A series of policies recently enacted by the Nicaraguan government will significantly impact the activities of churches and ministries operating in the country.

Viewed by religious freedom specialists as an effort to increase the state’s control over religious institutions, the measures impose taxes on tithes and offerings while mandating that organizations create formal partnerships with the Nicaraguan government to carry out in-country projects. Local newspaper La Prensa estimates that taxes on tithes may reach 30 percent.

President Daniel Ortega introduced the bill that was unanimously approved on August 20 by the Asamblea Nacional. Ortega’s party, the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, which started in the 1970s as a guerrilla group, controls the legislature.

The changes in the law will favor “the development of projects of interest to families and communities within a framework of solidarity and adherence to national laws,” said Vice President Rosario Murillo, who is married to Ortega.

The scope of the new regulations has been vague. Both Murillo and an Asamblea Nacional statement on the bill described the laws as “strengthening transparency, legal security, respect, and harmony.” One likely consequence is that churches receiving foreign money—including funding from their own denominations—will be forced to enter into an alianza de asociación (“partnership alliance”) to access their funds.

The same day the legislation passed, the government canceled the legal status of 1,500 organizations, citing their failure to submit proper financial statements. For the first time since the Ortega administration began cracking down on nonprofits, nearly half ...

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In the last two decades, over 400,000 South Africans have left their country to set up a new life abroad in the US, Europe, Canada, Australia, and the United Arab Emirates. They are mostly highly educated and highly skilled young families looking to escape crime and economic decay at home.

This exodus has prompted authorities to warn that South Africa’s tax base is at risk, with over 6,000 affluent earners emigrating yearly.

“I must be honest, it’s giving me sleepless nights,” said Landon Dube, a pastor for Tabernacle of Grace, a Pentecostal denomination in the middle-class suburb of Midrand, near Johannesburg.

Church leaders are worried about what the departures mean for their churches if they continue to lose families they rely on for tithes and financial support.

It’s an interesting dynamic: Some pastors may be legitimately worried about the future of their church and its ability to serve the community at a time of financial turmoil. But South Africa is also a place where fraudulent ministers and self-proclaimed prophets prey on desperate believers, so Christians may hear some leaders' concerns about the departures as coming from selfish motivations and a desire to keep up extravagant lifestyles.

The majority Christian country has only become more religious in the past few years; while colonial denominations are shrinking, newer Pentecostal and African-initiated churches are growing. But financially, South Africa is in turmoil.

With rolling blackouts, high crime rates, and stark inequality, its economy is growing at a dire 1 percent per year against the ideal 7 percent threshold needed to put a dent in youth joblessness (now up to 59.7% for workers under 25), according ...

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The world’s 280 million immigrants have greater shares of Christians, Muslims, and Jews than the general population, according to a new Pew Research Center study released Monday.

“You see migrants coming to places like the US, Canada, different places through Western Europe, and being more religious—and sometimes more Christian in particular—than the native-born people in those countries,” said Stephanie Kramer, the study’s lead researcher.

While Christians make up about 30 percent of the world’s population, the world’s migrants are 47 percent Christian, according to the latest data collected in 2020.

The study found that Muslims make up 29 percent of the migrant population but 25 percent of the world’s population.

Jews, only 0.2 percent of the world’s population but 1 percent of migrants, are by far the most likely religious group to have migrated, with 20 percent of Jews worldwide living outside their country of birth compared to just 6 percent of Christians and 4 percent of Muslims.

Four percent of migrants are Buddhist, matching the general population, and 5 percent are Hindu, compared to 15 percent of the world population.

Over the past 30 years, migration has outpaced global population growth by 83 percent, according to Pew.

Though people immigrate for many reasons, including economic opportunity, to reunite with family, and to flee violence or persecution, religion and migration are often closely connected, the report finds. US migrants are much more likely to have a religious identity than the American-born population in general.

The influx of religious migrants can have a significant impact on the religious composition of their destination ...

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Brad Hambrick oversees counseling ministries at Summit Church, a North Carolina church with 14 campuses and about 13,000 in attendance. He also teaches biblical counseling at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of books like Angry with God.

How do you distinguish between good and bad anger?

All anger says two things: “This is wrong, and it matters.” In the interpersonal space, sinful anger says a third thing: “This is wrong, and it matters more than you.” I can be right about the first two: “You shouldn’t have done that, and it’s important.” But when I’m willing to sin against you, then just because my prompt is theologically and morally accurate, that doesn’t mean my expression of anger is righteous. When you move toward social media and politics, in many ways, the “you” either becomes very far off or very ambiguous. People feel a lot more freedom to vent or to rage because they don’t really see a person. They just feel a cause.

