Christian Heritage News

 By Michael Foust - Posted at Christian Headlines: A federal appeals court delivered a major victory to religious liberty advocates Friday by ruling that the Biden administration cannot force religious doctors and hospitals to perform abortions and gender-affirming procedures under Obamacare. The issue was the much-debated “Section 1557” of the 2010 Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, and disability by medical professionals. The Biden Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) — like that of the Obama administration — interprets Section 1557 to also prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Further, Biden’s HHS says discrimination on the basis of sex encompasses “pregnancy termination” — that is, abortion. Continue here...

 By M.D. Perkins - Posted at The Aquila Report: The book Dangerous Affirmation is intended to serve as an introduction, rebuttal, and warning. It was written to help the average person in the pew to understand what is being argued by major “gay Christian” thinkers and to respond to it biblically. Although the Bible is the primary focus, I did not shy away from discussing controversial topics like homophobia, LGBT suicide rates, conversion therapy laws, and the rise of “gay celibate Christianity.” Truth demands proper application to every aspect of our life and society. Let’s see if you’ve heard any of these statements before:God made people gay and therefore being gay should be celebrated and affirmed. Jesus never mentioned homosexuality even once. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is about inhospitality and greed, not homosexuality. If the Bible were written today, it would be gay-affirming. The Bible doesn’t say anything about sexual orientation. Christians hate gay people and need to

 By Jonathon Van Maren - Posted at The Bridgehead: Canada’s federal government is overtly hostile to orthodox Christians. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has consistently accused those of holding Christian views on issues like abortion and sexuality of being fundamentally unCanadian ; he has sought to deny government funding to summer jobs programs that will not overtly affirm his views on these issues; he has insisted that those who share the views of the vast majority of people throughout Canada’s history are hateful and bigoted. But when 68 churches were damaged or burned down in 2021 with a collective shrug and late-coming, muted protest from Canada’s progressives, it became glaringly obvious: apathy towards and disbelief in the religion of Canada’s founding has become overt hostility. Polling shows that an increasing number of Canadians believe that Christianity is damaging for society. I have thought for some time that intolerance towards Christians in Canada is likely to grow.

 By John Stonestreet and Heather Peterson - Posted at Breakpoint : Not only will these rules limit our daughters’ opportunities to participate in sports and lead to dangerous violations of their privacy, but they will erase parental rights and free speech in favor of state-centered authority. Earlier this summer, the U.S. Department of Education announced new regulations regarding Title IX, which is designed to ensure and protect access for women and girls in education. These new rules are 700 pages long and are being trumpeted by organizations such as the National Education Association as a victory for victims of sexual harassment and clarification of discrimination based on sex. However, what is meant by “sex” will be a disaster for women. The massive document is infected with the presumptions of transgender ideology, specifically that “sex” includes “gender identity,” ignoring the biological reality of sex. Not only will these rules limit our daughters’ opportunities to participat

By Kayla Koslosky - Posted at Christian Headlines: A former U.S. postal worker has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court after a circuit court ruled that the U.S. Postal Service did not have to accept the employee's request to be off on Sundays because of his Christian faith. According to The Christian Post, the appeal was filed by First Liberty Institute, the Church State Council, the Independence Law Center and Baker Botts LLP on behalf of Gerald Groff. The appeal argues that the ruling by a three-judge panel for the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discriminating against Groff's religious beliefs. Title VII, the appeal says, "generally prohibits an employer from discriminating against an in- dividual 'because of such individual's… religion.' 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000e-2(a)(1), (2)." Read more...

 By Slimjim - Posted at The Domain for Truth : Crosspolitic, a Christian political talk show recently has someone on their show name Jason Farley who made the claim that it’s the American Baptist culture that has caused the Transgender movement. My response to Crosspolitic isn’t meant to be an attack on Presbyterians nor Paedobaptists (those who baptize infants of Christian family) and in a sense it isn’t even about transgenderism or the trans-community per se. While I am a Credobaptist, conservative Presbyterians have shaped so much of my theology, apologetics and philosophy . But I do want to respond to Crosspolitic video below where Jason Farley claims it’s the American Baptist culture that has caused the Transgender movement. Discussion on transgenderism itself can go so many places and here I want to focus very narrowly and only on the claim that Baptist theology is the cause of transgenderism. I have posted this because several individuals have talked to me about this in private

