https://www.christianpost.com/voices/prayer-heaven-finding-god-in-your-most-desperate-hour.html
Monday, May 18, 2026
Three Baptist Pastors Slaughtered.
Three Baptist pastors killed in Manipur ambush after peace conference.
Vehicles carrying Baptist church leaders stand along a roadside in Manipur, India, after an ambush on May 13, 2026, killed three pastors returning from a peace conference focused on reconciliation between tribal Christian communities in the conflict-hit northeastern state. Social mediaThree Baptist pastors were shot dead in an ambush in India’s northeastern state of Manipur on Wednesday, May 13, while traveling home from an interchurch peace conference focused on easing tensions between tribal Christian communities in the conflict-hit state. At least five others were wounded.
By nightfall, condemnations had arrived from India’s major Christian bodies, regional governments, and community organizations across the Northeast, while the question of who carried out the attack remained bitterly contested.
The victims were senior leaders of the Thadou Baptist Association India (TBAI), a Baptist denomination rooted in the Thadou-Kuki community of Manipur. They had attended the United Baptist Convention Assembly in Churachandpur, a town in Manipur’s southern hill district also known as Lamka, and were traveling back to Kangpokpi, roughly 60 miles north, when gunmen ambushed their convoy between the villages of Kotzim and Kotlen along the Imphal-Tamenglong highway at around 10:25 a.m.
The killings struck at ongoing efforts by Christian leaders to reduce tensions between the Kuki-Zo and Naga communities, both largely Christian tribal populations whose relations have deteriorated in recent months amid Manipur’s wider ethnic conflict. One of those killed, Rev. Dr. Vumthang Sitlhou, had emerged as a prominent advocate for reconciliation between the communities. CP.
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Welcoming and Nurturing New Believers.
Welcoming and Nurturing New Believers.
18 May 2026
The responsibility for nurturing new believers does not rest with one or two designated church leaders or in any particular church structure. It rests with all of us.
Ephesians 1. NIV.
Thanksgiving and Prayer:
15) For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all God’s people, 16) I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. 17) I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. 18) I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, 19) and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength 20) he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, 21) far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. 22) And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, 23) which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.
Sunday, May 17, 2026
Why, Why Oh Why Do We Allow Ourselves Annual Abasement By The Many Europeans Who Hate Us So Very Much?
One point? - Last? - Pah!
Okay, the song was utter rubbish but that has never stopped fifth rate groups and third rate winners from taking the title. Go on. You know I'm being totally fair.
Time to quit the competition and if the powers that be leave us up for annual humiliation - then vote with our feet. Don't bother watching.
Shame really! In its heyday, 40+ years ago, it was actually quite amusing and watchable.
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Armenia: Cultural Genocide.
Azerbaijan's demolishing of Stepanakert Cathedral is cultural genocide of Christian Armenia.
A priest stands in front of a church in Stepanakert on September 27, 2023. Armenia said on Sept. 27, 2023, that 42,500 refugees have arrived from Nagorno-Karabakh since Azerbaijan's lightning offensive, representing a third of the separatist ethnic Armenian enclave's population. | SIRANUSH SARGSYAN/AFP via Getty Images
CP.
History has taught us that genocide does not end with the removal of a people. It ends with the removal of their memory. In the heart of the South Caucasus, a silent erasure is unfolding.
While the geopolitical maps of the region were redrawn following the ethnic cleansing of more than 120,000 Armenians from their ancestral homeland of Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) by Azerbaijan, a secondary, more insidious Azeri campaign is reaching new heights. The latest casualty in this war of attrition is the Stepanakert Cathedral, a sacred landmark and a symbol of Armenian life in Artsakh. Recent satellite imagery and reports indicate the systematic dismantling of this holy site, a move that signifies not just the end of a building, but the deliberate deletion of an entire civilization’s existence.
National Repentance.
Pastor Gary Hamrick to Call for National Repentance at Prayer Event Ahead of America’s 250th Anniversary.
As America approaches its 250th anniversary, Pastor Gary Hamrick is urging national repentance at the "Rededicate 250" event, emphasizing that turning to God through Jesus Christ is the only hope for the nation's soul.
Updated May 15, 2026. Crosswalk.
Rededicate 250: Pastor Gary Hamrick to call for national repentance, rebuke 'lies of gender confusion, marriage redefinition.'
