Free Republic

(RNS) — Leaders of The Meeting House, a Toronto area megachurch with multiple locations and once one of the largest congregations in Canada, has shut down its public ministry, becoming a consortium of smaller congregations. “It is with sadness that we are required to bring the public-facing ministry of The Meeting House to an end as of August 29,” according to a statement posted on the church’s website. “Going forward, there will no longer be churches operating programs or doing ministry under the banner of The Meeting House.” The church’s remote sites will be rebranded as the “BIC Church Collective,”...

A federal judge ordered a former church office manager to pay $912,000 in restitution for embezzling money from a Baptist church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and failing to pay taxes. Katrenia Hartman, former office manager at Trinity Baptist Church in Tulsa, pleaded guilty in January to bank fraud and willfully filing a false federal income tax return. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Gregory K. Frizzell sentenced Hartman, 55, to serve 30 months in prison and five years of supervised release, according to a press release by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Northern District of Oklahoma. She also must pay the IRS more...

After leaders at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Carnegie, Pennsylvania, realized that some accounting discrepancies were growing “larger and larger,” they confronted a lifelong member who had access to church funds. Now William Reed, 73, has been charged with stealing almost a quarter-million dollars from the church’s Good Samaritan account. Money from that account, of which Reed had sole control, was intended to help neighbors in need. Instead, according to the criminal complaint, Reed moved $224,000 from that account to his personal American Express account. Reed held several finance-related positions at the church for the past 14 years, authorities said....

Join with fellow FREEPERS to pray for AMERICA: For those in Authority in Government, Family, Military, Business, Agri-Business; End to Sex Slavery; Healthcare, Education, Churches, and the Media. This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. (1 John 5:14) Forum threads labeled [Prayer] are closed to debate of any kind.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this guest post are solely those of the guest author. This election season, pastors must unapologetically speak truth to their congregations in pulpits nationwide, including this message that many shy away from: Abortion is murder and must be unabashedly opposed by followers of Christ. The pro-life landscape in America would look radically different if the Church advocated for preborn lives. In Florida, if the deadly abortion Amendment 4 is to fail, Christians cannot remain quiet or complacent as they have in years past. Sadly, it is estimated that 25 million Christians who are registered to...

George Orwell’s Dystopia Realized

Vladimir Zelensky has signed a law that calls for the banning of any religious group suspected of having ties to Russia. It threatens to effectively shut down the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) - the largest faith-based organization in the country. The Ukrainian parliament introduced the legislation earlier this week; it is expected to take effect in 30 days. After that, all the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and all affiliated religious organizations will be outlawed. The Synod stated that it would appeal Kiev's actions with international human rights organizations and call on them to immediately and objectively respond...

Ukraine’s Parliament has created the legal tools for a governmental ban on any religious group that it deems to be too closely tied to Russia by voting for a bill that explicitly bans the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine. However, the ban also directly affects the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), which the Ukrainian government says is too closely tied to Moscow because of its historic ties to the Russian Orthodox Church. After more than a year and a half of legal wrangling over the language of the bill, Ukrainian lawmakers are set to ban the sole canonical body of Orthodox...

Amid ideological hurdles facing Russia in occupied regions in Ukraine, evangelical churches are targets for Russian soldiers to allegedly root out anti-Russian sentiment, if not levy allegations of American havens for "spies." "You don't run a church: You run a nest of American spies," Russian soldiers who stormed Melitopol's Church of God's Grace told its Baptist pastor Mykhailo Brytsyn during interrogation after an armed takeover The evangelical churches are being targeted because the ideology is not in line with Putin's favored Russian Orthodox Church as Putin attempts to turn contested regions into full-hearted Russian territories after his years long war...

The Ukrainian parliament has approved a law that would allow authorities to ban the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), which Kiev has repeatedly accused of having ties to Russia, according to an MP. The legislation also outright bans the Russian Orthodox Church and all affiliated religious institutions.

