KY Baptist DR Training, New Pew Research & Fisk Jubilee Singers

In the midst of ongoing recovery from recent natural disasters, Kentucky Baptist Disaster Relief workers trained more than 200 volunteers during an event at Graefenburg Baptist Church Saturday (Sept. 10).
Of those trained, nearly 100 of them had never received any type of disaster relief training before. After completing the training on Saturday, those first-timers received certification to serve with Kentucky Disaster Relief on future projects.

Ron Crow, disaster relief director for the Kentucky Baptist Convention, said a typical training event will draw around 50-75 people, but the state’s natural disasters of the past few months have increased interest “dramatically.”
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Christians are projected to comprise less than half of the U.S. population by 2070 in a Pew Research study of how current trends might play out among believers and non-believers in the coming decades.

In the best-case scenario of how trends might continue to unfold, which Pew presents as the most unlikely and most optimistic possibility, Pew projects the Christian share of the U.S. population to shrink from a current 64 percent to between 54 percent and 35 percent by 2070.

In the scenario Pew described as most likely, Christians would comprise 39 percent of Americans by 2070, losing their majority status as early as 2050 at 47 percent of the national population.

Baptist Press senior writer Diana Chandler wrote on the study and you can get full details at BaptistPress.com.
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Good News for Today is sponsored by The Voice of the Martyrs

Good News for Today is made possible through our friends at The Voice of the Martyrs, a nonprofit organization that serves persecuted Christians around the world. Founded in 1967 by Richard and Sabina Wurmbrand, VOM is dedicated to inspiring believers to deepen their commitment to Christ and to fulfill His Great Commission — no matter the cost. Find out more and sign up for their free monthly magazine at vom.org/goodnews.
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Paul Kwami and the Fisk Jubilee Singers were inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 2000.
Kwami led the 15-member Jubilee Singers to their first Grammy award in 2021 – the 150th anniversary of the ensemble’s founding in 1871 to perform for U.S. and European audiences to raise funds for their struggling five-year-old college.

The Jubilee Singers received the National Medal of the Arts in 2008 from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The ensemble traveled to Ghana in 2007, performing spirituals at Elmina Castle, one of the sites of a “door of no return” through which millions of Africans passed in the transatlantic slave trade.

Kwami was one of seven children; his father was a farmer and music teacher. He first heard a spiritual at age 4 sung by a visiting choir. “I can still see it mentally – a picture of that choir, of the room where we were for this concert,” he once told the Nashville public radio station WPLN.
He died this week at age 70 in Nashville.

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