An undated photo of Pastor Gary Hamrick teaching at Cornerstone Chapel in Leesburg, Virginia. | Courtesy Cornerstone Chapel
As thousands prepare to gather at the National Mall on Sunday to pray for the nation ahead of America’s 250th anniversary celebrations, Cornerstone Chapel Senior Pastor Gary Hamrick is calling for national repentance and a return to the God of the Bible.
Hamrick, who is one of over a dozen pastors set to speak at “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving” on May 17, says his message to the nation is the same as that of the Apostle Peter at the dawn of the Christian era.
“Rededication begins with repentance,” Hamrick told The Christian Post. “Acts 3:19 says, ‘Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord.’ We must turn from our sin and turn to God and stand upon the solid rock of Jesus Christ, because He is the only hope for the soul of our nation. Jesus is always the answer.”
While the “Rededicate 250” event is expected to mark the nation’s largest religious gathering in more than 50 years, Hamrick expressed concern that despite a rich heritage of religious freedom, the country has drifted from its founding principles when it comes to issues like abortion, marriage and gender identity.
“We have given in to the lies of gender confusion and marriage redefinition, we have stripped parents of the right to raise their own children according to their values, and we have granted the environment more protection than babies in the womb,” he said. “We must safeguard the freedom to worship the Lord, live fearlessly for Jesus in the public square, and love people enough to speak truth against the destructive and demonic ideologies of our day.”
Part of that, said Hamrick, is energizing the Church to be both courageous and engaged when Christian principles are being sidelined by the culture.
“The presence of the Church and the power of the Holy Spirit are the only two forces restraining evil in our world,” he said. “Pastors in the pulpits must be courageous, and Christians in the pews must be engaged so that we can help others understand that they can be transformed by the person and power of Jesus Christ.”
“God has blessed this nation and churches can serve the nation when they fulfill their sacred duty of honoring God with His truth, praying for our country, and standing strong in the public square with truth and love,” he added.
Hamrick will join a speaker lineup that includes House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and several members of the Trump administration, along with megachurch pastors including First Baptist Dallas Pastor Robert Jeffress, Pastor Jack Graham of the Texas-based Prestonwood Baptist Church, Pastor Jentezen Franklin of the Georgia-based Free Chapel, Pastor Jonathan Pokluda of the Texas-based Harris Creek Baptist Church, and National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference President the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez.
The all-day event, which is free and open to all Americans, bills itself as “a historic gathering" that will feature Scripture, testimony, prayer and "rededication of our country as One Nation to God.” Those unable to attend can access a livestream through partner churches, ministries and organizations.
Hamrick said now more than ever, Evangelical and non-Evangelical pastors alike must boldly lead their congregations amid a rise in anti-Christian worldviews.
“Pastors must fear God more than they fear man,” he said. “Truth is offensive to a world that doesn’t want to hear it, but if we love people enough, we will tell them the truth. It’s not up to us how they respond. We let God sort that out. We must engage our world, promote biblical values, speak the truth, and tell people about Jesus wherever and whenever we can.” CP.
Saturday, May 16, 2026
Bless You All!
World Cup 2026 mission campaign aims to mobilise 10,000 churches
Evangelism and discipleship ministry Cru is hoping to mobilise 10,000 churches to spread the gospel during this summer’s World Cup taking place in the US, Canada and Mexico. CT.
One of Many Reasons Why This Blogger Supports Reform UK.
Christian Reform UK voters 'want their country back'.
Following Reform's staggering performance at last week’s local elections, one of its councillors has suggested that many Christians voted for the party “because they want their country back”.
The election results saw Reform go from almost nothing to over 1,400 council seats. Between them Labour and the Conservatives lost over 2,000 seats, with around three quarters of them being Labour. The Liberal Democrats gained 155 seats, while the Greens won 441 seats. Their performance in Scotland was particularly noteworthy, putting them on a par with Labour.
Speaking to Premier Christian News, Stephen Reed, deputy leader of Derbyshire County Council said that "a lot of Christians [were] motivated to stand for election because they want their country back, they want Christian values back".
Reed blamed the political establishment for their own failure, saying they had become “too woke and too progressive”.
“It’s encouraging to see people are wanting change. A lot of people are voting for Reform, it’s good to see we’re having a move back towards the values of family, community and country. That’s what Reform stands for," he said.
Reform leader Nigel Farage has previously suggested there is a strong disconnect between church leaders and ordinary believers when it comes to support for his party, particularly in the Church of England.
