By Christian Daily InternationalFriday, October 31, 2025The Rev. Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals in the United States, delivers a morning devotional at the World Evangelical Alliance General Assembly in Seoul, South Korea, on Oct. 29, 2025, emphasizing the Gospel of peace and reconciliation. | Christian Daily InternationalSEOUL, South Korea — On the third morning of the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) General Assembly, the Rev. Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in the United States, delivered a deeply personal devotional message about the reconciling power of the Gospel amid the turmoil of the modern world.Kim began by recalling a prayer he made 21 years ago, when his daughter, Naomi, was born with an intellectual disability and severe medical complications. “I was in the hospital, sitting next to her incubator as she was connected to tubes,” he said. “I couldn’t touch her. In the early weeks of life, I merely touched the plastic that separated us and prayed that God would fill her lungs and pulse blood through her veins.” He shared that he and his wife gave their daughter the middle name Joy, inspired by Nehemiah 8:10: “The joy of the Lord is your strength.” “We began to pray by that incubator that she would receive the joy of the Lord and that she would give the joy of the Lord,” Kim said.Her story, he explained, became a living picture of the Gospel — “how God responds to the problem of sin with the Gospel of peace to form a people with a missional purpose of reconciling hospitality.”Kim described the first-century world in which the Gospel was born — a time of deep political, cultural and social instability. “The Roman Empire had caused the greatest mass migration of people known in human history up to that time,” he said. “The empire promised unity, but there were constant rebellions.”He drew parallels between that world and the present. “This is our time as well,” Kim said. “Religious pluralism, urbanization, mass migration, economic upheaval, multiculturalism, breakdown of old worldviews — you name it. The Gospel must be proclaimed in tumultuous times.”Kim said the greatest problem facing humanity is not external turmoil but sin itself. “Sin separates, shatters and shames,” he said. “It alienates us from God, from one another, and even from ourselves.”Quoting Romans 7, he said, “The good that I want to do, I don’t do, but I do the very evil that I don’t want to do. We are alienated even within ourselves.”He explained that Christ’s work on the cross is the ultimate act of reconciliation. “God rescues us,” Kim said. “God responds to this problem of sin that separates and shatters and shames us with the reconciling peace of Christ. Jesus’ body was broken on the cross so that you could be made whole.”“Peace,” he emphasized, “is not a technique. Peace is not a thing. Peace is a person — the person of Jesus Christ.”Kim drew from the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesians to illustrate the Gospel’s power to unite. He explained that the “dividing wall of hostility” mentioned by Paul referred to literal walls in the Jerusalem temple that separated Gentiles, Jewish women and Jewish men.“Herod built a temple with dividing walls of hostility,” Kim said. “Signs were posted that warned Gentiles they could be killed if they crossed them.”“The Gospel,” he continued, “breaks down these walls of hostility. It forms a new people, a new temple — the Church — in which we belong to God and to one another.”Kim said the essence of the Gospel is “one of peace and peacemaking.” “We now belong to God and we belong to each other,” he said. “There is no other option.”Kim explained that Scripture uses several metaphors to describe this new reality in Christ — social, political, familial and architectural. “In verse 19, Paul says, ‘You are no longer strangers and aliens,’” he noted. “That is a social metaphor. Then he says, ‘You are fellow citizens with the saints,’ a political metaphor. Then, ‘members of the household of God,’ a family metaphor. And finally, we are built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets — an architectural metaphor.”“If we are to have a Gospel for everyone,” Kim said, “we need a Gospel for everything. The Gospel should touch every aspect of society — individuals and institutions, personal and public, spiritual and social.”Kim said the Gospel flourishes when believers live out reconciliation in tangible ways. He shared about visiting Malawi, where churches of different denominations were serving together in a predominantly Muslim area through literacy programs, vocational training, early childhood education and sustainable farming.“There were 80 children there, most of them Muslim children, memorizing ‘Jesus loves me, this I know,’” Kim said. Local Muslim chieftains, he added, had encouraged their children to attend because of the Church’s work in the community.He recalled that during the visit, the local chief asked Naomi to address the villagers. “There was a woman there who had three children with disabilities, and her husband had just left her,” Kim said. “Naomi stood up and said, ‘God loves you. Study hard and learn to read.’ And she added ‘thank you’ in the local language.”He said that moment reminded him of the prayer he prayed 21 years earlier. “Every person has a place at the table of God. Every person has a call to be on mission,” Kim said. “There is none too great and none too small, not abled or disabled, that in the great economy of God cannot be redeemed.”“There is no alienation, no separation, no shattering, and no shame that God cannot renew and remake,” he concluded. “And the Gospel touches it all.”This article was originally published at Christian Daily International Christian Daily International provides biblical, factual and personal news, stories and perspectives from every region, focusing on religious freedom, holistic mission and other issues relevant for the global Church today.

