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[Episcopal News Service] Interfaith leaders gathered this week inside an Episcopal church in Dearborn, Michigan, in a show of solidarity after recent incidents of anti-Muslim hatred and to rally the community against a rising trend of religious bigotry that has coincided with this year’s midterm elections. The “Hate Has No Home in Michigan” event was hosted Aug. 25 by Christ Episcopal Church and Mother of the Savior Church, an Arabic-speaking congregation that worships at Christ Episcopal Church. The event’s news conference featured speakers from several different faith traditions, including Muslim and Jewish, as well as the Rev. Halim Shukair, the two Episcopal congregations’ priest-in-charge. In his remarks, Shukair emphasized that his church also is home to the Intercultural Community Center in Dearborn, of which he serves as president. “This building is more than a church building. It is a sacred and community space where people from different cultures, languages and backgrounds come together,” Shukair said. “Here, people worship God in Arabic and English. Here Christians from different traditions share the same space, and through the Intercultural Community Center, neighbors from many faiths come together to serve the community.” The show of support for Dearborn as a diverse, welcoming and inclusive city comes as hate groups target the city, known for its large Muslim population. A group of right-wing activists staged a protest last week criticizing Muslims and Islam, and similar rhetoric targeting Muslim groups has raised alarms after a Muslim candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, earned the Democratic nomination in Michigan’s November election for U.S. Senate. El-Sayed, a Muslim of Egyptian heritage who was born in Michigan, attended the “Hate Has No Home in Michigan” event at Christ Episcopal Church and spoke during the news conference there. This was a conversation, El-Sayed said, “that we unfortunately have to have yet again, about what it means to be American in a place that could not be more American.” “This country has always been about bringing people across our differences together,” El-Sayed said. The organizer of last week’s anti-Muslim demonstrations wasn’t motivated to target Dearborn “because he hates a particular group of people,” El-Sayed said. “It’s because he hates that thing about America, that America is bigger than the small version of it that he wants it to be. He hates the idea that he doesn’t get to define America to be so small that it only includes a few people who look and think and act just like him.” Nationwide, the American Civil Liberties Union warns that attacks on Muslims are increasing at a time when overall hate crimes are down. Much of the anti-Muslim rhetoric this year has originated in right-wing circles online and has been amplified more publicly by some Republican lawmakers, such as Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who suggested earlier this year that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was a terrorist. Dearborn has long been targeted for such xenophobic vitriol because of its large Arab American population. People of Arab descent now make up a majority of Dearborn’s 110,000 residents, including Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, who spoke Aug. 25 at Christ Episcopal Church. “We have to stand with one another and lift one another up,” Hammoud said. He invoked the example of Dearborn’s children. “When they’re on the playground making new friends, they have no preconditions on those friendships. They’re not asking a young child, what direction do you pray or where did your father come from? … They’re learning about one another and playing with one another, because kindness leads.” Christ Episcopal Church also has been an example of that spirit in action. It partnered with Mother of the Savior, an Episcopal-Lutheran congregation, to launch the Intercultural Community Center with the backing of a $260,000 grant from Trinity Church in New York in 2022. The center’s mission is to serve as a “networking hub in Dearborn for nonpartisan social justice action which gathers individuals and groups from various cultural backgrounds.” “Dearborn and Metro Detroit represent something beautiful about Michigan,” Shukair said during the Aug. 25 news conference. “We are Muslims, Christians and Jews and people of other faiths and traditions. We speak Arabic and English and many other languages. We come from many parts of the world, but we share one community and one home. And when one part of our community is targeted by hate, all of us must stand together.” – David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at [email protected].

[World Council of Churches] The World Council of Churches will observe the Season of Creation, a worldwide ecumenical Christian observance that begins with the Feast of Creation on Sept. 1 and ends with the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals and ecology, Oct. 4. This year’s Season of Creation theme, “Living Water,” draws from Ezekiel 47:1-12, which depicts a life-giving river flowing from the Temple in Jerusalem to the Dead Sea. “The Season of Creation … is a time to witness God’s love and our human responsibility. Confessing God as the creator means a commitment for us as human beings to ‘tilling and keeping the earth,’” Bishop Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, World Council of Churches moderator of the central committee, said in reference to Genesis 2:15. Read the full article here.