Last year the Bishop of Oxford wrote an open letter to Farage criticising him for attempting “to politicise the questions of migration and asylum by deliberately increasing fear of the stranger in our communities”.
Farage has dismissed such the concerns of some in the church, saying they were “out of touch, perhaps with their own flock”.
For his part, Reed, said there was no contradiction between Christian teaching and Reform’s plans, particularly on immigration.
“Yes, you welcome your neighbour. But all of the teachings of Jesus point to what we do as individuals, not corporately as a nation. He’s not speaking to governments. Jesus said: ‘Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and give to God what is God’s’," he said.
He added, “Charity starts at home. Before we can help others, we need to look after ourselves. We need to fix the issues with homelessness, deprivation and poverty that we have in our own society, before we help other people." CT.
The New York Times - Not A Paper That Is Easy For Normal People To Like.
The New York Times.The anti-Jewish fever dream of
We’re living through a throwback to murderous beliefs from before the age of reason
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It’s now clear that we are living through a civilisational emergency. Just as the Palestinian Arabs tried to bring about the destruction of Israel in the attacks on October 7, 2023, so the Islamic world has deployed the cultural apparatus of the West to destroy the Jews.
The spurious distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is no longer even being deployed as a fig-leaf. Attacks on Jews are out of control in both Britain and America.
In London, such attacks are now taking place almost daily. In New York last week, a mob of Islamists and leftists besieged Park East synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side; this week, another such mob set upon Jews outside a synagogue in Brooklyn.
Anti-Zionism, with its incendiary lies about Israel’s behaviour designed to paint it as a unique menace and turn it into the pariah of the world, has been further weaponised to unleash something even darker.
We are witnessing a reversion to primitive, pre-modern forms of Jew-hatred.
The New York Times this week published a 4,000-word article by Nicholas Kristof headlined “The silence that meets the rape of Palestinians,” in which Kristof accused Israel of training dogs to rape Palestinian Arab prisoners.
This grotesque assertion was held to exemplify Kristof’s claim of systematic sexual violence “against men, women and even children by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards”.
The allegation that dogs were used to rape prisoners, said by experts to be anatomically impossible, is as ridiculous as it is obscene.
Tellingly, it combines certain hallmarks of the Palestinian Arab mindset — the belief that dogs are filthy, that Jews are also filthy, and the habitual and false projection onto the Israelis of crimes that the Palestinian Arabs themselves commit against them.
Indeed, Kristof has drawn upon precisely this poisonous Palestinian thinking.
The “dog rape” claim has been pushed since 2024 by the Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. Kristof treats this source as credible. It’s anything but.
It’s previously claimed that the Israel Defence Forces harvested the organs of Palestinian corpses, another disgusting fantasy drawn from the depths of the deranged Palestinian mind.
The Israelis have listed the group’s founder, Ramy Abdu, as a Hamas operative. The day after the October 7 slaughter and kidnapping of 1,200 Israeli innocents, Abdu posted on X that the perpetrators were “knightly heroes who forged for us a pure glory untainted by the mud”.
Kristof produced not one shred of evidence for his claims. His sources were either anonymous or belonged to the echo chamber advocating the mass murder of Jews and the destruction of Israel.
He quoted terrorism supporters whose own claims of abuse had changed over time. Honest Reporting noted that Sami al Sai, introduced by Kristof as a “freelance journalist,” has a long record of celebrating terrorists on social media and was jailed twice for incitement. The claims he made to Kristof about his alleged abuse differed in key details from the story he fed the Israeli “human rights” group B’Tselem last year.
More seriously still, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has accused Kristof of misrepresenting his words so that he was made to appear falsely as validating these allegations.
In short, the article was a nauseating travesty. But this wasn’t merely recycled Hamas propaganda demonising Israel. The “dog rape” allegation was a psychotic fever dream straight out of medieval, Nazi and Soviet anti-Jewish demonology.
Kristof wrote that some may wonder whether Palestinian witnesses might fabricate accusations to smear Israel, but this struck him as “far-fetched”.
Just think about that. To Kristof, it wasn’t “far-fetched” that a dog could be trained to rape a man. What was instead “far-fetched” to him was the suggestion that the Palestinians might be lying to harm Israel.
But that’s exactly what they do all the time. Kristof, his editors and other Israel-haters believe Palestinian lies — however absurd and impossible —because they want to believe them.
