Thirteen women, including eight prisoners, received Master of Arts in Christian Ministry degrees from Lipscomb University in mid-December. The degrees were earned over the course of 15 years—“one class a week, one course a semester, fall, spring and summer,” wrote the Christian Chronicle.
The degrees were offered through the Lipscomb Initiative for Education (or LIFE), a program started in 2007. LIFE’s former executive director said it is the only seminary degree offered at a prison in the country. In addition to the eight prisoners, five women who chose to take classes with their incarcerated classmates also earned degrees.
Faculty from Lipscomb, a Church of Christ institution, travel to the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center (formerly the Tennessee Prison for Women) every Wednesday night to teach the classes.
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News Briefs
The Senior Pastor Podcast will launch Jan. 11. The podcast’s Twitter site teases, “What do you get when you put four retired senior pastors in a room with a mic? A fantastic podcast.” The show will feature Bob Russell, Don Wilson, Ken Idleman, and Scott Rawlings. Learn more on the ministry’s Twitter feed.
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We’ve reported on some of the challenges Rusty Russell has gone through over the past two years. Russell, lead pastor of New Day Christian Church in Port Charlotte, Fla., helped his family cope with his son Charlie’s long, life-threatening battle with COVID-19 and related complications, and then he helped oversee his church’s recovery efforts from Hurricane Ian, which made landfall in late September.
Through it all—especially with regard to the coronavirus—he has learned you can’t please everybody.
Russell told Outreach magazine: “On the same week, I got two emails from people at my church, one of whom wrote, ‘I’m leaving your church because you’re not social distancing enough and taking this pandemic seriously,’ while the other stated, ‘I’m leaving your church because you’re not regathering quickly enough, and you need to get over this.’”
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Dr. Stanley N. Helton, president of Alberta Bible College, has an article published in the inaugural issue of the Journal for the Study of Bible and Violence. The title of Dr. Helton’s article is “The Intertextual Violence of God: The Story of Achan and the Story of Ananias and Sapphira (Joshua 7 and Acts 5:1-11).
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A Gallup survey found that the vast majority of people who have been served by chaplains say it was a valuable and beneficial experience.
Gallup reported: “44 percent call it very valuable and 32 percent moderately valuable. Another 17 percent say it was only a little valuable, while 7 percent describe it as not valuable at all.”
Overall, about one in four Americans has encountered a chaplain at some point in their life, typically while in a hospital or nursing home, or during service in the military.
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Patheos.com writer Richard Ostling recently answered a reader’s question, “What are the biggest local Protestant churches?” Using data published by Outreach magazine, he listed Christ’s Church of the Valley (Peoria, Ariz.) and Southeast Christian Church (Louisville, Ky.) as being among the 10 largest.
At the bottom of the listing/article, Ostling shared a note about the “strictly autonomous ‘Independent Christian Churches.’”
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An article in the Greenfield Reporter in Indiana detailed how several churches—including Outlook Christian Church and Fortville Christian Church—resumed short-term mission trips during 2022. Also mentioned in the article were Missions of Hope International (MOHI), International Disaster Emergency Service (IDES), and GO Ministries.
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Peter Makiriyado, a 2003 graduate of Johnson University, is starting a vocational/Bible college near his home in northern Zimbabwe. A Dec. 21 post on Johnson’s Facebook page states, “The Johnson library, as well as our faculty, donated piles of books to this new college and a crew worked together yesterday to load them for shipment.”
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The Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader wrote an interesting article about a Disciples of Christ congregation’s innovative housing plan for seniors that could help the nearly 100-year-old church survive.
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