 By Keith Evans - Posted at Gentle Reformation: I finished The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill last week (I know, I’m behind on the times, please bear with me), and the reformed world is currently re-embroiled in staving off Federal Vision for a second time, as Doug Wilson is experiencing a resurgen…no, that’s too on the nose. A renaissance …that’s it, as Doug Wilson is experiencing a renaissance . So I have found myself wondering recently: why do we keep doing this—why does the church keep listening to wolves? What is it that we believe the wolf has to offer that faithful shepherding does not? Let us consider that very notion under the following 5 reasons why the church keeps turning to un-Christlike examples to lead us: Wolves fight back, hard. And they play offense. Like literal wolves, the proverbial ones in the church are ferocious. They come at the church’s cultural opponents with a vengeance. They fight fire with fire. The world may play dirty and unfair—“but so what?” the thought

By Milton Quintanilla - Posted at Christian Headlines: Published August 18, 2022 Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest abortion provider, plans to donate $50 million towards the 2022 midterm elections in an effort to elect pro-choice candidates this November. The abortion giant first announced its massive spending plan and the launch of its new electoral spending program, "Take Control," in a press release on Wednesday. The group explained that the funds "will be strategically used to elect abortion rights champions across the country who are critical to protecting abortion access in a post-Roe world." According to Fox News , Planned Parenthood's initiative will first focus on buying ad space in Georgia, Nevada, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Arizona, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Michigan and Wisconsin. Continue here...

By Milton Quintanilla - Posted at Christian Headlines: Published August 15, 2022 Leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention announced on Friday that the Department of Justice is conducting an investigation into sexual abuse within the denomination. “Individually and collectively, each SBC entity is resolved to fully and completely cooperate with the investigation,” a statement released by the SBC said . “While we continue to grieve and lament past mistakes related to sexual abuse, current leaders across the SBC have demonstrated a firm conviction to address those issues of the past and are implementing measures to ensure they are never repeated in the future.” According to Religion News Service , the statement was signed by the SBC’s newly elected president, Texas pastor Bart Barber, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Al Mohler and other seminary presidents, the Executive Committee, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and leaders of the SBC’s International Missi

 By Diana Chandler - Posted at Baptist Press : LVIV, Ukraine (BP) – About 400 Ukrainian Baptist congregations have been lost in Russia’s war on Ukraine, said Ukrainian Baptist Theological Seminary President Yaroslav Pyzh, who is working to restore pastoral leadership to impacted cities. While volunteers at six humanitarian relief We Care Centers across Ukraine are helping internally displaced people winterize their homes, replacing roofs, windows and doors, Pyzh said the real challenge for UBTS is to rebuild pastoral leadership in places pastors have been displaced. “Since the war started, six months already, we lost about 400 Baptist churches. And so the real build is the rebuilding of leadership capacity, because if you rebuild buildings and you have no pastors to lead churches, I don’t think it’s going to do any good,” Pyzh, a graduate of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, told Baptist Press Aug. 12. “So the real challenge is not so much rebuilding walls

 By Dan Hart - Posted at The Washington Stand: On August 10, the Center Square reported that 96% of school districts (534 out of 554) in Illinois have opted out of the state’s proposed standards for sex education in public schools included in a bill authored, passed, and signed into law by Democrats, despite the fact that Illinois is considered one of the “big three” most liberal states in the nation . In May 2021, Illinois Democratic lawmakers passed a bill that aligned the state standards with the “ National Sex Education Standards ” (NSES). The NSES were authored in part by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS), which brands itself as “Sed Ed for Social Change” and “commits to working to dismantle the systems of power and oppression which perpetuate disparate sexual and reproductive health outcomes…” The NSES’s contributors and reviewers include individuals from far-left special interest groups like Planned Parenthood (the nation’s number one abortio

