“If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry,” Lakewood Church’s Senior Communications Director Don Iloff tells Charisma News while standing outside in the pouring rain in Houston.

Monday, August 28, 2017–Since the threat of Hurricane Harvey became imminent late last week, Church of God leaders have been monitoring the weather event and the subsequent devastating floods that are now occurring. Operation Compassion and God’s Pit Crew, two disaster-relief agencies with ties to the Church of God, have been en route to the affected areas and are providing relief and supplies.

ROCKLIN, Calif. — Concerned mothers and fathers flooded a school board meeting Monday in response to a Kindergarten teacher that introduced a student to her class as transgender without notifying parents. Now, another parent at the same school is outraged that her child was sent to the principal’s office for “misgendering” a male classmate who now identifies as a girl.

Following last night’s landfall of Hurricane Harvey, crisis-trained chaplains with the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team are arriving in Texas this weekend to offer emotional and spiritual care to evacuees, and to assess the areas with the greatest need. Billy Graham Rapid Response Team support vehicles are also en route, with more than 100 additional chaplains standing by as the situation and overall destruction becomes clearer.

Hurricane Harvey is forecast to become a category 3 hurricane before its landfall later tonight or into early Saturday somewhere between Port O’Conner and Matagorda Bay, Texas. Weather forecasters are predicting a catastrophic and life-threatening landfall with 6 to 12 feet of flooding as more than 3 feet of rain is expected. As winds climb to 125 mile per hour or more devastating damage to homes, businesses and other structures are likely.

Can a scientist offer insight into faith? Some Christians view science with suspicion and fear, but pharmaceutical scientist Dr. Randy Dockens believes science can help us better understand God.

In the wake of the white supremacist demonstration and the subsequent tragic events in Charlottesville, Virginia, racial tensions in the United States stand as palpable as ever. As the fall semester quickly approaches for colleges and universities around the country, no institution can ignore the need for deep conversations about race and ethnicity. But colleges and universities face a unique set of challenges as they explore these topics.

I recently returned from a very productive trip to four church planting locations in India. Presently, we have a total of five training sites and they are doing exceptionally well. We were in Ranchi, New Delhi, Hyderabad and Mumbai, which combined, has more than 50 million people. Only 2% of this 50 million plus are Christian. The rest are mostly Hindu with maybe a little less than 10% Muslim.

The written word has the power to set people free. Throughout human history, God has given us a narrative that reveals our creation story, our past, and even our future in Christ Jesus. When the persecution of the early church and 1st century followers of Christ wasn’t enough to squash the spreading flame of the gospel, the enemy attacked our ability to access and read the Bible. For hundreds of years, nobody except an elite few had access to scriptures and text to read and study in their own language.