World Religions News

Launching at Easter, project calls one million Americans to pray for one million people to follow Christ

CLEVELAND — A new project launching at Easter is calling one million American Christians to pray for a “Christ-centered awakening” across the country—citing “a crisis of faith and hope” gripping the nation.

Waning faith and divisions have caused many Americans to lose hope—and “only God’s intervention can save us,” project organizers say.

Leaders of the multi-denominational, non-partisan movement Prayer at the Heart say America is nearing a spiritual and cultural “point of no return,” requiring a heaven-sent rescue mission powered by united nationwide prayer.

The coast-to-coast movement—supported by prominent Christian leaders in the U.S.—aims to sign up one million praying Americans between Passover and Pentecost, April 5 – May 24, to intercede for one million people to “come to faith in Jesus Christ.”

Traditionally in Christianity, the period from Passover to Pentecost—which includes Easter—represents a spiritual journey from hope and deliverance to the coming of the Holy Spirit.

“It took a great awakening to give birth to our nation,” said Dr. Douglas Small, the movement’s founder and executive director. “On America’s 250th anniversary this year, it’s going to require Christians across America humbly seeking God together to save our nation.”

The united prayer effort comes at a moment when Americans are sharply divided on many cultural issues, polarized by politics and social media, and questioning everything—including faith.

Only one in seven Americans attends church regularly, but growing interest among young people is a reason for hope, Small said. “Across the nation, young adults are returning to church and faith,” he added. “This movement seeks to awaken believers to a work that the Holy Spirit has already initiated.”

Hope: Can It Be Revived?

The country’s pessimism was reflected in a Politico poll last November that revealed half of Americans—49%—believe the nation’s best times are in the past.

The antidote for America’s “crisis of faith and hope,” Small says, is a “humble grassroots movement,” creating a groundswell of public prayer events in towns and cities across all 50 states. An online “Prayer Wall” will schedule prayer in every state for an hour each week.

“We want to bring real hope through Jesus Christ back to the center of Americans’ lives,” Small said. “We believe God will use this movement to change hearts, awaken faith in Christ, and renew hope across America.”

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Prayer at the Heart is a Christian, interdenominational nonprofit organization and prayer movement committed to mobilizing one million Americans to pray for one million people to come to faith in Jesus Christ through coordinated nationwide prayer in every U.S. state.

Contact:
Ty Mays
Prayer at the Heart
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of RNS or Religion News Foundation.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled against a law banning “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ+ kids in Colorado, one of about two dozen states that ban the discredited practice.

An 8-1 high court majority sided with a Christian counselor who argues the law banning talk therapy violates the First Amendment. The justices agreed that the law raises free speech concerns and sent it back to a lower court to decide if it meets a legal standard that few laws pass.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the court, said the law “censors speech based on viewpoint.” The First Amendment, he wrote, “stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”

Gorsuch’s opinion drew support from liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.

A state could similarly not ban talk therapy designed to affirm a minor’s sexual orientation or gender identity, Kagan wrote. “Once again, because the State has suppressed one side of a debate, while aiding the other, the constitutional issue is straightforward,” she wrote.

In a solo dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that states should be free to regulate health care, even if that means incidental restrictions on speech. The decision, Jackson wrote, “opens a dangerous can of worms” that “threatens to impair states’ ability to regulate the provision of medical care in any respect.”

The decision is the latest in a line of recent cases in which the justices have backed claims of religious discrimination while taking a skeptical view of LGBTQ+ rights.

Counselor Kaley Chiles, with support from President Donald Trump’s Republican administration, said the law wrongly bars her from offering voluntary, faith-based therapy for kids.

Chiles contends her approach is different from “conversion therapy” practices from decades ago, like shock therapy. Her attorneys argued that the ban makes it hard for parents to find therapists willing to discuss gender identity with kids unless the counseling affirms transition.

“I look forward to being able to help them when they choose the goal of growing comfortable with their bodies,” Chiles said in a statement. “Counselors walking alongside these young people shouldn’t be limited to promoting state-approved goals like gender transition, which often leads to harmful drugs and surgeries.”

Colorado disagreed, saying its law does allow wide-ranging conversations about gender identity and sexual orientation and exempts religious ministries. The state says the measure simply bars using therapy to try to “convert” LGBTQ+ people to heterosexuality or traditional gender expectations, a practice that has been scientifically discredited and linked to serious harm.

The law doesn’t violate the First Amendment, Colorado argued, because therapy is different from other types of speech since it’s a form of health care that the state has a responsibility to regulate.

Advocates for LGBTQ+ people condemned the ruling, as well as “conversion therapy.”