I’m growing grapes for reals. It’s like a miracle. In fifty jillion degree weather. If Jesus is trying to get me to have a crush on him, it’s working. pic.twitter.com/SbVjYgpIpo — Beth Moore (@BethMooreLPM) July 30, 2022  By Elizabeth Prata - Posted at The End Time: TEN YEARS ago I wrote this blog about the danger of the then-emerging ‘Romanticizing Jesus’ movement. The sly eroticism when describing the Majestic God of the Universe, Creator of worlds, Destroyer of Souls, Enemies Under His Footstool…THAT God. Yes, He is compassionate, nurturing, loving, but He is God and He is thrice holy. We should look upon Him with love and awe and reverence, but never in childish, Junior High, flower covered diary terms. But Beth Moore did again, and again she sparked a controversy. Social media went ablaze, Christian news outlets reported on it, and the dial on blogs went spinning crazily. The reason there is always controversy around Moore is because she is living proof of one who preaches a dif

 By Bill Muehlenberg - Posted at Culture Watch: Published May 7, 2017 "Pretending the Nazis were not killing and enslaving millions for example is not exactly a Christian response. Pretending millions of babies are not being slaughtered every year is also an unbiblical response. Wilberforce knew all about the evils of the slave trade, which is why he was so effective in fighting it." The Old Testament prophets were well known as bearers of bad news. Their hard words, especially about judgment to come and the need for repentance, did not exactly make them the life of the party. They certainly were not on very many ‘Most fun people to be around with’ lists! They were not exactly regarded as upbeat types, who made people happy and comfortable to be around with. It was a very lonely calling therefore. They had to be faithful in delivering the word of the Lord, even if it was mainly bad news instead of good news. And those who preferred their religion to be on the happy-clappy sid

By Milton Quintanilla - Posted at Christian Headlines : A teenager in Nebraska was recently charged for having an illegal abortion after Facebook reportedly turned over direct messages between her and her mother to the police. According to The Christian Post , court documents revealed that Facebook handed over the chats between 18-year-old Celeste Burgess and her mother, 41-year-old Jessica Burgess, as part of a search warrant by Nebraska police. The investigation had been ongoing since April, before the Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v. Wade in June, which returned the abortion issue to the states. In Nebraska, abortion is banned after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Celeste, who claimed she had a miscarriage at 23 weeks of gestation, was reportedly given abortion pills by her mother in March. According to a sworn affidavit from Detective Ben McBride of the Norfolk Police Investigations Unit, a woman who claimed to be Celeste's friend said the teen took the first pill in April. Read

By Péter András Szabó - Posted at TableTalk Magazine: You will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for this must take place,” says our Lord in the Olivet Discourse ( Matt. 24:6 ). I have read these words numerous times, but they sounded very different when the war between Russia and Ukraine broke out. War was not a distant reality anymore but became a part of our lives. Trouble, worry, and panic are natural reactions in such times, but the words of Christ show us another way: with Him we can fight anxiety. As Leon Morris put it, “[The disciples] have one thing going for them that the general public has not: they know that God is over all and that his purpose will in the end be worked out.” 1 The gospel of Christ will triumph even in the midst of war. We witnessed this triumph in the past five months. I am a pastor in Budapest, Hungary. Our church is part of a small, confessional Presbyterian denomination, the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Central and Easte

 By Tom Ascol - Posted at Founders Ministries: Published 04.01.2013 "Have you listened to the fretful laments coming across the airways and in the places of public conversation about crime and immorality in our day? Have you watched the pundits and experts wring their hands and observe their futile solutions. They miss it They are clueless I do not mean this disrespectfully, but listen to our President talk about what we need to do about children committing violence to one another in our public schools. His answer: Let’s require uniforms to be worn. We have too many people killing one another says the Surgeon General–what we need is safer bullets Too many of our children are getting pregnant–let’s pass out condoms in our schools. Listen to the language of the supposed cultural experts in our day addressing the ills, and trying to prescribe remedies–if it were not so serious it would be laughable. It is no longer an adultery; it is an affair. It is no longer homosexuality; it is an

 By Diana Chandler - Posted at Baptist Press : NINEVAH PLAINS, IRAQ (BP) – Christians largely remain displaced from the once vibrant Nineveh Plains eight years after the Islamic State decimated the region, a Christian charity working in the area said. Of the estimated 100,000 or more Christians who fled their homes in the 2014 invasion, perhaps 20,000 have returned to date since repatriation efforts began in 2017, Max Wood, chairman of the nondenominational American Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East (American FRRME), told Baptist Press. “It was very peaceful until ISIS came along. It’s got its own charm. It’s just horrible that so many people have had to flee that area in 2014,” Wood said after the eighth anniversary of the invasion that refugees remember as The Black Day. “We learned about The Black Day from working with refugees in Jordan.” About 200 refugees gathered at the American FRRME’s Olive Tree Center in Madaba, Jordan, Aug. 6 in prayer, dance, poetr

