Muslim extremists murdered a popular Nigerian pastor who is being remembered as a “dedicated servant to the poor.”
Pastor Joshua Adah, who founded and operated a school giving free education to over 400 children in Bantaje, was slaughtered by a group of Muslim herdsmen who may be connected to the terrorist group Boko Haram.
The attackers reportedly seized Adah after his car broke down while on the way back to the mission from an outreach event.
“The pastor’s car broke down at Chediya on his return from Koji. He then phoned his mechanic at Jalingo to help him fix the car. When the mechanic arrived, the two men agreed to hire a vehicle nearby Dan Anacha, which would tow the car to Jalingo,” a police spokesman said. “The mechanic upon returning to scene could not find the pastor. … After a thorough search, his body was found in the area.”
A supporter of Pastor Adah said after finding Christ in 2000 he experienced a radical life transformation.
“Not too long after he got born again, he left the comfort and ‘luxury’ of city life for a remote village on a hill without light nor potable drinking water, not even a well in sight,” the supporter explained. “He was there with his humble wife and kids to answer the call of God at this time when larger cities meant greener pastures, fatter offerings and sizeable tithes to others doing ministry. He continued to preach the Gospel and hold campaigns, not in the urban areas but mostly in rural areas.
“I don’t know why God allowed Boko Haram to cut his life short. Even when it became dangerous, he refused to get out but kept preaching Christ in villages where many will not go,” she added .
A man who led a Seventh Day Adventist church until last March when he resigned and said he was going to “try atheism for a year” has announced he no longer believes in God.
“For the next 12 months I will live as if there is no God,” he explained. “I will not pray, read the Bible for inspiration, refer to God as the cause of things or hope that God might intervene and change my own or someone else’s circumstances.”
Ryan Bell was the leader of Hollywood Adventist Church until he was asked to resign by church leaders because of his opposition to Scripture on issues such as creation.
“Not being a pastor for nine months has given me the freedom to not have to believe in something for other people’s sake,” he explained to Religion News Service.
Bell now not only denies the existence of God, he is actively trying to undermine the Scriptures and truth of Christ by claiming it was just made up to fit the view of the leaders at the time.
“It’s probably been a decade since I was convinced about the virgin birth or the historicity of the birth narratives more generally,” Bell wrote. “In fact, Mark doesn’t even have a birth narrative, suggesting that it was invented later to tie the story together.”
A Dallas pastor is calling on the black community of Dallas to rise up against a new abortion center of Planned Parenthood that is surrounded by an 8-foot high concrete wall so people cannot see what is happening inside the complex.
Pastor Stephen Broden of Fair Park Bible Fellowship Church is calling on black megachurches to join their protest of the 17,000 square foot abortion center that he says was deliberately placed in the middle of a black neighborhood.
“Planned Parenthood has built a wall to shield their clients from the presence of God’s prayer warriors who pray to end abortion at one of Texas’ largest abortion facilities. This death trap is located in the middle of the black community, within a 1 mile radius of six of Texas’ black mega churches. And 5 miles of seven. A wall cannot hide their bloody hands from the presence of an omnipresent God,” wrote Broden in a Dec. 6 post on his Facebook page.
“That’s why it’s absolutely essential for us to communicate to these churches who are in this community that they have an obligation, a responsibility, to offer to the community in the public square a voice of God concerning His view of life and the dignity and value of life and when life begins.”
Abortion statistics show that black women have abortions five times the rate of other races.
Two pastors in Bangladesh are facing two years in prison because they were preaching Christ where Muslims could hear them.
Arif Mondol of the Faith Bible Church of God in Lalmonirhat and his co-pastor were conducting a baptism with their congregation of 40 residents when a mob of about 200 Muslims stormed into their building and began attacking the pastors.
“More than 100 Muslims headed by local Jamaat-e-Islami party members and Muslim clerics gathered at the house and started barking questions at the pastors: why did they propagate Christianity in the locality and convert some of them,” a source told Morning Star News. “The pastors replied that it did not take any permission from any authority to propagate any religion and convert people to any religion.”
Local police arrested the pastors and every Christian in the building while doing nothing to the Muslims who caused the incident.
Mondol and his co-pastor have been released on bail pending a trial.
Bangladesh does not have laws against evangelism, so the pastors are being charged with “Hurting Religious Sentiments.”
A virulent anti-Christian organization that found a liberal judge to back them in an attempt to strip pastors of a tax exemption for housing has lost at the appeals level.
The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago reversed the decision of liberal Judge Barbara Crabb who had backed the efforts of the anti-Christian Freedom From Religion Foundation. The court ruled that the FFRF had no standing to bring the case and that Judge Crabb had no basis for her ruling.
“The plaintiffs were never denied the parsonage exemption because they never asked for it, ” the three-judge panel stated. “Without a request, there can be no denial. And absent any personal denial of a benefit, the plaintiff s’ claim amounts to nothing more than a generalized grievance about §107(2)’s unconstitutionality, which does not support standing.”