By Christian TodayFriday, October 31, 2025Ben Jack, an evangelist with The Message Trust in the U.K., speaks at the World Evangelical Alliance's 14th General Assembly in Seoul, South Korea, on Oct. 30, 2025. | Hudson Tsuei/Christian Daily International SEOUL, South Korea — The Church must be willing to go into some “very dark places” to share the Good News of Jesus Christ while being careful not to compromise the Gospel, says evangelist Ben Jack. Jack has been an evangelist for 26 years, currently working with The Message Trust in the U.K., and is a former DJ. He didn’t decide to be a DJ for its own sake, he told the World Evangelical Alliance’s General Assembly, but rather intentionally: to be a missionary in the nightclubs and bars of the U.K.  Becoming a DJ made it possible to go into these spaces to share the Gospel through words and actions with people who were “looking for an escape from reality on a Friday night after a difficult week, because reality is hard for a lot of people.”Rather than looking for an escape, his simple but effective message was that they could instead find the best possible reality and embrace it: Jesus Christ.Those years in the nightclub taught him two important things about evangelism. The first was that Christians who want to go out into these dark places to share the Gospel need to be sure about what they believe, so that they can influence the culture; otherwise, the culture will influence them. “If we don't know the Gospel deeply, richly and above everything else, when we go into the world to engage culturally, it is culture that will evangelize us, rather than we who will evangelize into the culture,” he said. “There are many, many well-intentioned people who seek to use the things of culture as a gateway into giving people access to the Gospel, but over time, their good intention of desiring to impact and encounter people in the cultural space starts to eat away at the integrity of the Gospel."He said it was all too easy for Christians to start altering the Gospel in a bid to win others, but reminded WEA delegates that anything less than the Gospel is not what the world needs to hear. Meeting practical needs should not mean that Christians renounce telling people about the Gospel, he went on. “Before we know it, we do what Paul warned us against in Galatians and we either add something to the Gospel that shouldn’t be there or, more likely, we take something away from the Gospel and we turn it into no Gospel at all — and there is no point to no Gospel at all.“The world has a billion and one gospels it thinks will save them, but there is only one true Gospel — the Gospel of Jesus Christ," he said. Jack challenged Christians to think about just how much they trust that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is enough. When this conviction is firm, then Christians can think about how they can “use culture to our advantage.”The second thing he learned from his experience of being a missionary in nightclubs was that while tradition is important, it is “not ultimate,” especially if it stops Christians from entering into unholy places to reach the lost.“If we get too trapped into our traditional ways of doing things, we will never go into the nightclub spaces because we will think ‘no, no, we mustn’t do that, we can’t do that, our tradition dictates that that is not a place for us to go and be.’” He continued, “If we’re going to reach the world with the Good News by 2033, we need to do two really important things: we need to make sure that the Gospel is the thing we commit to above all else — that we know it, we live it, we breathe it and give glory to the One whom it is all about. “And secondly, that we ask careful questions about our traditions because we want to be rooted in our tradition enough that we are not tossed around by the spirit of the age — that we have an anchor, a firm foundation — but that we are not so beholden to traditions that are extra to the tenets of the Gospel itself that we then fail to be faithful to the opportunities that God has for us. “If we could get over ourselves a little bit, we could go and do some things that we are otherwise not inclined to do.” The World Evangelical Alliance's 14th General Assembly is being held from Oct. 27-31 and is attended by 850 Christian leaders from 124 nations under the theme of "The Gospel for Everyone by 2033." This article was originally published at Christian Today 

By Michael Gryboski, Editor Friday, October 31, 2025A statue of 16th-century theologian Martin Luther holds a Bible in the hand on the marketplace during the celebrations to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Luther's nailing of his 95 theses on the doors of the nearby Schlosskirche church on October 31, 2017 in Wittenberg, Germany. | Carsten Koall/Getty ImagesOn Oct. 31, 1517, an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther nailed 95 theses on a church door in Wittenberg, Germany, launching the widely influential Protestant Reformation.Luther’s objections to various corrupt practices and theological positions taken by the Catholic Church continue to influence religion and culture in the Western world to the present day.However, challenging such widespread views led to Luther gaining many adversaries, ranging from scholars who intellectually debated him to rulers who tried to stamp out his cause violently.Some of these opponents started as allies, eventually falling out with Luther over what and how to reform; others began as enemies, but later became direct or indirect allies. Here are seven notable enemies of Martin Luther.  Follow Michael Gryboski on Twitter or Facebook Page 2 By Michael Gryboski, Editor Friday, October 31, 20251. Girolamo AleandroGirolamo Aleandro (1480-1542), also known as Hieronymus Aleander, a Roman Catholic cardinal and humanist scholar known for his opposition to the Protestant Reformation. | Wikimedia CommonsAlso known as Hieronymus Aleander, Girolamo Aleandro was born in Venice, Italy, and became a humanist scholar and cardinal known for his opposition to the Protestant Reformation. Aleandro served as a nuncio at the court of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, where he was assigned to crack down on the teachings of Martin Luther as they spread throughout the empire.“He procured Luther’s condemnation at the Diet of Worms in 1521, and is supposed to have been the author of the edict issued against the great reformer,” explained the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia.“In 1531 he was sent as papal representative to Charles V, whom he accompanied to the Netherlands and Italy, zealous in inciting the emperor to action against the Protestants.”Aleandro was later sent to German King Ferdinand to help advance a “conciliatory policy toward the Protestants,” but when he failed to do so, he “demanded their ruthless destruction.”Follow Michael Gryboski on Twitter or Facebook