Jinger Duggar Vuolo and her husband, Jeremy Vuolo, offered some critiques of the purity movement in the fifth episode of their new podcast. The couple agreed that purity culture tended to be motivated by fear, was rules-based, downplayed physical attraction, and encouraged too much parental involvement at the beginning of a relationship.

“I think a lot of girls overreacted,” said Jinger when she and Jeremy were discussing a concern of the purity movement that people were giving pieces of their hearts away to romantic partners and had barely anything left to offer their future spouses.

She said some women were “so concerned with not wanting to talk to guys because they were going to give pieces of their heart away to them…It’s really messed up and warped because that is not how it works.”

Jinger and Jeremy Vuolo: Where Purity Culture Was ‘Wrong’

Jinger Duggar Vuolo is the sixth child of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, whose family was featured in TLC’s reality show, “19 Kids and Counting,” and later, TLC’s “Counting On.” The former show was canceled in 2015 after allegations broke that Jim Bob and Michelle’s oldest child, Josh, had molested five girls, including four of his sisters. “Counting On” was canceled in June 2021 after Josh Duggar was arrested and charged with receiving and possessing child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

In December 2021, a jury found Josh Duggar guilty on one count of receiving child pornography and one count of possessing child pornography. In May 2022, Duggar was sentenced to 12 years and seven months in prison. 

In February 2023, Jinger spoke to ChurchLeaders about her new memoir, “Becoming Free Indeed: My Story of Disentangling Faith from Fear.” She explained how she came to learn about the grace of Jesus, which contrasted with how God had been presented through the teachings of Bill Gothard and his Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP). Gothard and the Duggar family were the subject of the 2023 Prime Video docuseries, “Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets,” which Jinger chose not to participate in.

Jeremy began the conversation on “The Jinger & Jeremy Podcast” by explaining what “purity culture” is. The term generally refers to an evangelical movement that took place in the 1990s and which, among other ideas, emphasized not having sex before marriage and promoted courtship over dating.

According to the late Dr. Timothy Keller, “The teaching went far beyond the Christian sex ethic to argue that you should not ‘date’ or even kiss someone unless you were sure you were going to marry them. Sexual thoughts, most physical contact, and sex outside marriage were elevated to ‘unforgivable sins.’”

Joshua Harris’s book, “I Kissed Dating Goodbye,” is one of the most well-known books from that time period. Harris has since discontinued publication of the book and is no longer a Christian. 

RELATED: Watch Josh Harris’s Documentary on the Flaws in His Most Famous Book

Both Jeremy and Jinger experienced the impact of purity culture, although they said that Jinger’s experience was “more intense” than Jeremy’s.

Gateway Church is dealing with more sexual assault allegations, this time from someone who was allegedly victimized as a teen by a fellow youth group member. A lawsuit filed Aug. 14 by former “devout and active members of the church” names both the Dallas-area megachurch and Gabriel Reece Snyder, now 25, as defendants.

According to the lawsuit, starting in 2016, Snyder (then 17) groomed and assaulted the plaintiffs’ daughter (then 13) at Gateway youth group meetings. Snyder, who is currently in jail for an unrelated sexual assault of a child, hasn’t been criminally charged in this new case.

Parents of the alleged victim, who is now an adult, are requesting a jury trial. They are seeking monetary damages of more than $1 million.

In June, Gateway founder and senior pastor Robert Morris resigned amid a sexual abuse scandal. Two months earlier, the church settled a lawsuit involving the 2018 sexual abuse of a minor. (Morris was not involved with that case.)

New Lawsuit Alleges Abuse Within Gateway Youth Group

The new lawsuit alleges that Snyder groomed the plaintiffs’ daughter while both teens attended Gateway Church youth group, held at The King’s University in Southlake. About 200 participants from grades six through 12 attended the weekly Wednesday-night meetings on campus.

