Jesus told us that He came so that we would have “life to the fullest” (John 10:10). If that was Jesus’ goal while He was on Earth, don’t you think that should be a goal of the church?

On an annual basis, God’s Pit Crew, a nation-wide crisis response team, reaches out and blesses the Church of God Smoky Mountain Children’s Home. The organization often sends a team of women and men to renovate cottages, repair broken equipment, and enhance the campus buildings. Last year 19 women and men converged on the campus and transformed an empty facility into a place of respite.

As selection chair for the 2016 Lausanne Young Leaders Gathering (YLG2016), The Mission Society’s Rev. Richard Coleman facilitated a process to identify some of the most influential evangelicals in the world under the age of 40. Coleman spearheaded a two-year review of thousands of nominations and selected nearly 1,000 emerging young leaders from 150 countries to attend the gathering.

The somber facts delineated in the State Department’s 2015 International Religious Freedom (IRF) Report, released this week, are not reflected in the Obama Administration’s foreign policy actions and priorities.

Facing what the Los Angeles Times called “intense opposition from religious colleges in California,” state Sen. Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens) has removed a provision that would have stripped those schools of their religious liberty protections and made it easier for LGBT students to sue for “discrimination.”

Items debated by the General Council of the Church of God, as well as resolutions, were recently adopted at the 76th International General Assembly in Nashville, Tennessee.

As a people of faith, many followers of Christ would love to see prayer become part of our schools in America again. But I would suggest we first bring prayer back into the churches of America. The vast majority of churches in America give more time in their worship services to promoting their next event than they give to practicing prayer.

Workers supported by Gospel for Asia (GFA) are distributing supplies, including food, mosquito netting, hygiene products and blankets, to villagers fleeing widespread monsoon flooding across certain parts of Asia. The monsoons have killed more than 42 people and driven millions more from their homes in Myanmar, Bangladesh, Nepal and India.

A couple years ago, I spent several hours with a group of young pastors. It was a cross representation of church planters and pastors of established churches—healthy churches and unhealthy; growing, plateauing and declining.