“This is a dangerous practice that has been condemned by every major medical association in the country. Today’s decision does not change the science, and it does not change the fact that conversion therapists who harm patients will still face legal consequences,” Polly Crozier, director of family policy at GLAD Law, said in a statement.

The 2019 law carries the possibility of fines and license suspension, but no one has been sanctioned under it. The ruling is expected to eventually make similar laws in other states unenforceable.

Chiles was represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal organization that has appeared frequently at the court in recent years. The group also represented a Christian website designer who successfully challenged Colorado anti-discrimination law because she didn’t want to work with same-sex couples.

Twenty-three states have laws barring health care providers from offering “conversion therapy” for minors, and another four have some restrictions, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an advocacy group that tracks policies that impact LGBTQ+ people.

The high court agreed to hear the case after the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver upheld the law. Another Atlanta-based appeals court, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, had struck down similar bans in Florida.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court.

(RNS) — Last week, at Shabbat dinner, someone at the table asked me, “Would you like some farro?”

Without missing a beat, I replied: “Didn’t you hear? We don’t serve Pharaoh anymore.”

A groaner? Perhaps. A classic rabbinic pun? Definitely.

But like many Jewish jokes, it turns out there was more truth in it than I realized.

Farro is not just a trendy grain that shows up in upscale salads and artisanal soups. It is a category of ancient wheats that people have cultivated for over 10,000 years. It is hardy, resilient and able to grow in poor soil and harsh climates. It is rich in fiber and nutrients. It was perfectly suited for early civilizations. Including ancient Egypt.

Farro grew along the Nile. It sustained the population. It fed workers, including our ancestors.

The Egyptians used farro to make bread, porridge and even beer. Archaeologists have found grains of it in tombs — because, apparently, you needed your carbs in the afterlife, too. And yes — farro acquired a nickname, “Pharaoh’s grain.”

Which brings us, naturally, to Passover, which begins Wednesday evening (April 1). We are about to observe one of the most joyous, central and complex holidays in the Jewish calendar.

But Pesach did not begin as a single, unified observance. Originally, there were two distinct festivals.

The first was Pesach — Passover — on the 14th day of Nisan. It was a family-based ritual in which Israelites sacrificed a lamb and ate it together, recalling the night of the Exodus.

The second was Chag HaMatzot — the Festival of Unleavened Bread — beginning on the 15th of Nisan and lasting seven days. This was most likely an agricultural pilgrimage festival marking the beginning of the barley harvest.

Over time, these two observances fused into one. But perhaps that fusion was not arbitrary. What if these two strands — historical and agricultural — were always more connected than we assumed? What if avoiding chametz — or leavened products like bread, cake, pasta, beer, and for Ashkenazic Jews, legumes — was not only about remembering the haste of the Israelites when they left Egypt, but about rejecting Egypt itself?

Egypt was a bread civilization. Not just any bread, but leavened bread — that which rises, is processed, controlled and transformed. Bread that reflects human mastery over nature.

Egypt was a civilization of mastery and control; power flowed from the top down. Pharaoh was not merely a ruler — he was divine. Human beings were tools in a vast machine designed to produce stability, permanence and grandeur.

Bread that rises is not just food. It is a metaphor. Contrast that with matzah: flat, simple and unadorned. The bread of the poor.

It is anti-Pharaoh food. It says, we will not participate in your system of excess, control and artificial elevation. That resistance is not merely dietary, but ideological.

The Torah, from beginning to end, is a sustained argument against what we might call “Egyptianism,” or the belief that power is absolute, rulers are divine, and human beings exist to serve systems rather than the other way around. It implies stability matters more than justice, and order matters more than dignity.

The Exodus is not only a physical departure from a geographic place. It is a spiritual and political departure from a worldview.

Consider what the Israelites do on the eve of their liberation: They slaughter a lamb. Why? The lamb was sacred in Egyptian religion. It was associated with divinity. To slaughter it was to make a bold and dangerous statement: Your gods are not our gods.

It is to say, we are leaving — not just your land, but your theology.

And then comes Shabbat. In Egypt, slaves do not get a day off. Time belongs to the masters.

The Torah introduces the revolutionary idea that every human being — even the servant, even the stranger — is entitled to rest.

Then, there is the question of life and death. Ancient Egypt was obsessed with death. Its greatest achievements — the pyramids, the tombs — were monuments to the afterlife. Its sacred texts, like the Book of the Dead, were guides to navigating the world beyond.

