Saturday, July 25, 2026
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Somalialand Wickedness.
Christian in Somalialand poisoned to death after secret conversion.
Muslim relatives of a father of five in Somaliland who recently became a Christian poisoned him to death this month for converting, sources said.
Sharif Ali came to faith in Christ in April in an undisclosed town in Somaliland, a partially recognized state bordered by Somalia on the east, Djibouti to the northwest and Ethiopia to the south and west. He was 42.
He was poisoned on July 5 and died on July 7, sources said. A report by the doctor in Somalia who treated him stated that he died from food poisoning from ingesting ouabain, traditionally used by East African tribes as lethal arrow poison.
Area underground Christians said Ali’s family became suspicious of his secret faith after noticing he regularly hosted visitors in his home and missed Friday mosque prayers. Relatives invited him to a family gathering on July 5 where they questioned him about these observations and told him that neighbors had heard Christian songs in his home, the local sources said.
Ali chose not to respond to the accusations, remaining silent throughout the questioning, a Christian leader said.
After the family shared a meal, he returned home, and later that night, he became seriously ill, experiencing severe vomiting and diarrhea, the leader said. His wife took him to a hospital.
At the hospital, Ali told a visiting underground church leader, “Please come closer to me – I do not want to speak loudly. I regret not openly confessing my faith in Issa [Jesus] as my personal Savior. If I die, I rejoice because I have believed in Issa.”
He died two days later on July 7, area Christians said. He is survived by his wife and children ages 17, 14, 9, 6 and 4.
Ali had put his faith in Christ after a period of spiritual searching and encounter with underground Christians. As is customary for all Christians in Somaliland, where leaving Islam is punishable by death, he kept his faith secret. CD.
Persecution.
Christians imprisoned under India’s ‘anti-conversion’ law
Six pastors and another Christian in India have begun serving their five-year prison sentences under an “anti-conversion” law, two years after they were falsely accused at a child’s birthday party, sources said.
The Christians were convicted on June 12 of “promoting enmity, hatred, or disharmony between different religious groups,” “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage the religious feelings” under the Indian Penal Code and luring people to convert under Madhya Pradesh state’s anti-conversion law against fraudulent or forced conversion.
“By entangling these six pastors in a false case, opponents have succeeded in shutting down churches at six locations, scattering the believers and instilling fear in them,” a source told Morning Star News.
Pastors Santosh Paraste, 21, Sanjay Markam, 20, Amit Kumar, 24, Pramod Singh, 28, Karan Singh Maravi, 40, and Chhot Singh Dhurve, 49, all residents of Diwari village, along with Jeet Singh, 48, another Christian of Pipariya village, Dindori District, were arrested on a complaint by Angad Singh Maravi. An anti-Christian neighbor who disrupted the birthday party they were attending in 2024, Angad Singh Maravi is a follower of traditional indigenous religion who accused them of luring residents to convert.
Christian Daily.
1 Thessalonians 4 NIV.
3) It is God’s will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality; 4) that each of you should learn to control your own body in a way that is holy and honourable, 5) not in passionate lust like the pagans, who do not know God ...
Friday, July 24, 2026
Sweden: A Move In The Right Direction.
Swedish hospital halts use of puberty blockers in gender-confused kids due to serious health risks.
Doctors at a prominent Swedish hospital that treats children suffering from gender dysphoria announced they will no longer prescribe cross-sex hormones or drugs that suppress puberty.
The Karolinska University Hospital said that as of April 1, puberty blockers would no longer be given to youth younger than 16. In the hospital’s statement, first released in March outlining the policy change and later reported to English-speaking media Wednesday, the medical institution noted that the experimental measures have come under increased scrutiny in recent months amid rising numbers of youth patients being treated.
“These treatments are potentially fraught with extensive and irreversible adverse consequences such as cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, infertility, increased cancer risk, and thrombosis. This makes it challenging to assess the risk/benefit for the individual patient, and even more challenging for the minors and their guardians to be in a position of an informed stance regarding these treatments,” the statement read.
Patients between the ages of 16 and 18 will still be allowed to take cross-sex hormones; however, it's recommended that the physician obtain court approval before administering those drugs. The hospital said a careful individual assessment will be done for patients already taking puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, taking into consideration each patient's degree of maturity and ability to consent.
