Author: Shalem John

A teenage girl sat hunched on a chair in a small, sterile consulting room at Umaru Shehu Specialist Hospital in Maiduguri, Nigeria. Her hands trembled as tears streamed down her face. Her eyes were red and swollen. Words tumbled out as she pleaded with the doctor, explaining her fears of an unplanned pregnancy and a future she felt unprepared for. During the first three years of gynecologist Dr. Shiktira Kwari’s practice, several other women approached her with the same request: Please perform an abortion. “I always use that opportunity to talk to them about God’s plan for our lives and…

Southern Baptists didn’t enact major reforms at their annual meeting this week. They didn’t vote to shut down their long-standing public policy arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC). They didn’t go ahead with a constitutional amendment barring churches with women as pastors. They didn’t adopt sweeping new requirements for financial transparency. Even with some of the same issues coming up year after year and a significant number of people calling for the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) to take action, the thousands of blue and yellow paper ballots across a giant convention hall in downtown Dallas didn’t add up…

The Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC) will consider how Calvin University deals with faculty who have “personal difficulties” with the church’s confessional standards—specifically the standards on human sexuality.  More than 175 delegates are gathering at Redeemer University in Ancaster, Ontario, on Friday for the annual, week-long denominational synod. The agenda includes at least six overtures to modify the way the CRC handles gravamens, heavy issues where members or church leaders are not in complete agreement with the denomination’s doctrine. Since 2022, that doctrine has included a statement condemning homosexual sex, along with adultery, premarital sex, extra-marital sex, polyamory,…