Where do you see destructive anger?

Anger shows up most in private settings. If somebody is blowing up at Walmart, their regulation and social filters have deteriorated significantly.

We want to use an oversimplified test for righteous anger. “If I’m right, and it matters, this is okay. Tell me where I’m wrong.” Usually when we’re in that righteous anger spot, we love Jesus turning over tables in the temple. That’s what we feel like we’re doing.

And if you look in Matthew 21, after Jesus is finished turning over the tables, it says, “The blind and the lame came to him.” In my mind’s eye, when I think about Jesus in the temple, he’s just ...

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More Americans than ever are seeking help for mental health issues like depression and anxiety. But they seem to be avoiding help for another emotion, even though it comes up across life stages and can be destructive: anger.

Current events have fanned the flame of wrath even more. Like many Americans, Nycole DeLaVara has seen angry conversations about the news invade her church life—especially over politics, race, and gender.

But in her work as a biblical counselor in Southern California, DeLaVara says that anger often remains unaddressed and unresolved.

“I kind of wish people were coming and saying, ‘I am having a hard time processing what I’m seeing,’” said DeLaVara. “That would be a humble way of approaching things. I find people don’t know what they’re feeling.”

CT spoke with Christian counselors across the country who agreed. Not enough people, they say, have been able to recognize the uncertainty they’re feeling as anger, and they may be missing out on the guidance that could help them during a heated and divisive climate.

“The Facebook warrior usually doesn’t come into counseling and say, ‘I really struggled to manage my dialogue on Facebook,’” said Brad Hambrick, who oversees the counseling ministries at Summit Church, in North Carolina, which has 14 campuses and about 13,000 in attendance.

The flood of information people experience now—being able at every moment to know anything frustrating going on in the entire world—contributes to a “background sense of irritation,” said Hambrick, which “contributes to impulse control being harder these days.”

Last year, the Los Angeles Police Department ...

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Bangladesh’s religious minorities have reported looting, arson, and vandalization following Sheikh Hasina’s abrupt resignation as prime minister last month.

Thousands of young people first took to the streets in June to protest a court ruling that reinstated a civil service quota system many found discriminatory and exclusive. But after Hasina insulted protesters, demonstrations escalated into violence.

Since then, rioters have attacked the parliamentary building, the residences of the prime minister and other political leaders, and numerous other establishments, including ones belonging to certain religious minorities. The Catholic charity Caritas Bangladesh stated:

According to different local, national, and international news media, as well as reports from local communities, more than one hundred houses, religious institutions, and commercial centers belonging to Awami League leaders and religious minorities have been attacked. The Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council [BHBCUC] reported that hundreds of families have been attacked, faced sabotage activities, and received death threats from miscreants.

Caritas also stated its own regional office in southwestern Bangladesh was attacked by more than 100 rioters on August 4, noting that one of the mob’s leaders told the group after about 15 minutes that this was not the intended target.

On social media, many unverified reports went viral of mobs destroying a church in the Nilphamari district in northern Bangladesh and some Christian homes in Khulna, the country’s third-largest city.

BHBCUC president Neem Chandra Bhowmik said that his organization had received reports over the phone of “vandalism, intimidation and ...

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Not long after Frances Tagaloa accepted Christ at 16, she started experiencing flashbacks.

Over the next few years, Tagaloa began piecing together long-buried memories and came to recognize that she had been sexually abused between the ages of five and seven by a Catholic Marist Brother who taught at a school in the Auckland suburb of Ponsonby.

Tagaloa only told her parents about the abuse years later, after getting married and having children, because talking about the issue was taboo in her father’s Samoan culture, and she didn’t want her parents to blame themselves.

Her mother approached the Catholic Church in New Zealand around 1999, but Tagaloa, 56, decided not to speak with them —until three years later, when she heard the Marist Brothers were going to name a classroom after the perpetrator, Bede Fitton.

When Tagaloa met with a Catholic counselor, she wanted an apology and for Fitton’s honors to be removed. Instead, the Catholic church offered her financial compensation. Tagaloa suggested that they donate the money to the evangelical ministry where she worked.

“I was really disappointed in the process,” she said. “I remember thinking that was just a big waste of time.”

Two decades later, another opportunity arose for Tagaloa to hold the Catholic Church accountable.

