Churches Help UNC Students Process After Shooting, DR Assessing Idalia Response & IMB Asking For Prayer

Following a shooting inside a lab building at the University of North Carolina on Monday that left a faculty member dead, local churches have covered the campus in prayer while providing places for students to process the tragic events.

Police later arrested a 34-year-old graduate student from China who was later identified as Tailei Qi in connection with the incident in a residential neighborhood near the university.

On Tuesday, Qi was charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of Zijie Yan, an associate professor in UNC’s Department of Applied Sciences, who was also Qi’s academic advisor. Qi was also charged with having a gun on educational property.

Qi is being held without bail, and authorities haven’t provided a motive in the case.
University officials canceled classes on Tuesday and local churches and parachurch ministries provided places for students to pray and process the tragic events of the day before.
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With the arrival of Hurricane Idalia in Florida’s Big Bend area, Southern Baptist Disaster Relief (SBDR) teams began assessing the damage in preparation for a response.

“We have been in touch with SBDR leaders in the storm’s path and been involved in preparations,” Coy Webb, Crisis Response director for Send Relief, told Baptist Press this morning (Aug. 30). “Currently, we are now just waiting for the storm to pass to begin assessment and response.

Idalia made landfall in Keaton Beach at approximately 7:45 a.m. EST Wednesday as a Category 3 hurricane, said the National Hurricane Center. Maximum sustained winds registered at 125 mph with Cedar Key, 58 miles southeast of Keaton Beach, reporting a seven-foot storm surge.

The storm was downgraded to Category 1 and had moved into southeast Georgia with sustained winds of 80 mph amid heavy rain. Storm surge warnings remained along the Georgia and South Carolina coasts.
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Gospel workers are focusing on the Bhojki of India, with a population of approximately 2,900, are a community of priests at Devi Hindu temples. They live in the hills of the outer Himalayan ranges but are landless, as ploughing is socially and religiously taboo for them. The IMB is asking you to pray that this unreached people group will come to know God and become “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that [they] may proclaim the excellencies of him who called [them] out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9 ESV).

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