Free Republic

A Siberian cult leader who claims to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ was sentenced to 12 years in a Russian prison camp after his conviction for physically and financially harming his followers. Sergei Torop, a former traffic policeman known to his followers as "Vissarion," meaning "he who gives new life," and two aides used psychological pressure to extract money from his followers and cause serious harm to their mental and physical health, Reuters reported. Torop, 64, set up the Church of the Last Testament in a remote part of Siberia's Krasnoyarsk region in 1991, the year the Soviet Union...

The Seventh-day Adventist Church has released the advance edition of its 2025 Annual Statistical Report, detailing 2024 membership reports. Published by the General Conference’s (GC) Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research, the report presents division-level data on baptisms, attendance, and overall membership. As of December 31, 2024, global church membership reached 23,684,237—an increase from 22,785,195 in 2023, representing a net gain of 899,042 members. The East-Central Africa Division reported the greatest increase with over 446,000 baptisms and professions of faith, pushing its membership to more than 5.7 million. The Southern Asia Division and Inter-American Division also posted strong numbers, with...

Mt. Ennon Baptist Church is a 9000-member megachurch in Clinton, MD, that is associated with the National Baptist Convention USA and is led by senior “pastor” Delman Coates. According to their website, their vision is to be a “Caring, Christ-centered, Community Church, with a Kingdom Agenda.” One of their core beliefs is the importance of “Biblical Preaching and Teaching” , because “The Word of God is the final authority; it is true; it is unchangeable; it is to be used to equip the saints to achieve our mission.” At the same time, however, along with other beliefs centering around “prayer,”...

Rev. Brent Hawkes argues that churches should remove references to Jesus being the "Savior" from their websites, so as not to offend Muslims and other religions, and because it is a "stumbling block" for people who might otherwise attend. on X

[Catholic Caucus] German Bishop: Church Teaching on Homosexuality Depends on "the Times"What the Church's documents say about homosexuality "is time-related and must be reviewed in the light of the insights we have today from a moral-theological and ethical perspective," Auxiliary Bishop Ludger Schepers, 71, of Essen, Germany, told Dw.com (December 4) [implying that revelation is the same as the zeitgeist of 1968].A homosexual [and a pedophile?] "is the way he or she is now, that's just the way it is".What happens at the level of the universal Church, such as at the ex-synod, is for Schepers "not always clear, especially...

I’ve just experienced another attack on social media. The harassment on X, as Twitter now calls itself, usually lasts around 36 hours, and while most of the nasties are trolls and bots, I can’t pretend that the hundreds of comments don’t have an effect. I’m a priest, progressive, outspoken. No point in complaining. But a disturbing new aspect of these bombardments are the repeated and constant false accusations of pedophilia – not a libellous dribble, but a flood. It’s not really about me of course, and I’m in good company. Last month in Belleville, Ont., when Justin Trudeau was swarmed...

The most insightful critics of Marxism said that socialism’s greatest failure comes not from economics but anthropology and theology. Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., put that reality on display on Easter Sunday, when he tweeted that collective social action “is more transcendent than the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” On the holiest holiday on the liturgical calendar, Warnock wrote: The meaning of Easter is more transcendent than the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Whether you are Christian or not, through a commitment to helping others we are able to save ourselves.Warnock had previously asserted from the pulpit that “the early church was a...

For decades, John MacArthur has railed on prosperity preachers, likening them to “greed mongerers” who led First Century cults. Recently, he’s also taken aim at scandal-plagued evangelical leaders, like the late apologist Ravi Zacharias and former Hillsong Pastor Carl Lentz, saying these celebrities were in ministry only for the money. That’s why “liars and frauds and false teachers” are in business, MacArthur said in a recent sermon. “False teachers always do it for the same reason—filthy lucre, money.” Yet according to financial statements and tax forms obtained by The Roys Report, John MacArthur and his family preside over a religious...

To answer this question, we invited Billy Crone, the senior pastor of Sunrise Baptist Church in Las Vegas, Nevada, and founder of Get A Life! Ministries, to our television program Christ in Prophecy. Billy covered a number of sensationalist Bible prophecy topics such as UFOs and the Nephilim. Aliens Unmasked Nathan Jones: Billy, when it comes to sensationalist Bible prophecy, often we’re talking about UFOs. You’ve done a lot of research into UFOs. Can you explain why you approach UFOs so often in your teachings? Billy Crone: UFOs were part of my background when I was involved in the occult...

Apostate Christianity, represented by mega-church pirates Rick Warren and Brian Houston and others, are preaching that Muslims and Christians ‘serve the same God’, and since we do, we should join forces. Welcome to Chrislam 2019. From time to time, articles we have done in the past will be rediscovered by people and wind up getting shared with tens of thousands of people all over again. Such is the case with one of the first Chrislam articles we ever did back in 2012. Over the past 2 days, the number of shares on social media have exploded, going well past the...