The Society of Evidence-Based Gender Medicine called the Swedish policy change a “watershed moment.”
“Sweden’s new policy is consistent with Finland’s recently revised guidelines, which were changed to prioritize psychological interventions and support rather than medical interventions, particularly for youth with no childhood history of gender dysphoria (presently the most common presentation),” SEGM said Wednesday, noting that it's also the first country to depart from the guidance from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).
“WPATH has long positioned itself as the world authority in transgender health. However, in recent months, several countries’ health authorities have conducted their own reviews of the evidence and found the evidence insufficient to justify early medical interventions promoted by WPATH’s guidelines,” the organization, which is critical of the experimental medicalization of gender, added.
The Swedish policy change comes about a year after it was reported that between 2008 and 2018, the rate of teenage girls between the ages 13 to 17 being diagnosed with gender dysphoria grew by approximately 1,500% in the Scandinavian country, according to figures from Sweden's Board of Health and Welfare.
In October 2019, an investigative news program highlighted Stockholm’s Karolinska University Hospital, criticizing the medical facility for performing double mastectomies on trans-identifying females as young as 14.
The March announcement out of the Swedish medical center referenced the legal case of Keira Bell in England, in which the U.K. High Court of Justice ruled late last year against the London-based Tavistock gender clinic in a judicial review that decided youth younger than 16 are not mature enough to give informed consent to the experimental practices under the relevant standard in British law. Bell is a 24-year-old woman who was hormonally transitioned as a troubled teenager in the Tavistock clinic and underwent a double mastectomy as a young adult. She wound up regretting the whole gender-transition ordeal and has said that she was not capable of understanding the long-term repercussions to her health.
Youth ages 16 to 18 must first obtain a judge's approval before taking cross-sex hormones, the U.K. high court also decided. The ruling also cited the medical problems linked with puberty blockers and criticized the clinic for its poor record-keeping practices.
Sweden’s move to halt the use of puberty blockers in youth younger than 16 is the abandonment of what is known as the “Dutch protocol” heavily promoted by transgender activists, which allows for the prescribing of puberty blockers at age 12 and cross-sex hormones at 16.
According to Rocklin, California-based endocrinologist Michael Laidlaw, the first well-documented case report of a puberty-blocking drug being used in a young patient occurred in 1998 in the Netherlands. A pediatric endocrinologist, working together with a psychiatrist, decided to use Triptorelin on a 13-year-old girl suffering from gender dysphoria, he told The Christian Post in a 2018 interview about the dangers of Lupron, a hormone blocker that's being prescribed off-label for gender dysphoria sufferers despite lack of FDA approval for that purpose.
The rationale was that the patient should have the drug because the effects of going through puberty would be too traumatic to endure and that "pausing" pubertal signals in the brain would give the person more time to adjust and then later decide whether to move toward surgical transition, Laidlaw explained at the time.
The Karolinska University Hospital is a teaching hospital affiliated with Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, with two major sites in the municipalities of Solna and Huddinge. The hospital network is the second largest in Sweden after Sahlgrenska University Hospital.
Send news tips to: brandon.showalter@christianpost.com Listen to Brandon Showalter's Life in the Kingdom podcast at The Christian Post and edifi app Follow Brandon Showalter on Facebook: BrandonMarkShowalter Follow on Twitter: @BrandonMShow CP.
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Spitting In The Face of God. Without Proper Repentance There Will Always Be A Price To Pay.
A social ethicist and ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) drew attention on social media Monday for a resurfaced clip of her sermon promoting abortion, which she delivered earlier this year at a liberal synagogue in North Carolina while decked out in a Planned Parenthood stole.
The Apostle Paul - 1 Thessalonians 2.
7)Just as a nursing mother cares for her children, 8) so we cared for you. Because we loved you so much, we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well. 9) Surely you remember, brothers and sisters, our toil and hardship; we worked night and day in order not to be a burden to anyone while we preached the gospel of God to you. 10) You are witnesses, and so is God, of how holy, righteous and blameless we were among you who believed. 11) For you know that we dealt with each of you as a father deals with his own children, 12) encouraging, comforting and urging you to live lives worthy of God, who calls you into his kingdom and glory.
Labour Sees Crime As A Minor Aberration: The Public Does NOT!
Labour’s early release scheme is an insult to victims.