[Episcopal News Service] South Dakota Bishop Jonathan H. Folts announced in an Aug. 21 message to his diocese his plan to retire on Oct. 31, 2027. “To the diocesan staff, clergy and dedicated lay members across our diocese … You have welcomed me into your family, taught me new lessons and skills and have forged me into the Christian person that I am today,” Folts said. “I am immensely grateful.” Folts, 58, has been serving the Pierre-based Diocese of South Dakota as its 11th bishop since 2019. The Diocese of South Dakota is home to the largest Indigenous ministry in North America, serving the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota people, according to the diocese’s website. Before serving the Diocese of South Dakota, Folts served as rector and vicar of several churches in Texas, his home state, and Connecticut. He was ordained a deacon in 1996 and a priest in 1997 by his father, former West Texas Bishop James E. Folts. As a member of The Episcopal Church’s Truth, Justice and Healing Commission on Native Schools, Folts has dedicated much of his episcopate to justice and reconciliation over the church’s role in operating and supporting Indigenous boarding schools. Research shows that most boarding schools with Episcopal ties were in South Dakota, including the Crow Creek Dormitory. In 2025, Folts formally apologized to the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe for the diocese’s role in operating Indigenous boarding schools. In his message, Folts credited working closely with clergy and laypeople to make several improvements in the Diocese of South Dakota, including making diocesan finances “stronger” and revitalizing Thunderhead Episcopal Center, the diocese’s camp and retreat center located in Lead.  “Together, we have worked hard over these years to renew and strengthen the life and ministry of our diocese in many ways, and I am filled with gratitude to God and to you for the ministry we share and for the relationships we have forged,” Folts said. “Many of our congregations have grown in courage and are embracing new and faithful ways of serving their communities.” Improvements have been made throughout the diocese, Folts said, but “there is still work to be done and faithful ministry to do,” including addressing “dilapidated” church buildings and supporting struggling congregations. Folts did not call for the election of his successor in his message.

A team from Cuba has joined an international editing team to begin drafting the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity materials for 2028. The resources are being prepared jointly with Catholic and Protestant Christians from Cuba, including the staff and students of the Seminario Evangélico de Teología in Matanzas City. 

Announced internally last November, Rev. Jul Medenblik intends to retire from the presidency of the 150-year-old seminary that serves the Christian Reformed Church of North America. This will conclude 16 years of stewardship at the Seminary, a period marked by significant changes in society, culture, and technology. At the outset of his tenure as president, Medenblik set a posture of service. A hallmark phrase he initiated at Calvin Theological Seminary, “Called To Serve,” uses the seminary's initials, CTS, and has since been ingrained in the institution's language and ethos for a decade and a half. In his internal announcement, he shared, “When I was called as President-elect in 2010, I could not imagine all that would unfold. Along the way...

As churches worldwide prepare for the annual Season of Creation—observed each year from Sept. 1 through Oct. 4 to celebrate the Creator and to renew the shared call to care for the earth—a newly released curriculum aims to equip young hearts for environmental stewardship. The free, five-week unit produced by the Climate Witness Project is designed for children ages 4–10 in Sunday schools, Christian schools, and homeschool settings. Grounded in the biblical concept of shamar (caring/keeping), the resource uses Scripture, music, picture books, and hands-on activities to frame creation care as an act of joy, hope, and worship. Grounded in Biblical Hope and Local Stewardship This year’s theme centers on the gift and necessity of water, highlighted in Ezekiel 47:9...

Over the past year, the Global Vision Implementation Team has been working to help the CRCNA navigate a rapidly changing ministry landscape shaped by growing global relationships. Formed after Synod 2024 affirmed the Global Vision Team report ( Acts of Synod 2024, pp. 690-709, 807-9), the implementation team was tasked with helping the denomination reflect on what closer partnerships with churches outside North America could look like in practice. The team’s work responds to a growing reality within the CRCNA: nearly 25 percent of congregations are now made up mainly of non-Anglo members, many of whom are immigrants who maintain deep ministry connections with their countries of origin. Across the denomination, pastors and ministry leaders are preaching, teaching, mentoring leaders...

The teaching in Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical has strong similarities with the ideas that drove the abolitionist movement in America.

The World Council of Churches (WCC) will join the global Christian family in opening the 2026 Season of Creation, the ecumenical world's month of prayer and action for creation. Communities on every continent have already lived through record heat, wildfires, and flooding in 2026, many of them home to WCC member churches. 

The city of Florianópolis in South Brazil is hosting, from 26-30 August, the 35th General Council of the Evangelical Church of Lutheran Confession in Brazil (IECLB), the highest decision-making body of the church. In a greeting, World Council of Churches (WCC) general secretary Rev. Prof. Dr Jerry Pillay extended prayers to the leadership and participants.