Two Pastors’ Friendship, A Letter to the President, & Scripture-Engaged Trauma Survivors

Two pastors’ newfound friendship gave their churches an unexpected opportunity to serve their community together when the May 14 Tops Friendly Market shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., unfolded directly across the street from one of their congregations.

Mark Hamilton pastors Faithful Stones Church, which sits at the same intersection as the popular grocery store that became the site of a racially charged shooting that killed 10 people.

Months before the shooting, Eric Napoli and Hamilton had struck up a ministry partnership and friendship, which helped connect the churches for a swift response to their community.

“By Monday [after the shooting], we were together with a prayer group there on site,” Napoli said.

In a letter to President Biden, Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission acting president Brent Leatherwood is urging the president not to permit products likely made with slave labor by an ethnic minority targeted in a genocidal campaign by China’s Communist regime into the U.S. market.

In the letter, Leatherwood, expressed his “profound concerns” that a new White House order could be used to allow into this country solar cells and modules produced in western China by the Uyghur people under forced-labor conditions. The order “poses concerning ramifications for the United States’ righteous efforts to remove forced labor from our supply chains,” Leatherwood wrote.

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Trauma survivors who regularly engage in Scripture flourish more than survivors who are biblically disengaged, the American Bible Society said in its latest revelations from the 2022 State of the Bible report.

While a third of study participants have personally experienced trauma in their lifetime, those characterized as “Scripture engaged” scored higher on a 10-point scale that measured flourishing in six areas.

Scripture-engaged respondents scored 19 percent higher than Bible-disengaged respondents on the six-domain human flourishing index measuring happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, and financial and material stability.

Scripture-engaged trauma survivors scored 8.1 on the 10-point human flourishing scale, compared to a 6.9 score for the Bible disengaged, the ABS said, with the largest advantage seen in the area of meaning and purpose.

You can find the full story at our website, Baptist Press.com.