The 16-year-old boy who allegedly knifed Eastern Syriac Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel in Australia on April 15 was part of an extremist group of teenagers, and authorities arrested seven of them on Wednesday (April 24), news media reported.
Galatians is widely accepted as Paul’s first epistle. It emerged in response to a radical disruption of the Jewish faith following the resurrection of Jesus. Almost 2,000 years on, we can too easily gloss over the shocking nature of this shift, which became a schism, and then an entirely independent religion with unbroken spiritual roots in the history of Israel and Judaism.
An Eastern Syriac bishop and at least three others were stabbed as he presided over a worship service in a suburb of Sydney, Australia that was being livestreamed on Monday evening (April 15).
Two Australian Pentecostal megachurch pastors have temporarily lost their ministry credentials following allegations that the pair engaged in an adulterous relationship. Corey Turner, the global senior pastor of Neuma Church, confessed to having an affair with Stacey Hilliar, a female pastor within the megachurch, which has branches in Thailand and the United States.
In December 2022, the National Church Life Survey (NCLS) in Australia asked Australians what they would do if they were invited to church during Holy Week. The results reveal positive attitudes toward Christianity in the country.
We are there to build relationships. An issue is that so much of what is taking place online tends to be individualist: individual speakers or presenters as representatives of Christianity. But what if we were to come as a group, as a cluster, as a community online, and create a space within spaces rather than trying to create our own space external to these spaces.
“The state of orphans and vulnerable children was improving for decades, then suddenly one crisis hit after another,” says Karmen Friesen, principal coordinator of World Without Orphans (WWO), a global movement that seeks to mobilize the Church to respond to the needs of vulnerable children in every nation.
But when reading Matthew 28, where Jesus said in the gospel of this kingdom will be preached in all nations, to all the earth, I see that as a promise that God will fulfill, not a task that we need to achieve. But many times, we have focused on it as if it were merely a task. The difference there is if we focus on it as a task - this is that whole “industrialized” perspective of missions - then we are required to use our own agency to fulfill it. And as a result, if anything gets in the way or i
The first global database to track cases of anti-religion violence became available to the general public in January, providing rights advocates, ministries and others a plethora of information to defend religious freedom and belief.
I think missions influencers resort to militaristic tropes because, when it comes to the sharing of our faith, whether local or cross-cultural, we have a motivational problem. To get more believers ‘committed’ to evangelism, ministry, and missions, influencers too easily twist Scripture to promote a militant activism, casting the ‘great unwashed’, ‘pagan’, or ‘heathen’ as ignorant slaves of our enemy (sin, the powers of darkness, and the Devil) needing to be rescued (by force, if necessary, e.g.
Relationships define reality for us. Everything is interrelated. The interconnectivity of all things, physical and spiritual, are held together by relationships. So much so, that I believe in and started to develop a relational hermeneutic of Scripture that can better help us understand the purposes of God in the world today.
Even before the WEA officially announced its next General Assembly in Seoul, Korea from October 27-31, 2025, news of the plans has been met with criticisms by Korean church groups who called for the preparations to be put on hold until their concerns about certain WEA leaders and the organization’s theological views are addressed. While the two first statements focused primarily on questions around pluralism and syncretism due to WEA’s engagement with Catholics, ecumenical and Muslim groups, the
