Premier Christian Newscast

Sadly, today’s episode will be the last episode of the Premier Christian Newscast. To wrap the show up, we looked back over the last two years at what stories and topics have come up the most. What has been making waves in church news? What issues ar...

All of the UK will be going to the polls soon in a general election, which is expected at some point in the autumn. After a drubbing in the recent local elections, Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives are widely expected to be dumped out of office in Westmins...

The horrendous attack on a mother and her children by Abdul Ezedi, an Afghan asylum seeker, in Clapham earlier this year sparked a ferocious row. A string of politicians and right-wing media outlets accused churches of giving asylum seekers like Ezed...

It’s not just British denominations which are splintering under the weight of their divisions. The United Methodist Church in the United States has also gone through a painful five years of divorce, with up to one in four congregations choosing to le...

It’s not just a toddler group. Emphasis on the ‘just’. That’s the title and message of a new report which urges churches to take their midweek parents and toddler groups more seriously. These groups are not just about toys on mats and beakers of juic...

It is not just the Church of England and the Catholic Church which has been wrestling with divisions over same-sex marriage in recent years. The Baptist Union is also split between those who believe God affirms gay marriage and those who hold to a tr...

Ecumenism. Even the word itself is probably putting some of you off right now. A tiresome bit of churchy jargon that has no relevance for your church or spiritual life, right? But working for unity across churches and denominations is for some a genu...

Many of England’s biggest football clubs – today some of the country’s largest entertainment businesses – were originally started by local churches 150 years ago. Fascinatingly, the connections between Christianity and football are not solely a histo...

Just before Christmas, the Catholic Church surprisingly announced priests could offer pastoral blessings to same-sex couples for the first time. The announcement has been a jolt of energy to the church, delighting liberals who have been quick to publ...

Almost nobody has heard of Sir Paul Marshall until a few weeks ago. But, thanks to his Twitter account, the multi-millionaire hedge funder and media mogul has become briefly famous, or perhaps infamous. An investigation has revealed Marshall had a pr...

After the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, the Church of England embarked on a racial reckoning just like so many institutions. This produced a landmark report and a new racial justice unit. But more than three year...

A Christian gospel singer was approached by the police while busking in central London. In a video of the conversation, one of the officers tells the singer she is not allowed to sing church songs outside of church grounds, and later sticks her tongu...

Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the government of Iran has sought to tightly control its small Christian minority and suppress the spread of Christianity throughout the population. But the Women Life Freedom anti-government protest movement has...

The story which dominated the UK church world last year was undoubtedly the revelations about Mike Pilavachi and Soul Survivor. But while the C of E’s investigation into him confirmed he had acted inappropriately at the Watford church he led, the sto...

Christians spend an awful lot of time thinking about how and why people join the church. But we rarely consider the opposite – all of those who leave. Every year, an entirely uncounted number of people give up on going to church. Some continue to bel...