On an annual basis, God’s Pit Crew, a nation-wide crisis response team, reaches out and blesses the Church of God Smoky Mountain Children’s Home. The organization often sends a team of women and men to renovate cottages, repair broken equipment, and enhance the campus buildings. Last year 19 women and men converged on the campus and transformed an empty facility into a place of respite.
As selection chair for the 2016 Lausanne Young Leaders Gathering (YLG2016), The Mission Society’s Rev. Richard Coleman facilitated a process to identify some of the most influential evangelicals in the world under the age of 40. Coleman spearheaded a two-year review of thousands of nominations and selected nearly 1,000 emerging young leaders from 150 countries to attend the gathering.
The somber facts delineated in the State Department’s 2015 International Religious Freedom (IRF) Report, released this week, are not reflected in the Obama Administration’s foreign policy actions and priorities.
Facing what the Los Angeles Times called “intense opposition from religious colleges in California,” state Sen. Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens) has removed a provision that would have stripped those schools of their religious liberty protections and made it easier for LGBT students to sue for “discrimination.”