...Aftermath: Part 3 was the sermon that got the most attention -- the one where Stanley suggested that you need to "unhitch" your faith from the Old Testament as he insisted the New Testament writers did. To make his point, Stanley taught from Acts 15 and the story of the Jerusalem council. (snip) ...If Stanley said the conclusion of the Jerusalem council pertained to Mosaic dietary laws, how did he explain the command to abstain from sexual immorality? Not well. Moral Decay Stanley said, "If I were to hand everybody a 3x5 card, and I were to say, 'Tell me...

These are some of the most common lies that many Christians have fallen victim to.  I hear many of these quite frequently and in years past have even fallen for some of them myself.  The enemy has used each of these lies to sow great discord, apathy, and fear in the Body of Christ.   It's time to dispel them all. 1. "I must do _____ to be saved or keep doing _____ to stay saved." This is what virtually every religion teaches, but not true Christianity.   Unsurprisingly, every "Christian" cult teaches this as well.  The very definition of...

    PURITANS WERE MORE JEWISH THAN PROTESTANTS  Hugh Fogelman     A Puritan is a name often misunderstood. During the 17th century English Civil War (known as the Puritan Revolution), the Puritans were Protestant fundamentalists who wished to “purify” the Church of England. Some of the Puritans, known as Separatists “separated,” forming their own church. The Puritans felt that Parliament, and not the King, should have the final say and that the moral guidance for all legal decision should come from the Jewish Bible which they considered to be the highest authority in all matters. The Puritans were obsessed...

Wheaton College is stirring up an old debate this week that's worth revisiting. Professor Larycia Hawkins, in an effort to show solidarity with Muslims, decided to wear a hijab during advent. While wearing a hijab may have been tolerated by the school, what she said about the relationship between Islam and Christianity, was not. She wrote: "I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God." For the crime of saying, "we worship the same God" Hawkins was suspended from...

2 Peter 2:1 But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction. I am sad at the news of fellow Iowan Dr. Robert Schuller and pray for the comfort of the Lord on his family. However, I am very concerned for his soul. Dr. Robert Schuller was a prolific false teacher whose errant teachings destroyed thousands, if not millions (especially old ladies who could not drive to church who clung to...

A crowd of family, friends, music stars, civil rights leaders and preachers gathered at the Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church on Monday for the memorial of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old robbery suspect who was fatally shot by local police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Mo.Brown’s uncle, Pastor Charles Ewing, gave a passionate eulogy and made parallels of his nephew’s life and that of the life of Jesus Christ. “Michael Brown was 18 years old. He was shot around noon. Our Lord and Savior hung on the cross — now compare our time frame 12 o’clock to the Jewish time frame...

Over this year, there have been a number of news reports on another movement in the church advocating for the acceptance of homosexual behavior and same-sex relationships. Matthew Vines, an openly homosexual 23-year-old student at Harvard University, posted a video on YouTube of a speech he gave on homosexuality and the Bible. In the talk, he claims repeatedly that God’s Word does not condemn monogamous same-sex relationships. Now, a recent report from the Christian Post highlighted the amount of compromise happening within the church on this issue. The headline of the article explains, " 50 ‘Hand-Picked’ Christians Trained To Convince...

With apologies to C.S. Lewis My dear Wormwood, The Screwtape Letters It's hard to fathom, even by our standards of non-compliance with the Other Side, what a marvelous catch this John Shelby Spong fellow has turned out to be. I doubt we could have created a more perfect model of apostasy and heresy all wrapped up in one man. For more than four decades, he has steadfastly aided and abetted our cause of disbelief. Atheists and skeptics are obvious sinners, but they are not a patch on a man who wears the cloth of his religion while defaming and declaiming...

Doomsday preacher Harold Camping was left a laughing stock when his prediction that the world would end on May 21 failed to materialise. But the 90-year-old Californian may well have the last laugh after revealing that date was in fact Judgment Day - a spiritual moment when the righteous would be chosen - and simply a warm-up for the Rapture which happens exactly five months later. This means that Friday, October 21, will mark the start of the Apocalypse - when believers will be whisked away into heaven and hell will be unleashed on earth. And cynics should be warned,...

Renew Your Mind Daily Today's Scripture "We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ" (2 Corinthians 10:5, NIV). Today's Word from Joel and Victoria So many people today are not really enjoying their lives because of the condition of their minds. They constantly dwell on negative, destructive, harmful thoughts. They don't realize it, but the root cause of many of their problems is simply the fact that their thought life is out of control. They just dwell on any thought...