RELATED: ‘In the Midst of Navigating Robert Morris’ Resignation,’ Gateway Church Cancels Annual Conference

Parents of the alleged victim accuse Gateway of providing “little or no supervision” by the church’s “youth counselors, pastors, leaders, chaperones, or volunteers.” Their lawsuit states that Snyder “cynically used the biblical beliefs and teachings of Defendant Gateway’s pastor and ministers to convince 13-year-old [victim] that it was the will of God, and the leaders of Defendant Gateway, that she submit to him because he was a male and she was a female.”

Snyder allegedly took the girl “into the darkness outside” on the campus to assault her. Although surveillance cameras were present near those areas, “nobody from Defendant Gateway ever came to [victim]’s aid,” the lawsuit alleges. The girl’s parents indicate that she was abused from December 2016 through February 2017, by which time Snyder had turned 18.

More Details From New Lawsuit Against Gateway

The plaintiffs also claim that Gateway formed a “special” or “confidential” relationship with them, as “devout and active members” of the church. They allege that Gateway breached that relationship, inflicting emotional damage through fraud.

A former pastor in Lexington, Kentucky, has been indicted by a grand jury with seven felony charges related to his alleged sex crimes against a 15-year-old girl. Zachary King, formerly an executive pastor at LexCity Church, was first arrested in July. 

King, 47, reportedly resigned from the church shortly before his arrest, when he was confronted by members of the congregation. 

According to the arrest report, King admitted to having “sexual intercourse with the minor starting at age 15 in January 2023, continuing until April 2024.” 

King reportedly also specified that the abuse took place “in the minor’s home, at his residence, and at the church where he was a former pastor.”

RELATED: Man Arrested After Reportedly Confessing to Pastor That He Molested a 4-Year-Old

King also confessed to communicating with the child via WhatsApp and SnapChat, arranging meetups and receiving explicit photographs from the girl. He further said that he would pick the child up from her home and drive her up the road to have sex in his car. 

Following King’s arrest in July, King’s attorney requested that his bond be set at $50,000, but the judge set the former pastor’s bond at $250,000.

Attorney General Russell Coleman announced on Aug. 15 that investigations by the Attorney General’s Department of Criminal Investigations (DCI) and Special Prosecutions Unit resulted in a grand jury bringing seven charges against King. 

The charges include first degree rape, first degree sodomy, unlawful use of electronic means to induce a minor to engage in a sexual or prohibited activity, unlawful transaction with a minor with a victim under 18, third degree rape, third degree sodomy, and first degree sexual abuse.

RELATED: Texas Church Discloses ‘Inappropriate and Hurtful’ Actions That Led to Pastor’s Resignation; Elders Revise Plan for Interim Leadership

Shortly after news of King’s arrest broke, LexCity church announced that it would be closing permanently amid ongoing financial challenges, which had been compounded by the scandal surrounding King.

(RNS) — In mid-July, Lucas Oil Stadium, home of the Indianapolis Colts, was transformed into a place of worship as more than 50,000 Catholics gathered for the National Eucharistic Congress.

The stadium full of young people, nuns in an array of habits and priests in black and brown faced an altar adorned with four candlesticks and a golden monstrance displaying a consecrated host for Eucharistic adoration.

Then there were the Catholic bishops and other worshippers in the stands, hands raised in worship like Pentecostals, singing “How Great Is Our God,” a megachurch-style worship anthem, as a church rock band played on stage. That song was one of several Protestant-style worship songs sung at the Eucharistic Congress. Others included “Way Maker,” Build My Life,” “Come to the Altar” and “Praise,” the latest hit from Elevation, one of the so-called Big Four megachurches that dominate the worship music charts.

The presence of these songs is one more sign of the triumph of the Big Four churches, whose charismatic-tinged anthems can be found in Christian gatherings of all kinds — from megachurch stages and the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention to youth camps and Eucharistic worship services on Catholic college campuses. But the songs also reveal a new kind of ecumenical liturgical movement — built on friendship, songs and shared experience rather than formal denominational cooperation.

One of the clearest examples of this ecumenical liturgical movement came during the COVID-19 pandemic, when hundreds of virtual choirs from different Christian traditions around the world all recorded versions of “The Blessing,” a hit worship song from Elevation, said worship scholars Sarah Kathleen Johnson and Anneli Loepp Thiessen.

