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When droughts strike in eastern Africa, clerics, church experts, and faith-based agencies are some of the first to mobilize to address food security and deliver humanitarian aid. Now such groups are moving again as severe drought—the worst in 40 years—unfolds in the east and the Horn of Africa.

Three successive rainy seasons have failed to materialize, and scientists and relief agencies are blaming climate change for bringing droughts in a region battered by conflicts and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic.

What everyone agrees on is that something unusual happened at Tall el-Hammam, an ancient settlement near the Dead Sea.

In a layer of ancient earth, archaeologists claim to have found evidence of an apocalyptic event: Melted rooftops. Disintegrated pottery. Unusual patterns in the rock formations that can be associated with intense heat. For another three to six centuries after 1650 BC, the settlement’s 100 acres lay fallow.

When the choir at Rock Spring Congregational United Church of Christ complained about overheating while harmonizing under incandescent lights more than 15 years ago, congregant John Overholt didn’t just empathize. He acted.

The self-described “handyman who fixes things” replaced the 20-plus blazing hot bulbs in the chancel ceiling with cooler, then state-of-the-art, money-saving compact fluorescents.

Mennonite Church USA announced that Sue Park-Hur will fill the denomination’s newly created director of racial-ethnic engagement position. Park-Hur had been MC USA’s denominational minister of transformative peacemaking.

According to a press release, the new position was created to help leaders in the country’s largest Mennonite denomination define its diversity, equity, and inclusion goals as well as its standards and desired outcomes.

Garrett-Evangelical Theological Semi­nary professor Reginald Blount has been tapped to lead the school’s Center for the Church and the Black Experience. He succeeds Taurean J. Webb, who has served as CBE director since 2019.

The CBE, which was founded in 1970, provides leadership training for Black seminarians and pastors. Blount is an ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and currently pastors Arnett Chapel AME in Chicago.