Top of the Week: Investigation Reveals Explosive Allegations Against Former Florida Megachurch Pastor
Following are snippets of the top stories featured this past week on cn.mycharisma.com. We encourage you to visit the links to read the stories in full.
Celebration Church, a 12,000-member megachurch near Jacksonville, Florida, has released findings from an internal investigation into its founder, Pastor Stovall Weems, local media has reported.
According to news4jax.com, the report includes allegations of financial misconduct and fraud, among others. Weems, who resigned his position Monday night, denied the allegations in a statement provided to news4jax.com.
“I shall not and cannot be connected to any church in which the leadership abandons the clear biblical principles and scriptural qualifications for governance and oversight,” Weems letter of resignation stated.
Sean Feucht, a worship leader turned social activist, announced Wednesday afternoon he is leading a “Hold the Line” rally next month at the Walt Disney World complex in central Florida.
Feucht declared news of the May 16 rally just a couple weeks after hosting a similar event at The Walt Disney Company headquarters in Burbank, California. Hundreds of Christians and conservatives —including at least one current Disneyland cast member—participated in that rally.
The protests come as Florida has drawn national media attention over its Parental Rights in Education bill, which Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed into law in late March. The bill will go into effect July 1.
Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case in which a high school football coach was fired for silently praying on the field after games. Most of the Justices seemed favorable to Coach Kennedy’s arguments.
Liberty Counsel filed an amicus brief in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, in support of coach Joe Kennedy, an 18-year Marine veteran. On January 18, 2022, Liberty Counsel presented oral argument in a separate case, Shurtleff v. City of Boston. In that case, like in the Coach Kennedy case, the government argued that what otherwise appears to be private speech is government speech. Following the argument in Shurtleff, it appeared clear that the Justices were not sympathetic to the argument that the government could claim private speech is actually government speech and thereby censor it. Although not as clear in today’s argument involving Coach Kennedy, it appears the Justices were skeptical of the school district’s claim that Coach Kennedy’s speech was government speech.
Today, the High Court focused on two questions: (1) Whether a public school employee who says a brief, quiet prayer by himself while at school and visible to students is engaged in government speech that lacks any First Amendment protection; and (2) whether, assuming that such religious expression is private and protected by the free speech and free exercise clauses, the establishment clause nevertheless compels public schools to prohibit it.
The CEO of the Great American Channels company is on a mission to make GAC Media the “leader in family television,” and he’s taking significant steps to make that goal a reality.
After some families found the Hallmark Channel’s pro-LGBT shift to be disheartening, sister networks GAC Family and GAC Living are now poised to be major Hallmark competitors.
During an interview on Up Next with John Contratti, GAC Media CEO Bill Abbott laid out his plans to provide high-quality original content the whole family can enjoy.
The heartless medieval practice of castrating little boy singers in order to preserve their prepubescent voices was horrifying. A boy singer thus maimed was called a “castrato.” How, we ask ourselves, could society, even in the so-called Dark Ages, ever have condoned such heartless mutilations for music’s sake?
One may be tempted to believe a few random boys were kidnapped by soulless criminals who unmanned them for a small but malignant minority of unprincipled opera impresarios. Nothing could be further from the truth. By the early 18th century, as many as 4,000 boys a year were castrated in the hopes they would become the kind of “castrati” who commanded huge salaries in opera or, as unthinkable as it is, in church choirs.
Who, you may well ask, supplied these thousands of poor little boys? Who were their kidnappers? There was no need for kidnappers. Out of greed and a lust for celebrity, parents had their own sons castrated to “save” their voices from normal hormonal development. {eoa}
Follow breaking news like this on our new platform, CHARISMA PLUS.