I give England until the end of 2025 at the latest before it is no longer recognizable. Don't laugh; I give the U.S. until the end of 2027 at best, but that is a whole other column. The Church of England has apparently joined the pronoun movement. Of course, none of this should come as a surprise to anyone, but it is still a shame. According to a report in the Telegraph, the Church has decided to stop using the word "church" in order to be more modern. I don't know what word they will use. Lodge? Club? Association? The...

Join with fellow FREEPERS to pray for AMERICA: For those in Authority in Government, Family, Military, Business, Agri-Business; End to Sex Slavery; Healthcare, Education, Churches, and the Media. This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. (1 John 5:14) Forum threads labeled [Prayer] are closed to debate of any kind.

There's a lot of talk about shepherds being for sale lately, and if this isn't that problem in spades, I don't know what is. Our boy Woke Preacher Clips did the painstaking work to put together a montage that's nearly 7 minutes long, featuring more than 50 pastors, all saying the exact same thing about Kamala Harris a couple of weeks ago. This is insane:

Pilgrim Lutheran Church in St Paul, MN, is a trainwreck of a congregation. Led by impastor Jen Rome, they are an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) congregation that exemplifies all the most heretical parts of the denomination. Notably, a recent article by RNS identified this as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s (who is Kamala Harris’ radical Vice President pick) denomination and parish. The church, which checks off all the usual pro-choice/ pro-LGBTQ boxes, uses the “Inclusive Bible” for all scripture readings and say they are committed to: * Antiracism work, de-centering whiteness, and making reparations for race violence * LGBTQIA+...

Hey, Tim Walz isn’t so bad. In an age when leftists compete with one another in how much they can repudiate and mock traditional values, it is surprising and refreshing to discover that the Democrats’ shiny new vice-presidential candidate, America’s dad, is a regular churchgoer. Walz’s Christian piety, however, is not exactly the sort of thing that would put you in mind of Augustine, Aquinas, Martin Luther, Mother Theresa, or any other prominent Christian you’d care to name. In fact, it’s just the sort of thing you’d expect: the far left at prayer. The Daily Caller reported Wednesday that Democratic...

Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz attends a church that preaches beliefs related to gender, race and sexuality that many Christian denominations strongly oppose. Walz, who is the governor of Minnesota, identified Pilgrim Lutheran Church in St. Paul as his parish during a 2020 briefing on the COVID-19 pandemic. Materials published by Pilgrim Lutheran Church instruct parishioners not to refer to God using male pronouns, push congregants to support reparation funds, encourage them to celebrate Ramadan and include a modified gender-neutral version of the Lord’s Prayer, among other liberal practices. Pilgrim Lutheran Church is part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church...

Over the past several weeks, every major news outlet has noticed — and reported extensively — on the absence of the topic of abortion from GOP candidates’ speeches. Across the country, Christians have been disappointed by the Republican Party’s failure to make the life issue the hallmark of the presidential campaign. Defending the most innocent, the most vulnerable among us, should be every candidate’s top priority, but the same is true of every Christian. And if most of us take an honest look at our lives, we must admit that we’re not doing a great job being a voice for...

Join with fellow FREEPERS to pray for AMERICA: For those in Authority in Government, Family, Military, Business, Agri-Business; End to Sex Slavery; Healthcare, Education, Churches, and the Media. This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. (1 John 5:14) Forum threads labeled [Prayer] are closed to debate of any kind.

UPDATED 10:05 p.m. Central—The historic sanctuary of First Baptist Church of Dallas, the church led by Pastor Robert Jeffress, caught fire on Friday night. The cause remains unknown, though the fire comes less than one week after an attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, of whom Jeffress has long been an impassioned supporter.“Dallas Fire-Rescue is currently battling a two-alarm fire in a building located at 1717 San Jacinto Street,” Chief Robert Borse told The Daily Signal. “The initial call was received at 6:05 p.m., and crews arrived on scene at 6:09 p.m.”“The fire has been knocked down and contained,”...

Dallas Fire Rescue (DFR) responded to a three-alarm fire just after 6 p.m. at the First Baptist Dallas Church at 1707 San Jacinto St. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlCSU1HLQIY