 By John Stonestreet and Glenn Sunshine What has happened to Nigerian Christians meets the established international standards for genocide. Back in May, 20 Nigerian Christians were brutally martyred by the Islamic militant group ISIS. In June, 40 more Christians died in Owo, Nigeria, in a terrorist attack against a church. Though it is not clear who is responsible for that attack, what is clear is that Christians continue to be severely persecuted in this West African nation. The persecution, which has been ongoing for years, is part of a long history of conflict with Islam. In 1953, Christians made up only 21.4% of the population in Nigeria. Today, about half of the country’s population, about 96 million people , are Christians. To put that number in perspective, Germany, the largest country in Europe, has a total population of less than 84 million . Much of the Christian growth in Nigeria has resulted from education efforts by Western missionaries, though the country has long h

 Posted at Evangelical Focus : The organisation will release an update of the manual for health managers which states that “sex is not limited to male or female”. The World Health Organisation ( WHO ) has announced that it has started work on the update of its Gender mainstreaming for health managers manual. The document dates from 2011 and it “addresses how gender norms, roles and relations affect health-related behaviours and outcomes as well as health sector responses”. So far, the manual “ recognizes that gender inequality is a cross-cutting determinant of health that operates in conjunction with other forms of discrimination based on factors such as age, socio-economic status, ethnicity or place of origin and sexual orientation”. According to the WHO, it “provides a basis for addressing other forms of health-related discrimination”. Read more...

 By Dewey Roberts - Posted at Vanguard Presbyterian Church : (Number 1) It has often been stated that Christianity thrives best in poverty, rather than riches. While there might be some truth to that statement, it is superficial in my opinion. There are many poor countries of the world where the gospel has been preached, but not well received. The truth seems to be that Christianity only thrives when the church focuses on prayer, revival, and evangelism. Without those emphases, members, churches, and denominations become like the Laodicean church and say, “I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing” (Revelation 3:17). Certainly, material wealth has a great influence in promoting that self-satisfied spirit that is a death knell for the cause of Christ, but there are many wonderful Christians who are wealthy and who have used their gifts for God. I have known many wealthy Christians who were very earnest in praying for revival. In His sermon on the mount, Jesus gave the

By Justin Poythress - Posted at Reformation 21: "When it comes to social media, the chief value is coveting. The cry rings out from every side: 'Come here to covet, and to be coveted! Get the latest, get the greatest! Or be the greatest and the latest!'” Every place has a feel, an impression or characteristic sensation. Home has a feel, even if it isn’t always positive. The neighborhood you grew up in has a feel. The noisy main street of your urban center has perhaps a collection of feels depending on the hour or day. Then there’s the shaded path in a wooded park, the nearby field after a fresh rain, or the indie coffee shop on the corner. You get the idea. What if the “place” is online? As we enter the age of the metaverse, we need to become increasingly aware of the feel of online spaces. Social media websites are like miniature (or not so miniature) cities, each with a certain feel. And in two of the largest online cities, Facebook and Instagram, the dominant feel is

 By Shane Vander Hart My church is currently doing a Bible study in the Book of Joshua. One of my favorite passages is in Joshua 5, as the new leader of the Israelites surveys the city of Jericho. Jericho is a walled city that the fledging, nomadic nation must overcome to start to take possession of the land that God promised He would give them over 40 years ago. "When Joshua was by Jericho, he lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, a man was standing before him with his drawn sword in his hand. And Joshua went to him and said to him, 'Are you for us, or for our adversaries?" (Joshua 5:13, ESV). The "man" gives a loaded response. "And he said, 'No, but I am the commander of the army of the LORD. Now I have come," (Joshua 5:14, ESV). He was not for the Israelites or the people of Jericho. He is the commander of the army of the LORD, and he's here now. Read more... See also: Civil Duties (Gentle Reformation)