Congregations and pastoral candidates are adapting the hiring process and getting to know each other online.

Phillip Bethancourt’s kids aren’t convinced other children actually live in College Station, Texas. They moved from Nashville a few weeks ago for their dad’s new job as pastor of Central Church, but because of the coronavirus shutdowns, the four boys have yet to go school, make friends in the neighborhood, or meet the kids at their new church.

Bethancourt too is living in his own strange parallel reality, preaching to a video camera in an empty auditorium and waiting for a congregation he hasn’t seen to officially vote him in. If all goes as planned on Sunday, he’ll become a lead pastor for the first time while his flock is still social distancing.

“Nothing matches the opportunity to be with people in person,” said Bethancourt, who left his job as vice president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission to pursue the call at Central Church. “But I would say the process we’ve been using so far is the best substitute we can create.”

Several other pastors and churches are in the same predicament, caught in the process of applying, interviewing, and onboarding during the coronavirus pandemic.

“This is not the time to be without a pastor,” said William Vanderbloemen, who runs a consulting agency that helps Christian organizations with hiring. His phone has been “ringing off the hook” with churches wanting to get serious about their pastoral search.

Many have decided to forge ahead with the process despite the unique challenges of social restrictions and shutdowns due to the pandemic. Several congregations, including high-profile megachurches Moody Church and Willow Creek Community Church, were in the midst of leadership transitions and have named ...

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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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USCIRF chair Tony Perkins gives CT a behind-the-scenes look at today’s annual report on “systematic, ongoing, and egregious” violations.

A new report aims to “unflinchingly criticize the records of US allies and adversaries alike” on religious freedom.

And there’s a lot to report, with more headlines each month confirming the Pew Research Center’s 10-year analysis that government restrictions and social hostilities involving religion have reached record levels worldwide.

Today’s 21st annual report by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) identifies significant problems in 29 countries—but sees “an upward trajectory overall.”

“Our awareness is going to grow greater, and the problem will appear more pronounced,” USCIRF chair Tony Perkins told CT. “But as we continue to work on it, I think we will see tremendous progress in the next few years if we stay the present course.”

Created as an independent, bipartisan federal commission by the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act, USCIRF casts a wider net than the US State Department, which annually designates Countries of Particular Concern (CPC) for such nations’ violations of religious freedom, or places them on a Special Watch List (SWL) if less severe.

Last December, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced CPC status for Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan.

USCIRF now recommends adding India, Nigeria, Russia, Syria, and Vietnam.

And where the State Department put only Cuba, Nicaragua, Sudan, and Uzbekistan on the watch list, USCIRF recommends also including Afghanistan, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Central African Republic, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, and Turkey.

USCIRF’s mandate is to provide oversight and advice to the State Department. ...

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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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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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How the pandemic concentrated pressures on small churches—and how the body of Christ is stepping up to help, one $3,000 grant at a time.

Philadelphia pastor Kevin Cropper’s heart sank last month when he saw a message asking for food among the prayer requests emailed to his church.

“It was a request for something tangible, and we didn’t have it,” Cropper said.

His congregation, Ark of Safety Christian Church, had canceled its weekly food distribution since it ran out of donations when it stopped gathering in March. “It makes you feel bad because isn’t that what our mission is? We want to be able to help in this type of crisis, but we need the resources to do it.”

That’s the problem with being a small, inner-city black church during a pandemic. Black adults are more than twice as likely as whites or Hispanic Americans to know someone who has been hospitalized or died due to COVID-19. Their communities are afraid, grieving, and suffering from the virus themselves; and they are far less likely to have the staff, budgets, or space to help as much as they feel called.

“We are in the city. We don’t have acres, we stay close to each other, and it’s very easy to spread the virus,” said Kato Hart Jr., pastor of Hold the Light Ministries, a Church of God in Christ (COGIC) congregation in Detroit.

American counties with a higher-than-average proportion of black residents now account for half of coronavirus cases and 60 percent of deaths. Even in a church of 50, word keeps spreading of which members have lost relatives to the virus: aunties, uncles, grandparents. Hart has lost fellow brothers in ministry, citing a letter from denominational leadership saying 30 COGIC bishops have fallen to COVID-19—including a dozen in Michigan alone.

“We’re in a fight, and we need help. These megachurches, ...

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(UPDATED) The St. Louis pastor spoke up about the difficulties faced by leaders and critiqued “celebrity culture” in ministry.

Darrin Patrick, a megachurch pastor, author, and speaker, has died.

Patrick was a teaching pastor at Seacoast Church, a multi-site megachurch based in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, and the founding pastor of the Journey Church in St. Louis, where he lived.

In a Friday evening update, Seacoast Church stated: “Darrin was target shooting with a friend at the time of his death. An official cause of death has not been released but it appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound. No foul play is suspected.”

Patrick’s unexpected death came as a shock to friends and colleagues. Robby Gallaty, pastor of Long Hollow Baptist, in Hendersonville, Tennessee, said that Patrick was scheduled to speak at his church next weekend.

“I just talked to him Tuesday and Wednesday,” said Gallaty. “This is the second close friend I have lost in a year.”

Gallaty first met Patrick in 2015 and had invited him to speak the following year at a men’s ministry event at Long Hollow. Just before the event, he said, Patrick called and said he was leaving the ministry.

At the time, Patrick had been a rising star among Reformed evangelical circles and was serving as vice-president of the Acts 29 church planting network. He was fired from Journey for what church elders called misconduct including “inappropriate meetings, conversations, and phone calls with two women” and an abuse of power.

Despite Patrick’s fall from ministry, the two stayed friends. Patrick admitted his faults and got counseling. He went through a restoration process that lasted 26 months, according to a 2019 blog interview posted at Christianity Today. He returned to the ministry as a preacher but not as a senior pastor of a church. ...

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However, this was the sixth successive year of net inflows in equity mutual funds, according to data by the Association of Mutual Funds in India (AMFI).

LIC's New Endowment Plan is a participating non-linked plan which offers an attractive combination of protection and saving features.

The power stations of the NLC integrated mining-cum-power generating company are located at Neyveli in Cuddalore.

The BMW 8 Series Gran Coupe is powered by a 3-litre, 6-cylinder in-line BSVI petrol engine. This is the most luxurious sports coupe ever built by BMW, the company said in a statement

The businessmen-brothers are facing charges of financial irregularities in cases filed by both Enforcement Directorate (ED) and CBI.

Pradhan also said that India favours reasonable prices that give some space to the producer countries.

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

Theatre owners need not fear OTT platforms and resort to protectionism. They can continue to be relevant even as tech disrupts

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