The ministry leader became the first witness in the Catholic hearing with New Zealand’s Royal Commission of Inquiry, an independent body established in 2018 to investigate abuse and neglect that children and adults faced while in the care of state and faith-based institutions between 1950 and 1999.

On July 24, the Royal Commission released its final report, which found that an estimated 256,000 out of 655,000—or ...

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Timothy Dudley-Smith, author of “Tell Out, My Soul,” “Lord, for the Years,” “Sing a New Song,” and more than 400 other hymns, died in Cambridge, England, on August 12. He was 97.

Dudley-Smith was a Church of England bishop, serving as the suffragan, or assistant bishop, of Thetford in Norwich for 12 years before he retired in 1991. Prior to taking a position in leadership, he served as director of the Church Pastoral Aid Society.

He was always more widely known, however, for his hymns. Many Anglicans deeply cherished his words.

“These hymns restore our faith, not only in the gospel, but also in the action of singing that gospel together, with heart, and soul, and voice,” a retired English professor at the University of Durham wrote in 2006. “Dudley-Smith never lets us down. There are no weak lines, no approximate rhymes, no distortions of syntax, no fumbled metres … no bad hymns.”

Dudley-Smith’s most popular hymn, “Tell Out, My Soul,” has been published 190 times in Great Britain and is also popular in the US and elsewhere. It was first written in 1961, and by 1985, appeared in 42 percent of all contemporary hymnals, according to hymnary.org.

Ten of Dudley-Smith’s other songs have been published more than two dozen times. “Faithful Vigil Ended”—“Faithful vigil ended / watching waiting cease / Master, grant thy servant / his discharge in peace”—has appeared in 28 different hymnals. “Name of All Majesty,” written in 1979, appears in more than 70, including translations in French, Korean, and Chinese.

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A year after more than 400 members of a Christian sect starved to death in eastern Kenya’s Shakahola forest, a Kenyan task force is calling for policy regulations it hopes will allow the government to better balance religious liberty and human rights.

Paul Mackenzie, who led Shakahola’s Good News International Church, is still in custody awaiting the outcome of the case filed against him by the state. He and his associates have been charged with the death of 191 minors, and authorities believe the victims acted under direction from Mackenzie, an end times preacher who promised them heaven if they starved to death.

“The policy aims at strengthening the right for the use of freedom of religion and at same time to protect the public from potential harm arising from the practice of religion and belief,” the Religious Organizations Policy report stated in its introduction. “It ensures freedom of religion and belief is not used as an avenue to abuse human rights and dignity.”

Its most wide-reaching mandate would force all churches seeking to be legally registered with the government to first affiliate to existing denominations or umbrella groups. These groups include the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK), the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya (EAK), the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Kenya National Congress of Pentecostal Churches, the Kenya Coalition of Churches Alliance and Ministries, and the Organization of African Instituted Churches.

The current law requires churches to register with the Registrar of Societies but does not require them to affiliate with any recognized religious bodies.

Working with the umbrella groups “is a mechanism for self-regulation. It is a better ...

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Neville Mlambo, 65, a retired missionary, shakes his head. His United Church of Christ in Zimbabwe (UCCZ) church had educated some of the finest Black ministers, CEOs, bishops, and judges in the last 100 years when Western colonialism and the church landed together in Zimbabwe.

“Colonial church-owned schools were prestigious. They groomed the cream of Black army commanders or city mayors,” said Mlambo. “Twenty years ago, we would overflow with 1,000 students squeezing for a place to study at our mission boarding schools. Today, we hardly attract 350 in some schools.”

Historic church-run mission schools in Zimbabwe—affiliated with a range of traditions, including Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian, Dutch Reformed, Baptist, or Salvation Army—are now on the decline.

“They are losing money, students, and the next generation of congregants as more Black families troop to private secular schools,” he said.

Zimbabwe has one of Africa’s highest literacy rates: 97.1 percent of the population in urban areas are able to read and write. Its educational system has included a mix of free state schools, plus thousands of Christian seminaries, primary schools, high schools, and colleges. The Catholics, Anglicans, and American Methodists have vast tracts of lands in Zimbabwe and dominate ownership of missionary-led schools.

“Christian mission schools took off in the 1920s as the colonial project deepened along with a need to train clerks, teachers, nurses, or judges that served the colonial conquest. That story is unwinding today, fast,” says Edgar Shuwa, a theology lecturer at Rusitu Bible College, which is run by remnants of the American Baptist mission in east Zimbabwe.

There’s ...

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