Are We Ready to Kiss 2022 Goodbye Yet?
Religion News Roundup
In October, Cory Wall, youth pastor at Fairview Baptist Church, a Southern Baptist congregation in Greer, S.C., was placed on administrative leave after handing out "I (Heart) Hot Youth Pastors" stickers to his young teen students. His best defense is the fact that there ARE no hot youth pastors.
In June, three female abortion rights activists stripped to their underwear at the Lakewood megachurch in Houston to protest the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v Wade. Pastor Joel Osteen could prevent similar disruptions by simply having the whole congregation worship in their underwear every week.
Jerry Falwell Jr. - the former president of Liberty University whose creepy three-ways with his wife and a Florida pool boy led to shady financial entanglements and scandal, recounted in the Hulu documentary "God Forbid" - learned one lesson from it all: Never become business partners with someone you have watched having sex with your wife.
New York-based televangelist and gospel singer Juanita Bynum was ridiculed in September for charging $1,499.99 for a seven-session prayer training course. She could remedy this by vowing to throw in a five-session finance course by Brooklyn Pastor Lamor Whitehead, the "Bling Bishop" currently charged with bilking a parishioner out of $90,000.
Prosperity preacher Creflo Dollar, senior pastor of World Changers Church International in College Park, Ga., in June encouraged his flock to “throw away every book, every tape, and every video I ever did on the subject of tithing.” We expect he will soon tell his followers to replace those materials with even more expensive ones based on his new sermon series on giving: "The Widow's Mite - Too Much or Not Enough?"
At the first-ever Catholic Crypto Conference, Nov. 17, Mark Yusko, who along with his wife, Stacey, gifted Notre Dame $35 million in 2009, encouraged attendees “to begin your [crypto] journey or risk being left behind.” Watch for Jerry Jenkins to immediately copyright the slogan for his new end-times book, "The Beast in the Blockchains."
In a new study released in December by Pew Research, overall 39% of Americans say they believe “We are living in the end times” while 58% disagreed. An earlier survey of wedding guests in first-century Judea found only 50 percent of virgin lamp bearers were ready to go meet the Bridegroom.