On This Date at MinistryWatch
Meta and the Bible, TrailLife USA, COVID and Christian schools, and Mars Hill Church
ONE YEAR AGO: On June 14, 2023, MinistryWatch reported that the artificial intelligence arm of Facebook parent company Meta has turned to widely translated religious texts like the Bible to provide data for its Massively Multilingual Speech (MMS) project, which aims to expand text-to-speech and speech-to-text technology to underserved languages. Read more here.
TWO YEARS AGO: On June 16, 2022, MinistryWatch reported that the Christian Reformed Church, a small evangelical denomination of U.S. and Canadian churches, voted at its annual synod to codify its opposition to homosexual sex by elevating it to the status of confession, or declaration of faith. Read more here.
THREE YEARS AGO: On June 15, 2021, MinistryWatch reported that TrailLife USA, a Christian alternative to the Boy Scouts, was seeing a significant rise in membership. Its membership has now grown to over 60,000. Read more here.
FOUR YEARS AGO: On June 16, 2020, MinistryWatch reported that the COVID pandemic had forced the permanent closure of at least 60 private schools, most of them Christian schools, according to a study by the Cato Institute. Read more here.
NINE YEARS AGO: On June 15, 2015, MinistryWatch reported that one of the three executive elders at the then-recently dissolved Mars Hill Church had publicly apologized for his behavior there. In a series of blog posts, Sutton Turner took responsibility for his role in a book-buying scandal, as well as in helping perpetuate a culture of fear and intimidation at the Seattle megachurch that dissolved earlier that year. Read more here.
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