A man who formerly worked in Hollywood as a set designer with such stars as Katy Perry and Paris Hilton says Christ freed him from homosexuality and he hopes to encourage others who are walking a similar path.

Becket Cook, author of the 2019 book A Change of Affection: A Gay Man’s Incredible Story of Redemption, shared his testimony this month on The 700 Club. Francis Chan wrote the foreword for the book, which Thomas Nelson published.

“At a very young age, I knew that I was attracted to the same sex,” Cook told CBN. “I had to keep it to myself. I dated girls. In elementary school, I went steady with girls. In high school, I dated girls. But it was all a facade. After college, I ended up moving to L.A. to pursue acting and writing and … a creative field. I just came out to everyone. That’s when I fully embraced homosexuality as my identity.

“… I was very successful in my career as a set designer, production designer. I was doing covers for Vogue and for Harper’s Bazaar,” Cook said. “And I worked with a lot of pop stars like Katy Perry and Paris Hilton and Oprah … everyone you can imagine, I worked with them. And I also started my own men’s fashion line.”

Cook’s clothes were sold in Los Angeles, New York City and Paris.

“I went to all the shows, I went to all the after-parties,” he said.

But God began working on his life at one specific…

Russell Moore and other prominent Christian figures expressed heartbreak after John Powell, a church planter and pastor, was killed in a highway accident as he was helping a driver who had stopped in the traffic lanes. 

On Sunday, Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, shared the news of Powell’s death on social media.

“I am shocked and shaken and grieving this morning, beyond what I can say,” Moore wrote on Twitter. “My former student John Powell was killed last night, hit by an eighteen wheeler while helping stranded motorists off of a highway.”

According to a local news report, Powell, senior pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in New Caney, Texas, and another man stopped to help a truck that had been rear-ended by another car and caught fire around 11:30 Saturday night.

While the men were assisting the truck, a semi-truck came toward them on the highway. According to…

HYDERABAD, India, July 20, 2020 (Morning Star News) – A Christian couple and their children were asleep in their beds in central India at 11 p.m. recently when villagers who follow the local tribal religion broke into their home and began beating them with wooden batons.

The family of Bhima and Devi Markham fled from their home in Devkupli Para, Chhattisgarh state that night, May 20, to save their lives, an area pastor said.

“They ran into the wilderness to hide while the assailants vandalized their belongings, throwing away the food grains in their homes,” pastor Ramdhar Kashyap told Morning Star News.

The mob of 15 furious villagers went on to beat Christians Chenna Markham and Joga Kunjam and their families, along with an unidentified elderly Christian woman, driving them from their homes.

“The three families including their children and the elderly sister, a total of 14 injured Christians, fled from Devkupli Para in different directions fearing for their lives,” Pastor Kahyap said.

They journeyed about two miles on foot before reaching his church premises in Burdi village at about 3 a.m., he said.

“They were profusely bleeding,” the pastor said. “I called 108 ambulance service in the wee hours and took them to the hospital.”

Though villagers had persecuted the Christians for months, they attacked that night because the Christians had refused to…

James MacDonald, controversial founder of Harvest Bible Chapel in greater Chicago, is now in danger of losing his custom-built home in Elgin, Illinois, for failing to pay his mortgage with the Republic Bank of Chicago, according to a new lawsuit.

MacDonald, according to a Daily Herald report, owes the Republic Bank of Chicago $947,546.34 on the 5-bedroom, 5.5-bathroom home that sits on 10 acres along Highland Avenue.

The Harvest Bible Chapel founder who was ousted from the helm of the church in February 2019 for “highly inappropriate recorded comments” he made on a radio program as well as “other conduct,” allegedly borrowed $990,000 from Republic Bank of Chicago to purchase the home in 2016. Since last December, MacDonald hasn’t made a mortgage payment, the bank argues, and now owes $925,902.96 on the loan, $20,669.34 in unpaid interest, as well as $974.04 in late charges.

MacDonald’s LLC, Vanilla Bean, is also named as a defendant in the foreclosure lawsuit filed last week in Kane County.

A California church filed a federal lawsuit Saturday challenging the state’s restrictions on houses of worship, including what the suit says is a ban on “in-home Bible studies.”

At issue are prohibitions by Gov. Gavin Newsom and state officials on “in-person religious gatherings” in 30 counties, as well as bans on corporate singing statewide. 

Liberty Counsel filed the suit on behalf of Harvest Rock Church and an associated organization, Harvest International Ministry. Each is headquartered in Pasadena. Harvest Rock has multiple campuses. 

Harvest Church requires masks, takes temperatures of attendees and requires the proper social distancing, the lawsuit says. Despite that, the state has imposed a “total prohibition” on religious activities, thus violating its constitutionally protected freedoms of religion, speech and assembly, the suit alleges.

“While the Governor has unilaterally and significantly restricted the number of individuals permitted to ‘gather’ in Plaintiffs’ churches, he has imposed no similar restrictions on the untold thousands of protesters who have gathered all throughout California cities with no threat of criminal sanction, and no social distancing or restrictions whatsoever.” the suit says. “And, the Governor explicitly encouraged such large gatherings of protesters while condemning churches for singing hymns in their churches.”

The…

A Tennessee church that shuttered last month after suffering an outbreak of COVID-19 announced the loss of two senior members to the virus but said they are also experiencing miracles in the pandemic too.

“We have lost two wonderful vulnerable seniors who were with us on Father’s Day and that’s tough. This horrendous virus attacked and we lost Bro. Frank Cunningham as well as Dr. Jimmy Bilbo,” Kelvin Page, pastor of Westmore Church of God in Cleveland, Tennessee, said in a video announcement on Facebook last weekend.

“Both of these men were special men who are greatly appreciated by the Westmore family. And we have learned from this horrendous virus that we must do all that we can do to protect our vulnerable. We have to. Even when we think that we were doing our due diligence and doing our best, we thought that, it still slipped in. And so we’ve got to do an even better job than what we thought we were doing.”

Cunningham, who died on July 9, was 73, and Bilbo, who passed a day later on…