Freeing offenders before they have served their time undermines public faith in the justice system
Thursday, July 23, 2026
When So Many Rough Sleepers OPT To Sleep Out ...
Andy Burnham's flagship pledge to end rough sleeping has been dismissed by a homelessness charity founder.
Speaking to GB News, Sleep Out founder and former Middlesbrough Mayor Andy Preston claimed the new Prime Minister “failed miserably” to deliver on the same promise as Mayor of Greater Manchester.
During his first speech as Prime Minister, Mr Burnham pledged to end rough sleeping across the UK as a marquee objective of his premiership.
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Not Debating With Atheists. (Hmm. Well ... )
WHY I DON’T DEBATE ATHEISTS.
We need apologetics, but what we need more is genuine confidence in the Word we carry.
As a former seminary dean, I’ve interviewed lots of people for jobs teaching Christian apologetics, to equip future pastors and missionaries to defend the faith against unbelief. Almost all of them were brilliant—skilled not only in philosophy and science but also in rhetoric and logic. Many of them were quick on their feet and could demolish any atheist who dared debate them. After a while, though, I noticed something all these interviews had in common. When I would ask, “How did you come to Christ?” not a single one, to my memory, ever pointed to an apologetic argument.
Often these apologists would talk about finding faith the same way I did: growing up in a good church or having parents who shared and demonstrated their faith. One candidate, a towering intellect who had been a graduate student at an Ivy League university, happened to stumble into a tiny congregation to hear a preacher with a fifth-grade-level education talking about what grace means. Another candidate blushed as he told me he became a Christian while watching disgraced televangelist Jimmy Swaggart quote John 3:16.
But these scholars had nothing about which to be embarrassed. I walked away from those stories even more amazed by grace than I would have been had they told me they were convinced by the cosmological argument for the existence of God. And sometimes I wished these apologists who became Christians through seemingly unsophisticated ways would say that more often, more loudly, more publicly. In fact, as the years have gone by, I’m even more convinced that the parts of their lives they mentioned quietly are far more important to defending the faith in the 21st century than the carefully crafted onstage takedown of a professional atheist.
We are well past the heyday of traveling road-show debates, which were at their height when the New Atheists at the end of the last century levied Bertrand Russell–like breadth of knowledge with Oscar Wilde–level wit and sarcasm against the Christians across from them. In other debates, apologists seemed to get bored with talking about, well, God as they moved more and more into political polemics or attention-economy YouTube theatrics.
Today’s apologetics debates are quite different from those of eras past; sometimes both sides seem to doubt that there’s a God and that he raised Jesus from the dead. Some of those most eager to defend the faith want to talk instead about civilization, discussing how socially “useful” Christianity is rather than whether it’s true. Some of them speak definitively about gender pronouns or Islamic jihadism or vaccine mandates, but when asked whether the Resurrection happened, they’ll say, Well, what do you mean by “happened”?
All that seems exhausted now. Yet something is stirring, and I think it could take us where we should have been all along.
In the case of apologetics debaters, the exceptions prove the rule: What makes the best apologists stand out is precisely the ways they are not a mirror image of their interlocutors. Think of the most compelling defenders of actual historic Christianity, even in “Christian versus unbeliever” open debate. William Lane Craig comes to mind, as do John Lennox and many others. Yes, their gifting is in rhetorical firepower and philosophical argumentation, but those traits seem embedded in something else. When these forums seem to burn with life-changing fervor, it is not when the Christians applaud loudly and the skeptics slink away, having been “owned.” It’s not just about their arguments—these apologists could not be replaced by artificially intelligent debate bots. Something else is there.
Most of us, when thinking about apologetics, turn to Acts 17, the account of the apostle Paul at the Areopagus, and rightly so. Paul squared off against the Athenian Stoics and Epicureans, skillfully demonstrating—from their own architecture and poetry and philosophers—that they didn’t have the certainty they pretended to possess. But what we often forget is that Paul, though ready to debate that way, didn’t start there.
What provoked the session at Mars Hill was not what made the gospel intelligible to Athens but what made it strange. He was, Luke records, “preaching Jesus and the resurrection” (Acts 17:18, ESV throughout). Paul went from the Resurrection to disputes over the “unknown God” to right back where he started:
The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead. (vv. 30–31)
At its best, our emphasis on apologetics has served God’s kingdom well when it is enfolded in a much bigger project of carrying, bearing witness to, and demonstrating the gospel that reconciles people to a God who loves them and forgives their sins. But the debate culture of our time can sometimes impede that end. Christians sometimes think the way to share the gospel is to have a ready answer for every possible objection to belief—from archaeology to quantum theory.