They regard the Palestinians as the wretched and oppressed victims of the Israelis. That’s why it’s considered as “far-fetched” to believe that the Palestinians could do anything monstrous to the Israelis as to believe that the Israelis could be the Palestinians’ victims.
That’s also why so many of the Israel-haters have denied the sexual violence done to the Israelis on October 7.
The day after Kristof’s travesty, the results were published of a two-year Israeli commission of inquiry into the gender-based atrocities committed during the October 7 massacre and subsequent captivity of some 251 people, even young children, dragged that day into the Gaza Strip.
The commission, founded by legal scholar Cochav Elkayam-Levy, drew upon more than 10,000 photographs and video segments; more than 1,800 hours of visual material; and more than 430 testimonies and interviews with survivors, witnesses, released hostages, experts and family members.
Its findings are very hard to read. The victims were tortured, mutilated and decapitated; a breast was cut off and tossed around; women were shot in the course of being raped and raped after they were murdered.
They were shot in the face to annihilate their beauty and their humanity; nails and other objects were found in their intimate areas; relatives were forced to perform sexual acts on each other. And it was all filmed by Palestinian savages who proudly carried out these depraved acts with delirious glee.
This report constitutes meticulously sourced, authoritative research that throws an even more shocking light on Kristof’s warped and malevolently sourced message.
The New York Times has been accused of running the Kristof article the day before in order to diminish the Israeli report. Whether or not this was so, Kristof himself suggested that his aim was to diminish, relativise and downgrade what happened on October 7.
His article, he said, showed that “the horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on October 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day”.
No other country is treated like this. Only Israelis are to be denied the unique reality of their suffering. Abuse happens in all prisons, and Israel is surely no different. But only Israel is subjected to psychotic lies about it.
That’s because Israel is the world’s only Jewish country, and the way Israel is being abused is the way Jews alone have always been abused.
The claim that dogs are trained to rape Palestinian Arab men is merely a modern version of ancient blood libels — that the Jews were poisoning the wells, or murdering Christian children to bake their blood into Passover matzah.
Today’s starvation libel, the genocide libel, the baby-killers libel, the harvested organs libel — and now the “rape dogs” libel — all transmit the same message as the murderous blood libels of old: that the Jews are evil, demonic, inhuman. They are therefore to be excluded from the field of human empathy. They are to be branded as monsters and their suffering is to be denied.
The combined effect of Kristof, The New York Times and all the other media outlets and red-carpet celebrities and university professors and social media influencers who present the Jews as devils incarnate is that they set the mob on them.
“You rape men, you rape children,” screamed the mob outside Park East synagogue. “You f**king sociopath, I see it in your eyes.”
Jews are being hunted down on the streets of Western cities just as they were once hunted down in medieval Christian towns. Rampaging mobs were then driven by bloodlust, inflamed by the Catholic Church which told them that the Jews were the devil.
Astoundingly, Jews are now facing the same kind of religious mania — this time driven by Islam and left-wing ideology.
What we’re looking at is a throwback to a primitive set of murderous beliefs about Jews from before the Enlightenment, before modernity and before the age of reason.
We are realising to our horror that the skin of civilisation is extremely thin, and that it’s now been torn off altogether. We’re living through a spiritual plague. Barbarism is in the ascendant, and its super-spreader is The New York Times.
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Extra Privileges For Parliamentarians?
Rayner cleared in tax investigation 24 hours after demanding a decision.
Barrister’s letter to HMRC ends former deputy PM’s stamp duty saga, reviving her No 10 hopes
Friday, May 15, 2026
"Lunatic, deranged and evil."
Defending a culture under siege with Brendan O'Neill
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I was really delighted to be invited once again to join Brendan O’Neill, chief political writer on Spiked, to discuss on his show the ever-more jaw-dropping events of our time.
We talked about the convulsions in Britain’s Labour party; the tragedy of Jews who are enemies of the Jewish people; why anti-Zionism is an evil in itself and is also anti-Judaism; the role of education in undermining the West; the Trojan Horse of the Palestinian cause; the Islamist threat to Western values; and the need to form alliances to defend the West.
You can access the discussion by clicking the arrow below.
*** My new book, Fighting the Hate: A Handbook for Jews Under Siege, can be bought on amazon.com, amazon.co.uk and other Amazon sites.
My previous book The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West – and Why Only They Can Save It, can be bought on amazon.com, amazon.co.uk and other Amazon sites.
You can access all my blogposts on my website, melaniephillips.substack.com
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