Judaism takes a different path. Our “priests” — kohanim — cannot have any contact with the dead. They cannot enter cemeteries. Mummification — the original denial of death (yes, there is a pun there; get it?) — was an Egyptian thing. Israelites did not mummify. Jews do not gaze at the faces of the dead in open coffins; funerals have closed coffins. We bury our dead, ideally, as soon as possible, so that we do not linger in the presence of death.

We turn away from death, and toward life. We are obsessed with life. We insist: Uvacharta vachayim—choose life.

And then there is the Torah’s most repeated commandment: “You shall not oppress the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

This is not merely historical memory. It is moral reprogramming to say, do not become what you escaped. Do not internalize Egypt.

Fast-forward several centuries to 419 B.C.E. Jews are in Egypt again — in particular, a Jewish military colony on Elephantine, an island in the Nile, now part of the city of Aswan.

A man named Hananiah sends a memo to a man named Yedaniah, the leader of the Elephantine community. It’s what historians call the “Passover Papyrus.”

He instructs them: Remove leaven from your homes. Do not consume fermented products. Saying, in other words, even here, even now in Egypt, remember who you are. 

The avoidance of chametz becomes a portable identity — a boundary that says, this is who we are, and this is who we are not.

Which brings us back to that Shabbat dinner, and that bowl of farro or “Pharaoh’s grain”: The food of empire and sustenance of a civilization that built wonders on the backs of slaves.

On Passover, we remove chametz from our homes, but we are doing more than cleaning our kitchens. We are purging ourselves of Egypt — of arrogance, hierarchy and the illusion that power justifies itself.

You can take the Israelites out of Egypt, but taking Egypt out of the Israelites is an ongoing task. Every year, every generation and every kitchen must say, I’ll pass on the farro. We don’t serve Pharaoh anymore.

My wishes for a sweet and liberating Pesach. 

Christian Daily International is launching an international podcast series, Faith Without Frontiers, on March 31, 2026, marking a new chapter in its mission to share stories of faith, resilience and leadership from across the global Church.

Hosted by Gordon Showell-Rogers, International Director of Christian Daily International, the podcast will release 10 episodes in its first season, with new installments published every Tuesday.

The series is made up of heart-to-heart conversations with Christian believers, many in leadership roles, from a wide range of nations and professional backgrounds. From Europe to the Middle East, Africa to North America and Asia, guests include legal professionals, humanitarian workers, entrepreneurs, academics, public servants and survivors of profound hardship. Their stories touch on justice issues, displacement, war, human trafficking, ethical leadership, youth ministry and public life.

“The podcasts are simply conversations with extraordinary friends about their amazing and challenging faith journeys, and what has shaped their lives,” Showell-Rogers said. “I’m deeply grateful for friends’ willingness to speak very openly, often sharing deeply personal realities.”

He said what has struck him most is the goodness of God in very diverse circumstances and contexts.

“What this very international series of conversations has in common is a sense of the presence of God, the work of God in often dark, sometimes funny situations all over the world,” he said. “I hope that others will enjoy the first series as much as I have enjoyed recording them.”

The title Faith Without Frontiers reflects both the geographical breadth of the guests and the spiritual theme that unites them — stories of faith stepping beyond boundaries, both personal and international.

It was not the only title under consideration. Showell-Rogers’ teenage grandson suggested the more playful: “Gordon’s Gospel Gossip.” “In many ways, that title captures the authentic, unscripted nature of these conversations between friends. My guests have all loved it,” he said. “But we decided that a slightly more serious title might be good – at least for now.”

While the contexts differ — from courtrooms to classrooms, from refugee ministries to national institutions — a common thread runs through each episode: perseverance and hope rooted in Christ.

“I am struck by the resilience of the human spirit and the resilience of the human spirit in Christ,” he said. “Some of the stories are deeply painful. But each person is continuing to trust God, walking forward with Christ and serving Him in remarkable ways.”

The podcast aligns closely with Christian Daily International’s broader mission to strengthen global Christian unity and understanding.

“Our overall aim is to help believers around the world hear one another’s stories and understand that we are all part of one body in Christ globally,” Showell-Rogers said. “I hope that as you listen, you will find yourself thinking, ‘That person’s God is my God.’”

He added that the stories may encourage listeners — perhaps particularly younger believers — to consider how their own professions and life paths can become avenues of service.

“I hope that something of that will come across when people listen,” he said, “and that people will feel inspired to walk with Christ, serving him in their own area, in the place to which the Lord has called them.”

Season 1 of Faith Without Frontiers begins March 31, 2026, with new episodes released every Tuesday.

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Contact:
Timothy Goropevsek
Christian Daily International
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of RNS or Religion News Foundation.