The Alliance Defending Freedom, which filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of 600 churches, applauded the court making the Constitutionally sound ruling.
“The atheists who filed this suit may have an axe to grind against religion, but as the 7th Circuit found, that doesn’t give them sufficient standing to challenge a tax benefit for which it has never applied and that has been provided to pastors for decades,” said ADF Senior Legal Counsel Erik Stanley. “The allowance many churches provide to pastors is church money, not government money. It is constitutional and should continue to be respected and protected.”
A pastor who helps victims of substance abuse, rescues minors from prostitution and provides a home for battered women survived an assassination attempt in Argentina.
Pastor Marcelo Nieva was driving in Rio Tercero when a gunman fired rounds from a 9mm handgun into the pastor’s car. Neither Pastor Nieva nor his passenger was hit with any of the bullets that penetrated the car.
A forensic exam of the car found that a bullet struck a vertical beam in the car frame and was deflected millimeters, sending the round into the car’s interior. Without the deflection, the bullet would have struck the pastor’s neck.
The Pastor credits the hand of God for keeping them safe during the attack. He also said that he is not going to slow down doing the work of Jesus to placate the drug gangs that have been objecting to his helping those in need.
“We are struggling and working to uncover the truth of the facts,” he said to Chrsitian News. “We firmly believe that truth overcomes lies and the light will always vanquish darkness.”
Police have been slow to investigate and local residents have said they believe the pastor’s actions are exposing corruption among local officials when they don’t take steps to stop the drug gangs from harassing the pastor and church members.
The senior pastor of Bahamas Faith Ministries International Fellowship is dead after a plane crash in the Bahamas.
Myles Munroe was killed along with his wife, daughter and six others when their plane struck a construction crane in a shipyard next to the airport and crashed into a junkyard. No one on the plane survived.
Munroe was leading a Global Leadership Forum that included world leaders such as ambassadors to the United Nations.
“He was indisputably one of the most globally recognizable religious figures our nation has ever produced,” Bahamian Prime Minister Perry Christie said of Munroe. “His fame as an ambassador for the Christian ministry preceded him wherever in the world he traveled, whether in the Caribbean, North America, Asia, Europe or Africa.”
The Associated Press says that severe weather had an impact on the crash.
The man many call America’s Pastor turns 96 years old with a focus on heaven.
Rev. Billy Graham will be celebrating his birthday at home with family and close friends today while a brand new video from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association debuts named “Heaven.”
The video has a never-before-seen message from the powerful man of God filmed last year at his home.
“I know I’m going to heaven,” Graham says. “I’m looking forward to it with great anticipation.”
Graham has been struggling with deteriorating eyesight and hearing but staff says every day he begins with prayer, devotions and Bible study time.
“Although his physical condition keeps him homebound, he remains interested in current events and the ongoing work of the ministry that he began more than 60 years ago,” says Franklin Graham, his eldest son and president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. “Opportunities like My Hope and the Heaven film are ways that we can help my father to continue the work that God called us to do. Please pray for my father, and for those who will watch this film—that they too may know the peace found in Jesus Christ.”
Noted evangelist John Piper says that pastors who are bullying and using fear to control congregations need to be rebuked for their sinful actions.
Piper addressed a question from a listener on his podcast about abusive leaders within the church.
While Piper said the words “bully” and “bullying” are not in the Bible, the application of what the Bible calls “bad shepherds” applies in the cases of what we today would call bullying.
“Does the pastor get down and live alongside his people, giving examples to them or is he always pompously pronouncing with a domineering sense of I’m a big shot in this church and you guys ought to toe the line,” Piper said. If it was the big shot mentality, Piper stated, “That’s bullying and that’s the opposite of what God calls his shepherds to be.”
Piper also said that in some cases what is called bullying is really pastors exercising the authority given to them by God to rebuke and correct those under their teaching to guide people to be more like Christ.
Piper added if someone is unsure about their pastor’s actions, to “go to the Bible, especially the New Testament, use all of it to form a well-rounded picture of what biblical leadership and biblical shepherding is and then measure your pastor by that.”
The Seattle area megachurch founded by Mark Driscoll is disbanding at the end of the year.
The announcement last Friday sent shockwaves through the church’s multiple locations as they have only a few weeks to decide if they want to become an independent church, merge with another congregation or simply disappear.
The “Mars Hill” ministry itself will also cease to exist. They will fire all of their existing staff.
The church has been struggling through transition after the resignation of founding pastor Mark Driscoll.
Several former Mars Hill leaders expressed optimism that this news could end up bringing benefit to the Seattle area.
“God makes good out of bad: New local ‘Mars Hill’ churches: Redemption Church, Redeemer Church, A Seattle Church, Downtown Cornerstone, Reach; all these seeds have fallen from the dying Mars Hill tree. God is very much alive in Seattle,” former Mars Hill deacon Mike O’Neil wrote.
