A pastor admitted a past ‘sexual incident’ with a teen. His congregation gave him a standing ovation.

From The Washington Post-

On December 1, as headlines across the country blared with news about Matt Lauer’s surprise firing from the “Today” show for sexual misconduct, a woman named Jules Woodson tapped out a short email. It ran only 78 words but was nearly 20 years in the making. “Do you remember?” the subject line read.

“Do you remember that night that you were supposed to drive me home from church and instead drove me to a deserted back road and sexually assaulted me?” Woodson wrote. “Do you remember how you acted like you loved me and cared about me in order for me to cooperate in such acts, only to run out of the vehicle later and fall to your knees begging for forgiveness and for me not to tell anyone what had just happened?”

She closed with three words and a hashtag. “Well I REMEMBER,” the email said. “#me-too.”

More here-

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/01/10/a-pastor-admitted-a-past-sexual-incident-with-a-teen-his-congregation-gave-him-a-standing-ovation/?utm_term=.8c5127b61fda

Memphis mega-church pastor admits he molested a minor days before his ‘True Love Waits’ workshop

From Memphis-

Twenty years ago Memphis mega-church teaching pastor Andy Savage sexually assaulted a high school senior who was 17 years old.

According to Fox 13, the Highpoint Church leader admitted to the act on his social media platforms. At the time, Savage was in college and working as a staffer at a Texas Baptist church now known as StoneBridge. He said in his statement that he apologized immediately and asked for forgiveness from the victim.

“I apologized and sought forgiveness from her, her parents, her discipleship group, the church staff, and the church leadership, who informed the congregation,” he said on the church website. “In agreement with wise counsel, I took every step to respond in a biblical way.”

The response from Savage came after the woman came forward with graphic details to The Wartburg Watch, a site started by two Christian women who pursued their faith, but saw “disturbing trends within Christendom.”

More here-

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/01/memphis-mega-church-pastor-admits-he-molested-a-minor-days-before-his-true-love-waits-workshop/

“Fever Season”: Revelations of a plague year

From Salon-

“The panic is fearful today,” wrote an Episcopal nun from Memphis, Tenn., in the summer of 1878. “Eighty deaths reported and half the doctors refuse to report at all. We found one of our nurses lying on the floor in her patient’s room down with the fever, another is sickening. I really believe that Dr. Harris and I and the two negro nurses are the only well persons anywhere near here.”

With more than half the city’s population fled and most of those remaining stricken by the virus known as Yellow Jack, Bronze John and “the Stranger’s Disease” — yellow fever — Memphis resembled a post-apocalyptic landscape to rival that in any zombie film. At the peak of the epidemic, corpses lay in the streets as overburdened work crews struggled to convey them to mass graves. Looters rampaged through the posher homes in the only major urban center between St. Louis and New Orleans, guzzling their victims’ liquor and collapsing with the fever at the scene of their crimes. At one point, a single man remained of the staff at the Western Union telegraph office, which was the sole, fragile information conduit between the quarantined city and an outside world looking on in horror and pity.

As Jeanette Keith describes it in her new history of the 1878 plague, “Fever Season: The Story of a Terrifying Epidemic and the People Who Saved a City,” yellow fever’s grisly reign over Memphis that summer forged the city’s identity for generations to come. It was a saga that capsized conventional 19th-century American views of heroism. All but one of the city’s white Protestant ministers left the city.

More here-

http://www.salon.com/2012/10/07/fever_season_revelations_of_a_plague_year/singleton/

Church honors saint by establishing Christian hunters group

From Memphis-

The story of Saint Hubert, as told by Father John Sewell, Rector of St. John's Episcopal Church, goes like this:

In the late 600s A.D., a "party boy" named Hubert had given himself to the vanities of life, and was obsessed with hunting. Once, he chose to pursue his sport on Good Friday, "a real no-no in that time," and received an unexpected wake-up call from above.

During his hunt that morning, a vision of the crucifix appeared to Hubert between the antlers of a great stag. Through the creature, God spoke to him and said, "Hubert, if you don't get your act together, you're going to hell."

Sewell and his church celebrated the patron saint of hunters and hunting dogs during Sunday morning's services by blessing hunters, their dogs and establishing the Guild of Saint Hubert, a Christian hunters group that promotes spirituality, safety and respect in the hunt.

"I'm convinced that hunting is actually a spiritual exercise," said Sewell, who explained how hunting can be used as a metaphor for spiritual salvation in his sermon.

"(Hubert) went hunting and got more than he thought he would," he said. "Not only do we go hunting, but God hunts for us."

More here-

http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2010/oct/25/hunt-for-spirituality/

Yellow fever left mark on Memphis; historians disagree on epidemic's impact

From Memphis-

This weekend, dubbed Martyrs Weekend, recognizes victims of that deadliest outbreak in 1878 and the people who came to their aid, often dying in the process. Twelve Catholic nuns, 9 priests, 4 Episcopalian nuns and 10 Protestant ministers died. Survivors had to face the city's bankruptcy, the loss of its charter and an image that Harkins says steered immigrants away from Memphis for years.

Many of the immigrants who had helped the city to grow are in what Elmwood Cemetery's assistant director Jody Schmidt calls a "trench grave," holding 1,500 caskets placed side by side and end to end. Another 1,000 marked graves are scattered through the cemetery. They made up less than half the city's victims. The population had been roughly 50,000 before about 30,000 fled at the start of the epidemic on Aug. 5, 1878. Of the 19,000 who stayed in Memphis, 17,000 came down with yellow fever, and 5,150 died.

Memphis had been a magnet for German and Irish settlers looking for jobs along the heavily traveled river. "I think there's a chance Memphis might have rivaled Atlanta if it had continued to attract a cosmopolitan mix of people. Memphis became more provincial," says Harkins.

More here-

http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2010/sep/11/yellow-fever-left-mark-on-memphis/