Georgia senator Raphael Warnock received the Roosevelt Institute’s Freedom of Worship Award in a ceremony on October 13.
“I really felt that the strength of his pastoral voice was unique,” said Anne Roosevelt, granddaughter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and board chair of the institute.
Ronnie Floyd, president and CEO of the Southern Baptist Convention’s executive committee, announced his departure on October 14 in a statement critical of recent decisions related to the third-party sexual abuse review that is getting underway. An investigative firm is looking into allegations that the executive committee mishandled abuse reports and mistreated survivors.
Efforts to win the return of 17 members of a US-based missionary group and a local driver stretched on in late October, as a violent gang demanded $1 million ransom per person.
The individuals kidnapped on October 16 included five children age eight months to 15 years, although authorities were not clear whether the ransom demand included them, a top Haitian official said. Sixteen of the abductees are Americans, and one is Canadian.
The Ohio-based Christian Aid Ministries said it would hold a day of fasting and prayer for its missionaries.
The National Council of Churches has elected an all-female slate of officers for the first time in the ecumenical organization’s 71-year history.
Teresa Jefferson-Snorton, leader of the Fifth Episcopal District of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, on October 13 became chair of the organization, starting a two-year term along with the other officers.
The city of Geneva plans to rename a street in honor of Annie Jiagge, the first African woman to serve as president of the World Council of Churches, which has its headquarters in the city.
Jiagge, a Presbyterian from Ghana, became president of the WCC in 1975. A lawyer, she was also the first woman in Ghana to become a judge. From 1962 to 1972, Jiagge served on the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, where she wrote the first draft of what would become the UN’s Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.
One of the nation’s oldest seminaries has changed its name and removed the word seminary in the process.
Hartford Seminary, established in 1833 by a group of Congregational ministers, now is known as Hartford International University for Religion and Peace. The school is located in Hartford, Connecticut.
A news release from the school said the name change is the culmination of a two-year strategic planning initiative. Hartford wants to be positioned as “a global leader in interreligious education, peace studies and religion research,” it added.
Because she wants to be a witness to others on a similar journey, minister Mary Johnson is beginning to share the story of her gender transition and her choice to now live fully as the person she feels God created her to be.
A retired pastor in the United Methodist Church, Johnson is married to UMC bishop Peggy Johnson, who retired as episcopal leader of the UMC’s Peninsula-Delaware and Eastern Pennsylvania Conferences in September.
A third-party investigation at one of Northern California’s most prominent megachurches ended in October with a report that found no evidence the pastor’s adult child had acted on his confessed attraction to minors.
“After interviewing 104 witnesses and reviewing or analyzing more than 500,000 documents, Zero Abuse Project did not find any disclosure or other direct evidence the volunteer in question sexually abused a child,” said the report by the firm hired by Menlo Church, near San Francisco, to study its handling of the confession.
A British art collector who bought a pair of 17th-century marble angels from a Neapolitan antiques shop two decades ago has returned the winged putti to Italy’s art police after learning that they had been stolen from a church.
Italy’s carabinieri said the unnamed collector had tried to resell the angels at an antiques shop in Avignon, France, before his planned move from France to Portugal when French police flagged them as possibly stolen goods.