After exploring spirituality and realizing he needed a personal relationship with God, actor and comedian Russell Brand got baptized Sunday (April 28) in the River Thames. On social media, the 48-year-old podcaster described the experience as incredible, profound, and “literally overwhelming”—because he was under water.

“I felt changed, transitioned,” Brand said about being baptized. The ceremony had very “intimate and personal aspects,” he noted, and several “bizarre incidents” occurred that felt “serendipitous and laden.”

Brand, who recently sought advice about which Christian denomination to join, didn’t indicate which one he chose. But he said he’ll share more information in upcoming videos.

I got baptised!!!!

And… pic.twitter.com/c1JamCk49x

— Russell Brand (@rustyrockets) April 29, 2024

Russell Brand Is Baptized: ‘I’ve Made the Decision—for Myself’

Russell Brand, who admits to being a former “junkie,” said all the substances he’s tried in the past left him disappointed, unable to provide the tranquility, peace, and transcendence he was seeking. But now, Brand said, “Some new resource in me has switched on.” He added that after being baptized, he knows that “my resources are coming from somewhere else and someone else now.”

RELATED: ‘I Need a Personal Relationship With God’—Russell Brand Says Jesus Is ‘Becoming More Important’ to Him

This path of following Jesus is new to Brand, who acknowledged he’ll make mistakes. Hours after being baptized, he admitted he’d “already felt irritated,” noting he has three children, a job, and challenges and that he lives “in the world.”

Yet Brand added that he already feels “incredibly blessed, relieved, nourished, and held.” Spreading his newfound joy is now “part of my mission and my ministry and part of my service,” he said.

In his post-baptism video, Brand thanked all the social media followers who’ve “embraced me” and encouraged his faith journey with supportive comments. The actor said he even understands the “cynicism” some people have expressed about his transformation.

“I’ve made the decision—for myself,” he assured viewers, adding that he prays his baptism will be relevant to his family, especially his children. Brand said his wife is Catholic and has made her own faith decision.

Russell Brand’s Followers: Ditch the Tarot Cards

Hours before his baptism post, Russell Brand shared a video on Instagram asking for people’s opinions about tarot cards. Many Christians consider practices such as tarot and yoga “heresy,” he said, but the symbolism is helpful for him. Tarot “does serve as a tool for reflection and personal analysis,” said Brand.

Then he described something he’d just read on the Hallow meditation app. It was a reminder to give all your worries to God and focus on him, because he’s in charge. “What do you think about that?” Brand asked his social media followers.

Reagan Gray, a 26-year-old teacher in Little Rock, Arkansas, has been arrested and charged with sexual assault of a teenager. The alleged victim was a 15-year-old student at the youth group of Immanuel Baptist Church. 

At the time of the alleged abuse, which is said to have taken place in 2020 and 2021, Gray was teaching at Little Rock Christian Academy and worked as a volunteer for Immanuel Baptist’s student ministry.

The victim was not a student of Little Rock Christian Academy. Gray met the teen through Immanuel Baptist Church’s youth group and music ministry. 

Gray’s arrest comes amid an ongoing scandal centered on Immanuel Baptist Church’s handling of sexual abuse allegations. In March, Dr. Steven Smith resigned as pastor of the church, roughly three months after he disclosed to the congregation that its former assistant children’s ministry director, Patrick Stephen Miller, had been criminally convicted after allegedly assaulting two young girls at the church.

According to THV11, an arrest affidavit said that the parents of Gray’s alleged victim first learned of Gray’s inappropriate relationship with their child when they discovered a text thread between the teen and Gray on the teen’s phone in 2020. 

RELATED: SBC Pastor Discloses Years-Old Child Abuse Allegations Against a Former Church Staffer

The parents said that after telling Gray to stop communicating with their son, they reported Gray to Smith. Smith is said to have questioned Gray, who said that her relationship with the teen was not “physical.”

Gray was then reportedly removed as a volunteer from Immanuel Baptist’s student ministry and instructed to undergo counseling. She was subsequently reinstated as a volunteer for the student ministry. The police were not notified. 

The arrest affidavit said that when Smith was interviewed in 2024, he said that Gray revealed during a counseling session in the fall of 2023 that her relationship with the teen had been sexual in nature and that she had continued communicating with the teen via Snapchat following her confrontation with the teen’s parents.

RELATED: Church Staffer, Elementary School Volunteer Faces Felony Peeping Charges After Being Caught Placing Camera Under Women’s Skirts

In an interview with FBI investigators, the teen said that Gray sent him nude photos of herself on a daily basis and expected him to send nude pictures of himself in return. He also said that Gray performed oral sex on him but did not have intercourse with him so that he could “stay pure,” according to Mirror.

