Victims’ advocates caution institutions against plans to “restore” fallen leaders.

Update (May 1): Cedarville University president Thomas White has been placed on administration leave by the school’s board of trustees. A week after Anthony Moore was fired by White over “additional information related to [his] past,” the board announced it will commission an independent investigation of Moore and an audit of his hiring.

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Another case of a leader with an abusive past moving from one evangelical institution to another has intensified scrutiny on Christian hiring practices and responses to abuse.

In ministry contexts, the desire to keep fallen leaders out of positions where they might again abuse their authority is sometimes met with another perspective—a hope that a redemptive and forgiving God would allow people to be restored to leadership. Both victims’ advocates and community members worry that administrators weighing those considerations at Cedarville University made the wrong call.

In 2017, Cedarville welcomed Anthony Moore six months after he was fired from the lead pastor position of The Village Church’s Fort Worth campus. President Thomas White wrote that he offered to shepherd Moore through a five-year plan of restoration at the conservative Baptist school while he taught theology, helped coach basketball, and served as a special advisor on diversity.

CT spoke with four current and former Cedarville professors who said they knew Moore had made a “mistake” related to same-sex attraction and technology, based on White’s introduction and Moore’s own telling. Some assumed pornography or an online relationship. They had no idea that he had reportedly filmed a subordinate at his previous church in the shower. The revelation, detailed by multiple ...

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The Southern Baptist publisher plans to restrict its budget by at least $25 million through reducing staff and salaries.

LifeWay Christian Resources, the publishing entity of the Southern Baptist Convention, has announced it will cut roughly 10 percent of its operating budget through staff reductions, a hiring freeze, and salary cuts.

The move comes after five consecutive weeks of steep revenue decline in the wake of the coronavirus and the expectation that sales may not rebound anytime soon.

The Nashville-based Christian publisher said revenue is down 24 percent compared with the same period last year, largely due to a sharp drop in bulk orders from churches for resources such as Sunday school curricula, Bible study materials, and Vacation Bible School curricula.

It’s not clear yet if SBC churches or other churches that buy LifeWay materials will hold VBS or camp programming this year.

LifeWay’s budget for this fiscal year is $281.3 million. It said it planned to cut between $25 million and $30 million from its budget.

The announcement is just the first indication of the financial blow many US churches and denominational agencies are facing as a result of the COVID-19 shutdowns—a blow that could reshape the religious landscape for decades to come.

“LifeWay stands to lose tens of millions of dollars of revenue that the organization would normally generate over the summer months from camps, events, VBS, and ongoing curriculum sales,” said Ben Mandrell, LifeWay’s CEO, in a news release. “LifeWay is mitigating these losses as much as possible through various expense reduction plans, including staff reductions and cuts in non-employee expenses.”

LifeWay said members of its executive leadership team will give up one month’s salary beginning in May. It did not say how it would achieve a staff reduction, ...

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The Christian magazine had halted publication without informing subscribers and has shared little about its founder’s sabbatical.

Last month, Relevant Podcast listeners heard a familiar voice in their earbuds: founder Cameron Strang, returning to the show’s lineup—and to leadership at Relevant Media Group—six months after stepping away due to public criticism from former employees.

Though Relevant promised to be transparent with its efforts to address Strang’s alleged racial insensitivity and difficult leadership style, it did not bring up the process again until the April 10 update announcing his return as CEO.

In the meantime, the bimonthly Christian magazine had not sent out an issue to its 27,000 paid subscribers since Strang left in September, leaving fans to wonder about its future.

Strang told listeners that he’s “excited to be back” for a new era at Relevant as it prepares to revamp and expand its podcast offerings, transition to a yearly print publication, and relaunch its website, all under an advisory board newly enlisted to oversee leadership of the 10-person staff.

Relevant’s loyal followers, some of whom have been around for its entire 20-year history, are excited to hear Strang’s voice again. But as much as they hope to see the kind of progress the company has promised and prayed for, a few have questioned the lack of communication.