In a 2023 article for the academic journal Worship, Johnson and Thiessen pointed out that the song had been recorded more than 100 times — by Catholics in Singapore, Lutherans in Washington state, an ecumenical virtual choir in Pittsburgh — who all found common meaning in the song.

Johnson, an assistant professor of liturgy and pastoral theology at St. Paul University in Ottawa, Ontario, said she’s been encountering songs like “The Blessing” in unexpected places for a decade — which changed the way she thought about these songs.

These songs, she thought, might be a sign that Christians who are often divided have more in common than they realize. They are singing with more people than they know, she said.

“That led me to wonder, how can this shared music help Christians who struggle to recognize each other, enter into a new kind of relationship through these shared worship practices,” she said.

Thiessen, a doctoral candidate at the University of Ottawa who worked with Johnson on a new Mennonite hymnal committee, said Christians have always borrowed songs from one another. And they may not be aware of where those songs come from, she said.

Both Johnson and Thiessen said that in a time when people are divided, even in churches, the ecumenical power of worship songs gives them hope.

(RNS) — A Baptist missions organization has received a $1 million donation from a Virginia megachurch, boosting its efforts to help girls in Africa.

Lott Carey, a predominantly Black organization long known as the Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Society, has traditionally had fundraisers as part of its annual gathering, which this year occurred from Monday through Thursday (Aug. 12-15) in Memphis, Tennessee.

The Rev. Gina Stewart, Lott Carey president, had announced beforehand she hoped to raise $1 million on the last night of the convention. But Alfred Street Baptist Church, a historic Black church in Alexandria, Virginia, decided to raise money ahead of that occasion.

Its pastor, the Rev. Howard-John Wesley, told Religion News Service he learned during a church trip to Ghana arranged by the Rev. Emmett Dunn, Lott Carey’s executive secretary-treasurer, about the plight of girls caught up in the Trokosi tradition in that country: Girls are turned over to priests at religious shrines for forced labor and ritual, sexual servitude as payment for the sins of their relatives. Although Ghana criminalized forced labor in 1998, Trokosi priests have continued to practice their servitude system “unchallenged” by law enforcement, according to child rights experts.

“It was our trip to Ghana that exposed us to the slave trade industry that you wouldn’t believe still existed in 2024,” Wesley said. “We really felt like God gave us an opportunity to make a difference in freeing some of these young ladies.”

The money will be used to support the ministry of the Ghana Baptist Convention, one of the largest denominations in Ghana, to rescue young girls whose families have sold them into the long-established system opposed by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. The ministry works to rehabilitate the girls, teaching them at a vocational training center that aims to give them skills to allow them to reintegrate into society.

Stewart, the senior pastor of Christ Missionary Baptist Church in Memphis, said she too learned about Trokosi’s mistreatment of the girls during a trip to Africa.

“My journey to Liberia and Ghana with Lott Carey in 2022 was life-changing,” Stewart said in a statement. “Shortly thereafter, Rev. Dunn led a trip to Ghana with 100 Alfred Street members, and they too were blessed by the beauty of Ghana and shaken by the horrors of the dehumanizing indentured servitude known as the Trokosi tradition and vowed to make a difference.”

The $1 million donation is rare for Lott Carey, which has an operational budget of $2.5 million. It received an equal sum from Fountain Baptist Church in Summit, New Jersey, for relief efforts related to Hurricane Katrina.

The donation sum is also not the first for Alfred Street, which gave $1 million to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2015 and donated the same amount to Jackson State University, a historically Black institution in Mississippi, to help students and officials as they dealt with a crisis in 2022 after high levels of lead were found in its water.

About 950 people attended the Lott Carey meeting, including about 20 people from the Virginia church whose trips to the Memphis gathering were subsidized by the church. Alfred Street has about 2,000 people in attendance in person on Sundays and some 20,000 who watch online each week.

Wesley said his church raised the money through a 40-day fast in 2023 when members and supporters were asked to set aside daily devotional time and give up favorite foods, drinks and habits and use the money they would have spent on them for a donation.