The church needs people who can do all that—and that’s why we ought to thank God for and support the training and participation of physicists and archaeologists and philosophers and, yes, YouTubers and TikTokers who know how to have a virtual cage fight.
But we also need to emphasize that not every individual needs to be equipped to do all that in order to share the gospel and bear witness to the life-changing reality of Jesus Christ. Some are intimidated because they feel inadequate to “always [be] prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Pet. 3:15). But the apostle is not calling for omnicompetent debaters.
The “defense” here is in the context of people who are free from fear of what others can do to them, who seek holiness, who are gentle and respectful, who have good consciences. It’s not primarily about how Christians articulate the hope that is within them but about how they cultivate it.
Apologetics is not about building the household of God; it’s about clearing the brush around it. When someone says, “We can’t trust the Gospels because they were written hundreds of years after Jesus lived,” we should show them why that’s not true. When someone says everything is material, we ought to show them how they don’t really act as though love and courage and music and beauty are just chemical secretions. We might set up a ride to church for a friend who can’t get there or note where the wheelchair ramp is for a neighbor who’s had surgery, but the point is not the ride or the ramp—it’s what happens once that person gets there.
Apologetics is not the mastery of information for the sake of getting people to master Jesus as another, greater piece of information. God is not an algebra equation. Faith is “the evidence of things not seen”(Heb. 11:1, KJV). Evidence may lead people to a moment when, in seeing Jesus, they have faith. But faith is not the endpoint of an accumulation of evidence. Faith is the evidence. People must experience it from the inside to really know it.
The great Mississippian novelist Eudora Welty once explained why she didn’t “crusade” more in her writing. She said in an Atlantic essay, “A plot is a thousand times more unsettling than an argument.” She was right. We need the arguments, but none of them matter if we’ve lost the plot.
We need debaters, yes, and we need experts. But more than that, we face an opportunity when people all around us are exhausted by living like machines. Many of them will keep their guard up and argue confidently, but deep down they wonder, What if there is more than this? What if, behind all this, there really is someone who knows and loves me? Apologetics is a step toward showing people Jesus, but winning arguments alone is not the kingdom of God.
What we need now is genuine confidence. The Word we carry is resilient and can handle whatever the next decade throws at it. That’s not because our opponents are stupid but because the gospel is true.
Russell Moore is editor at large and a columnist at Christianity Today. CT.
Remember The Imprisoned In Your Times of Prayer.
View email in your browser Please pray! Chinese pastors in prison The wife of a jailed Chinese pastor is pleading with the world not to forg...
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In 2019 Pc Andrew Harper was dragged to his death by a getaway car, driven by teenage thieves whom he had tried to apprehend.
Pc Harper’s killers showed no remorse during their trial, laughing and joking throughout. When the verdict of manslaughter – rather than murder – was returned, some of their family members cheered as Pc Harper’s wife sobbed.
The 16-year sentence handed out to Henry Long, and the 13-year sentences of Albert Bowers and Jessie Cole, were thought shamefully insufficient by Pc Harper’s family. The Government agreed, passing Harper’s Law. This introduced mandatory life sentences for anyone convicted of killing an emergency worker while committing a crime.
Yet far from serving life, Bowers and Cole are eligible to be released as early as this September, due to Labour’s Sentencing Act 2026. More than 5,000 criminals – including killers and rapists – could be freed halfway through their sentences.
Pc Harper’s mother, Debbie Adlam, is right to call this an “insult”. As she told The Telegraph, “it’s a gift for prisoners to be let out early. The cost is to us, the victims, and then the public”, given the extraordinary rate of reoffending.
The Government told Ms Adlam that the early release scheme had been “introduced…with the aim of improving the effectiveness of sentencing”. The public will wonder how releasing offenders absurdly early improves a sentence’s “effectiveness”, unless the desired effect is to encourage yet more criminal activity and undermine faith in the justice system. Pc Harper’s family deserve better.
Any government’s first duty is to protect the public. Why does Labour think releasing violent offenders into society early serves that purpose?