“When the print issues stopped coming, I was disappointed but figured the company was trying to figure out how to move forward. I suspected they had lost a lot of advertisers & revenue,” wrote Erin Bird, an Iowa pastor, in a Twitter thread responding to the April update. “I’ve patiently walked thru this w/ you, actually prayed for you guys (& those hurt), & was hoping to see a repentance from Cameron that would show the world ...

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Russell Moore’s earliest appointees helped define a new era for the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm.

Three top leaders who served alongside Russell Moore at the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) since the start of his presidency have left the Southern Baptist entity over the past six months.

Outgoing vice presidents Phillip Bethancourt and Daniel Darling and former director Andrew Walker embodied key emphases of the ERLC in recent years, as it developed new ways to equip churches to address racial justice, sexual abuse, and societal pressures around marriage and family.

The ERLC said in a news release that its mission continues uninterrupted, the staff changes providing an opportunity “to strengthen the work of the organization.”

Bethancourt—who stepped down from his position as executive vice president on April 26 to become pastor of Central Church in College Station, Texas—cited the trio’s work as evidence of “a generational shift on how Southern Baptists engage the public square.”

Days before Bethancourt’s departure, Darling, the ERLC vice president for communications, announced he too would be leaving, taking on a position as senior vice president for communications at the National Religious Broadcasters. Walker, former director of research and senior fellow in Christian ethics, departed October 31 to become a full-time ethics professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

To fill their roles, the ERLC named former vice president for operations and chief of staff Daniel Patterson as the new executive vice president and spread Walker’s responsibilities among other staff. Darling’s replacement has not been announced.

Several additional staff shifts were announced last week, including the tapping of Travis Wussow, general counsel and vice president ...

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CT interviews Stephen Rasche on Erbil’s Catholic presence, the need for Christian unity, and why Christians will “no longer be shy” with the gospel.

For 25 years, Stephen Rasche was a “bare knuckles” international lawyer. But in 2010, he offered his services to the Chaldean Catholic Church of Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan and has increasingly dedicated his life to the preservation of this ancient community.

Under the leadership of Archbishop Bashar Matti Warda, in 2015 Rasche helped found the Catholic University of Erbil, where he serves as vice chancellor. Also the director of its Institute for Ancient and Threatened Christianity, Rasche lived this title as ISIS ravaged Iraq’s Christian homelands in the Nineveh Plains and many believers fled to Erbil.

After testifying on their behalf before the United Nations and the US Congress, Rasche allows them to represent themselves in his recent book, The Disappearing People: The Tragic Fate of Christians in the Middle East. The book has won a diverse range of endorsements, from leaders such as Matthew Hassan Kukah, bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Sokoto, Nigeria; Yahya Cholil Staquf, general secretary of Nahdlatul Ulama, the largest Muslim organization in the world; and Thomas Farr, president of the Religious Freedom Institute.

The US State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom reports that less than 250,000 Christians are living in Iraq, most in Kurdistan or on the Nineveh Plains. Two-thirds belong to the Chaldean Catholic Church.

CT interviewed Rasche about the logic of establishing a university during a genocide, how its Catholic identity functions in a Muslim society, and his enduring optimism for Christianity in Iraq.

What led you personally to invest your life in this endeavor?

In 2010, Bishop Warda had just been made archbishop, and I went to pay him a visit of respect, asking if there ...

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Domestic mobile brand Lava on Saturday said it has resumed production at its manufacturing facility in Noida with over 20 per cent production capacity.

Franklin Templeton Mutual Fund on Friday said it is making every effort to ensure an orderly and equitable exit to all investors affected by closure of six debt schemes, a day after it was asked by regulator sebi to focus on returning investors' money at the earliest.

Bring back levies such as the wealth tax and estate duty on the rich, to utilise for the welfare of the Covid-stricken poor

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