Pastor Greg Laurie urges church leaders and Christians to speak out against the antisemitism being demonstrated on college campuses throughout the country.

College students, along with other protestors, are demanding that their universities cut all financial ties with anyone does business with Israel. Pro-Palestine protestors have chanted “Death to America,” “Death to Jews,” and “Death to Israel.”

The Harvest Christian Fellowship lead pastor told ChurchLeaders that when it comes to what began with 100 students at Columbia University in New York City and has spread to Massachusetts, California, Tennessee, and Texas, it has “increasingly [become] clear these efforts are coordinated.”

RELATED: ‘Hatred of Jewish People’ Is a Sign of the End Times, Says Pastor Greg Laurie

Laurie believes that America is “repeating” the history of antisemitism that rose alongside the Nazis in Germany and resulted in the Jewish Holocaust.

According to Dani Dayan, the head of the Yad Vashem National Holocaust Museum in Israel, “The ongoing anti-Israel demonstrations at elite U.S. colleges and universities are exactly what happened in Germany in the 1920s, just years before Nazis took over the country.”

Many of the students protesting have “no idea” what they are supporting as they hold up signs and shout, “We are Hamas,” ”Gas the Jews,” and “Final Solution,” Laurie said. “[But] many of them do.”

And what’s “even more alarming,” he added, is “professors, who certainly know what they are doing, are joining these protests.”

Laurie explained that these protestors “fail to understand that the modern state of Israel was formed on the heels of the holocaust where 6 million Jewish men, women, and children were murdered by the Nazis.”

“They realized that they needed a homeland where they could live in peace and prosperity and raise their families,” he continued. “But also the Jewish community has had a continual presence in their land since the first kingdom of Israel, since King David. How could they be colonizers? They are indigenous people.”

RELATED: Sean Feucht, Eric Metaxas, and Russell Johnson Set To Lead ‘United for Israel March’ at Columbia University

Laurie argued, “God gave this land to Israel.”

He went on to ask where the protesters are for the more than 1,100 Jewish people who were “tortured, butchered, and some even beheaded” by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, along with the 250 hostages that were taken during the attacks.

He said, “Where are the protests for them? Where are the protests for citizens of 17 countries still held hostage? What about for the hundreds of thousands killed this year in Sudan?”

Having viewed unedited footage of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, ChurchLeaders verifies Laurie’s assessment of what took place. Hamas body camera footage also showed the aftermath of women and children being raped and the attackers parading hostages through the streets of Palestine while people cheered.

The day after the Oct. 7 attack, speaking at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, Laurie told the Jewish people that were gathered that day “that as evangelicals we stand with them, we are praying for them, and will do everything we can to help them.”

RELATED: ‘Is This Attack on Israel…A Fulfillment of Bible Prophecy?’—Pastor Greg Laurie Answers

Laurie added, “This is more important now than ever.”

“As a pastor, I will not stand by idly as this horror unfolds before our very eyes. We are living in a moment where history will judge us,” he said.

One of the great criticisms the church of Germany receives regarding the Holocaust is that “they did not speak out on behalf of the Jewish people,” Laurie said. “We cannot let this happen again.”

(RNS) — The legions of dudes who crowded into the Great Southern Bank Arena in Springfield, Missouri, for the recent Stronger Men’s Conference, sponsored by a Pentecostal megachurch, were treated to a monster truck, a boxing match, pyrotechnics and a standoff between a pair of celebrity pastors.

Women who attend James River Church’s women’s annual conference later this year, by contrast, will get what looks like a Holy Spirit Barbie party.

A promo for the men’s conference begins with images of a roaring motorcycle, a wrestling match and a shouting preacher pacing across the stage like a lion, urging men to get ready to fight. The promo for the women’s video begins with the image of a pink record player, followed by the voice of the late televangelist Kathryn Kuhlman, urging women to give their worship to God — then breaks to scenes of joyful women dressed in stylish pink, dancing with joy as balloons and confetti fall from the sky.

RELATED: ‘I Take Full Responsibility’—John Lindell Apologizes for Inviting Mark Driscoll and Alex Magala to Stronger Men’s Conference

The two conferences reveal both the showmanship of charismatic megachurch worship and the rival messages given to men and women. Men are warriors filled with fire and vinegar, while women are icons of femininity — dressed to the nines and concerned with building a happy home for their husbands.

