethiopia has the world’s most committed Christians, according to Pew, with 98 percent saying their faith is very important. In the Philippines, it’s 91…

InterVarsity Christian Fellowship has launched a “2030 Calling” — an initiative to bring Christian fellowships to all major college campuses in the United States in the next 12 years.

As students across the country are returning to campuses this fall, the inter-denominational, evangelical Christian campus ministry announced its new initiative on Monday to bring Christian ministries to all 2,500 U.S. college campuses that have over 1,000 students by the year 2030.

According to the ministry, about 53 percent of those 2,500 schools do not have a known campus ministry presence.

“Our deep conviction is that every student at every university and every faculty member at every university deserves an opportunity to hear the Gospel in a compelling, passionate and personal way from somebody that they know,” Greg Jao, Intervarsity director of external relations and senior assistant to InterVarsity President Tom Lin, told The Christian Post. “The best way to do that is to make sure that there is a campus fellowship at every one of those places.”

Jao explained that the 2030 Calling is strategic because “today’s college students represent the…