Grand Canyon Education (GCE), a for-profit marketing agency for Grand Canyon University (GCU), has been sued in federal court for allegedly engaging in a racketeering scheme by students who enrolled in the university’s doctoral programs.
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Over the past decade, the American Bible Society spent nearly $100 million to build and operate a state-of-the-art interactive museum in Philadelphia that explains the role of the Bible and a Christian worldview in the nation’s founding, as well as in the ongoing history of the nation. At the end of this month, the museum will permanently close.
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Last week, the last of the three criminals confessed to conspiring to defraud churches as part of a scheme they cooked up back in 2013. The news was announced by the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, which charged the three men in 2019.
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Politicians from both parties benefit from the abuse of the tax code, but they differ over who’s responsible, claiming that those on the other side are guilty of the greatest abuse. But they agree on one thing: Abuse has skyrocketed since 2010 and the Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United decision.
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A Washington, D.C.-area law firm has filed a complaint in a Virginia district court alleging Liberty University failed to properly investigate a student’s report that she was raped by another student and retaliated against her after she made the report.
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Bill Hwang was hailed as part of a new evangelical donor-class for donating nearly $80 million to dozens of evangelical ministries. But his fortune — which, it turned out, was based on lies, heavy borrowing and risky stock bets — blew up in March 2021, when he was unable to pay creditors. Hwang was arrested April 27, 2022.
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The Satanic Temple has filed a civil lawsuit against a Pennsylvania elementary school after the school turned down a request to form an after-school Satan Club. The proposed club for Northern Elementary School in York, Pennsylvania, was voted down 8-1 at an April 19 school board meeting.
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Megachurch head pastor Stovall Weems has resigned from Celebration Church in Jacksonville, Florida, as he continues to pursue a lawsuit alleging he was illegally suspended from his position by the church’s governing board earlier this year.
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The investigation of alleged mishandling of sexual abuse has cost the Southern Baptist Convention more than $1.7 million so far, a number that exceeds the original estimate made last fall. A 2019 investigation by the Houston Chronicle reported hundreds of abuse cases in Southern Baptist churches spanning decades.
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TV preacher Andrew Wommack’s ministry racked up $25.9 million in debt building the $99 million campus of Charis Bible College in Woodland Park, up in the mountains west of Colorado Springs. Wommack now wants to tear up an agreement he made with the city a decade ago to build campus student housing as a taxable private enterprise.
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Embezzlement will cost churches $170 billion in the year 2050 if current trends continue, according to Center for the Study of Global Christianity co-Director Todd Johnson. But while 1 in 3 churches will be victims of embezzlement, 27% won’t report the crime because members often have a hard time believing they have been victimized.
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Missionaries throughout Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the Bahamas look forward to the weekly arrivals of planes flown by Agape Flights, a Florida ministry that shuttles mail, medicines, cargo, relief supplies and other resources. But one of its planes was burned in Haiti by demonstrators protesting the country’s increasing violence and kidnappings.
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Almost 11 weeks into tax season, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service continues to experience delays in processing last year’s tax returns. Millions of tax returns and filings are still backlogged, including those in the Form 990 series, an annual reporting obligation by tax-exempt entities like ministries and churches.
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Hillsong Worship, the music arm of Hillsong Church, has withdrawn from a tour with Christian music group Casting Crowns in the wake of scandals at the Australia-based church.
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AARP Foundation attorneys will act as co-counsel in a class-action lawsuit alleging the African Methodist Episcopal Church mishandled nearly $90 million in retirement funds, the organization said. The AME stopped making payments to retired ministers covered by its pension plan earlier this year after a 2021 audit found that two-thirds of the denomination’s retirement funds had been lost in risky investments.
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Two more leaders of Hillsong Church U.S. campuses have announced they’re taking their campuses in a different direction in the wake of founder Brian Houston being ousted by the church’s board for breaching its code of conduct.
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Half of Ukraine’s 7.5 million children have been displaced in the month since Russia invaded, said the U.N. Children’s Fund on March 24. The Association of Christian Schools International is seeking donations to help some of these children, their families, and Christian schoolteachers and school personnel who have fled their homes.
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Stovall Weems, founding pastor of Celebration Church in Jacksonville, Florida, says he was illegally removed from his position by the church’s governing board earlier this year, after his accusations that a trustee was improperly billing the church for “enormous sums of money” for services were turned back on him.
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Metaxas and other conservative Christian media figures are being probed about their practices in a defamation lawsuit filed by Eric Coomer, an executive with Dominion Voting Systems. In a deposition for the case, Metaxas said he had done little to verify claims aired in the broadcast that Dominion had rigged elections in the U.S., Mongolia, and Venezuela.
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Research shows charitable donors prefer to give their time over money — even when it does less good for the cause — because they perceive it gives them more control over where their donation goes. But nonprofits, although they need both donors’ time and money to succeed, feel that financial gifts have the most impact.
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