The James River Stronger Men’s Conference made national headlines recently and launched viral videos over the inclusion of an act by Alex Magala, an acrobat and sword swallower who has appeared on “America’s Got Talent” and has had a side hustle as a dancer at clubs.

After Magala’s performance at the conference, Mark Driscoll, the former pastor of Seattle’s Mars Hill Church who has reinvented himself as a Pentecostal preacher in Arizona, denounced Magala from the stage, saying his performance was homoerotic and a sign of pagan worship and a “Jezebel spirit.” (Jezebel is the name of a biblical queen and the enemy of the prophet Elijah whose name is often invoked to denounce someone as a temptress.)

In response, James River pastor John Lindell kicked Driscoll off the stage.

“You are done,” Lindell said. The two later appeared to mend fences during the conference but any truce was short-lived, with the church sending the media links to a video of Lindell calling Driscoll to repent. As of Wednesday (April 24), the link is no longer public but clips of the call to repentance are still posted on YouTube.com.

A spokesperson for the church did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

RELATED: ‘It’s Called Go-Go Dancing’—Alex Magala Addresses Accusation He Is a ‘Stripper’; James River Church Says They Didn’t Know

The dust-up between Lindell and Driscoll had all the earmarks of a pro-wrestling-style feud, leading to speculation that it had been staged — an accusation fueled by Driscoll promoting his book, “New Days, Old Demons,” which warns that an “evil Jezebel spirit is destroying America,” after the conference.

Driscoll, who once paid his way onto the New York Times bestseller list and crashed a John MacArthur conference to promote another of his books, is known for his preaching about hypermasculinity and his willingness to criticize fellow pastors.

Scholar and author Jessica Johnson is among those who are skeptical of the controversy over Driscoll’s appearance at the Stronger Men’s Conference.

“Knowing that Driscoll is the promotional master that he is, it just had very much a wrestling kind of feel to it — where the whole thing was staged,” said Johnson, author of “Biblical Porn,” a study of Driscoll’s former evangelical empire at the now-defunct Mars Hill Church in Seattle.

Johnson said the gendered conferences at James River Church reflect a theology where men are aggressive and in charge and women are both joyful and submissive. She found the promo for the women more disturbing than the spectacle of the men’s conference because it sent the message that women’s only role is to worship and be female — while leaving all the leadership to the men.

“I mean, what were these women doing other than dancing?” she said.

(RNS) — One of the largest Catholic health care systems in the U.S. will likely have to pay 33,000 of its Washington state employees more than $200 million after a Seattle jury found on April 18 that the system had illegally underpaid workers for years by rounding down their compensated hours and denying meal breaks that were nonetheless deducted from their time sheets.

The verdict, the latest in a series of legal troubles for Providence Health & Services, is part of a broader pattern of Catholic hospitals being accused of undermining their mission by shortchanging patients and staff.

Two lead plaintiffs, a certified nursing assistant and an ultrasound tech, filed the class-action suit in 2021 against Providence, which operates 51 hospitals throughout the western U.S.

RELATED: Bishops Discourage Catholic Health Care Groups From Performing Gender-Affirming Care

The jury awarded Providence hourly employees in Washington about $98 million in damages, but King County Superior Court Judge Averil Rothrock, finding that the violations were willful, doubled the total, following state law, with interest.

Providence did not respond to multiple requests for comment by Religion News Service, but in an emailed statement to The Seattle Times and Fierce Healthcare, the health system indicated that it intends to appeal the decision.

Monsignor Robert Siler, the episcopal vicar and chancellor in the Diocese of Yakima, told RNS by email that the diocese was limiting its comments due to Providence’s appeal but said that “overall we believe Providence cares deeply for its employees” and noted that Providence’s employees benefit from “robust union representation.”

“Given the many challenges facing Catholic health care, we pray for a just outcome, and a continued focus by both labor and management on Providence’s mission to serve everyone, especially the poor and vulnerable,” Siler wrote.

The Archdiocese of Seattle and the Diocese of Spokane did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The president of SEIU Healthcare 1199NW, a union representing 8,000 health care workers at Swedish Providence, Kadlec Regional Medical Center and Providence St. Peter Hospital, told RNS in an emailed statement that the union is “elated by the legal victory achieved by these workers.”

While the union was not involved in bringing the class-action suit, Jane Hopkins, the president and a registered nurse, said that the union has fought for recent laws on overtime, breaks and staffing because “we’ve watched multibillion-dollar healthcare corporations like Providence prioritize profits above the well-being of their workers.”

Hopkins said the class-action suit “demonstrates the need for persistent enforcement.”

Providence has also faced scrutiny from attorneys general in Washington and Oregon around its charity care practices.

In February, the system agreed to repay or forgive about $158 million in medical bills to nearly 100,000 patients who likely qualified for free or reduced-cost charity care. Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson had filed the suit two years ago alleging that “Providence trained staff to aggressively ask for payment from patients who were likely eligible for financial assistance, or simply billed them without determining if they qualified.”

Ferguson also said that “In thousands of cases, Providence knowingly sent low-income patients — including Medicaid enrollees — to debt collectors.”

In September 2022, The New York Times found that Providence had relied on consulting firm McKinsey & Co. to create an aggressive strategy to press patients, even those with very low incomes who ought to have qualified for financial aid, to pay their medical bills, sometimes asking them to pay at the bedside and sending repeated bills before sending the cases to collections, resulting in drastic financial consequences such as depriving the patients of heat in their homes.

In Oregon, where Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum is investigating the health system’s charity care practices, she asked a state judge to force Providence to turn over documents in her investigation, which the health care system has called “highly burdensome.”

Shortly after last week’s wage violation verdict, about 500 technicians represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union 3000 at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane began a strike scheduled to last more than a week because of what the union says are unfair labor practices during contract negotiations.

(RNS) — Angelique Desiree Carney Howse has many titles: Baptist minister, health care consultant, student advocate.

Come May 11, when she graduates from the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, she will receive another title: Doctor. “I’m relieved because this time last year I did not know if I was going to be able to finish,” said Howse, the president of ITC’s Student Christian League. “I did not know if the school was going to exist.”

ITC, a consortium of seminaries in Atlanta known for its decades of educating Black ministers, is one of several faith-based historically Black colleges and universities that have been struggling with accreditation and other challenges, even as other HBCUs are seeing increases in enrollment and infusions of donations.

RELATED: Dr. Tony Evans on Why We Need Black History Month: ‘Tolerance Is Still a Far Cry From Reconciliation’

Howse credited the Rev. Maisha Handy, ITC’s interim president since September, with improving the center since it declared “financial exigency” last April, saying it would reduce faculty, suspend programs and restructure operations.

“Where we were this time last year, we’ve made a complete 180,” Howse said. “For sure, interim President Handy has done the impossible, made a way out of no way completely. We were in dire financial straits.” (Handy could not be reached immediately for an interview.)

ITC is not out of the woods. The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, an accrediting agency, has placed the center on probation, citing governance and financial concerns.

The agency has placed Virginia Union University — home of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology — on probation for similar reasons, and St. Augustine’s University in North Carolina is awaiting arbitration proceedings after the commission determined its accreditation should be terminated.

“During our appeals process, they did not allow us to show any new evidence,” said Marcus Burgess, interim president of SAU, who took on the role after SACSCOC’s ruling and has worked to bring the school closer to compliance, “rightsizing” the budget and making faculty and staff cuts before Christmas and again earlier this year.

Virginia Union University officials did not respond to a request for comment about its accreditation status. In a Frequently Asked Questions page on its website, the school expressed confidence in addressing the requests of the accrediting body.

RELATED: For Black ‘Nones’ Who Leave Religion, What’s Next?

“The University is continuing to expand the Business Office, strengthening our internal fiscal
infrastructure to accommodate the University’s growth,” said the school, which dates to 1865. “This includes streamlining processes and reducing the time it takes to accomplish transactions.”

Accreditation questions can harm a school’s prospects even as it fights its way to solvency. ITC has seen a significant drop in its enrollment over the last decade. The Association of Theological Schools, ITC’s second accrediting body, which lists the school in good standing, reports it had 448 students in the 2003-04 year, compared with 61 in 2023-24.

SAU, founded in 1867 by the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina, saw decreases in enrollment, leaving it with about 750 students.

St. Augustine’s University Day is celebrated at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, Va., on April 14, 2024. (Photo courtesy of St. Augustine’s University)

“From fall to spring we probably lost about 200 students,” Burgess said. The school is known for being the childhood home of Sarah and A. Elizabeth Delany, authors of the bestseller “Having Our Say,” whose father, Henry Beard Delany, was one of the first Black bishops consecrated in the Episcopal Church.

On April 1, Burgess shifted the school to remote classes. “I had to cut my costs so I went remote to try to stop the bleeding,” he said. “We’re seeking a little over $5 million or better to help us with the fight to pay for legal fees, to help shore up payrolls, to get things back in order.”

As of mid-April, Burgess said the school had received $400,000 in cash and additional in-kind donations that brought the total to about $1 million.