A guest who vacationed at The Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, was reportedly concerned after encountering a person he believed to be a male portraying a female villain during a character dining experience.

The Disney employee in question was in character as the Evil Queen from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” according to Disney fan blog That Park Place. The man said he noticed the individual portraying the Evil Queen “without a doubt had a man’s voice” when his children posed for pictures with the villain during the Story Book Dining event at the Wilderness Lodge.

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He didn’t notice the seemingly male cast member until he got close to the individual. He said he was taking pictures and videos while his wife and children interacted with the Evil Queen and didn’t notice the actor’s concerning tone of voice “until I got face to face” with the cast member.

“I told my waiter that I had a problem with something,” the guest told the blog. “He then asked what was the issue, and I simply stated I have a problem with Evil Queen being a man dressed in drag. The waiter immediately said he was going to get a manager and he looked panicked.”

He continued, “At first, I said I wanted to formally complain about the Evil Queen being a man and that I felt very disrespected by Disney because this is not the sort of thing my family values and they didn’t give us any type of notice that this sort of thing was even a possibility.”

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The man went on to say he and his family are Christians who spent thousands of dollars on their Disney vacation and that it “is not right” for a male to portray a female Disney character.

To read the full story, visit our content partners at CBN News.

Reprinted with permission from cbn.com. Copyright © 2024 The Christian Broadcasting Network Inc. All rights reserved.

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John Lindell took time during his sermon Sunday to “apologize” for inviting both Driscoll and Magala to the Stronger Men’s Conference, which took place in mid-April.

“I want to apologize and let you know I take full responsibility for the decision that was made to invite Mark Driscoll and Alex Magala to the Stronger Men’s Conference,” he said, according to The Roys Report. “I am deeply saddened by the division that our invitation has brought to the Body of Christ. That was never our intent.”

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The pastor added, “The Stronger Men’s Conference is about reaching men for Jesus Christ, and it will continue to be about reaching men for Jesus Christ.”

Days prior, during a Wednesday service at James River Church, Lindell revealed Driscoll had accused one of his sons, Brandon Lindell, of a “list of dark sins.” He went on to call Driscoll’s behavior in recent days as “demonic” and urged the Scottsdale-based preacher to repent for his actions.

Last week, though, Driscoll took to his X account, where he wrote, seemingly in reference to Lindell, “Tolerance is demonic . . . When the church gets naughtier than the culture, they become an abomination.”

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Driscoll has—in the days since the conference—seemingly capitalized on the media attention he has garnered to promote his newest book, “New Days, Old Demons.”

Interestingly, Lindell didn’t explain why exactly he was apologizing for inviting Magala. The James River pastor reportedly told his congregation last Wednesday that Magala’s performance was appropriate for a men’s conference and that the sword-swallower became a born-again Christian a decade ago and attends Mosaic Church in Los Angeles.

Magala broke his silence last week, when he posted a video response to the ordeal on Instagram.

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A post shared by Alex Magala (@alexmagala)

The stunt-performer thanked Lindell for his kind words but clarified that he didn’t become a Christian 10 years ago because he was born into an Orthodox Christian family and, as such, he explained he went “through the ceremony of becoming a Christian as a baby.”

To read the full story, visit our content partners at Faithwire.com.

Reprinted with permission from cbn.com. Copyright © 2024 The Christian Broadcasting Network Inc. All rights reserved.

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Luke Smallbone, one half of the Grammy-winning Christian duo For King & Country, is no stranger to struggle. The difficulties he and his wife have endured have proven to be blessings in their lives.

“I fiercely love my wife,” Smallbone told CBN News. “And a lot of that has to do with the fact that we’ve actually been through some things. We actually lived out our vows in our 20s. Not many people are saying, ‘Hey, I’ve lived out my vows in my 20s.’ They usually think that’s gonna take place in their 60s and 80s.”

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“But for us,” he continued, “living out those things has given our relationship the ability to look back and say, ‘Hey, if we went through this, why can’t we go through that?’ And I think that’s been nothing but a good thing for us.”

Smallbone’s wife, Courtney, has opened up to CBN News in the past about her intense fight with crippling anxiety and drug addiction brought on, respectively, by a rare disease diagnosis and severe morning sickness during her second pregnancy.

Thanks to her husband’s support and the Lord’s faithfulness in her life, Courtney has found healing and freedom from her addiction.

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Reflecting back, Smallbone sees how God has used painful things—like the potential loss of their son—to speak to him and his wife.

“When pain comes, allow that to be an opportunity for change,” he said, sharing a lesson God has taught him over the years. “[I]f something catastrophic happened and I lose my marbles, it probably says something about me. It probably has less to do with the circumstance.”

Avoiding pain and suffering is a natural human instinct. And in Western culture, one of the ways people often try to numb or distract themselves from difficulty is by filling their calendars with things—events to busy their bodies and minds.

Over the years, though, Smallbone said he’s realized dealing with tough relational issues, rather than running from them, has proven to have the power to deepen the bond he has with Courtney.

To read the full story, visit our content partners at Faithwire.com.

Reprinted with permission from cbn.com. Copyright © 2024 The Christian Broadcasting Network Inc. All rights reserved.

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“Don’t go to Hollywood.”

That was a line the Robertsons of “Duck Dynasty” fame heard time and again when they first told their family and friends they decided to step into the world of reality television.

The Lord, though, gave the now-famous family a response to that well-meaning—if misguided—plea. Korie Robertson, wife to Willie and mother to Sadie and John Luke, recently said on CBN’s “Faith vs. Culture” they turned to the biblical promise found in 2 Timothy 1:7.

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The New Testament passage reads, “For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline” (NLT).

“[God] says He will be with us wherever we go, so we just asked God’s favor on us, His protection [to be] on us,” she said. “God says to go into all the world. So whenever anybody asks me, ‘Should I get into entertainment as a believer?’ I’m like, ‘Yes, we need more people in entertainment. We need more light in that [industry].'”

Newly released data from AllConnect found average internet users spends nearly seven hours a day looking at screens—a 60% increase from before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. And children ages 8-10 are spending about six hours a day staring at screens, while 11- to 14-year-olds are using the internet for upwards of nine hours every day.

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All that to say, Robertson realized there is immense power in the media industry. So why not leverage it for good?

“Whenever we started ‘Duck Dynasty,’ it wasn’t necessarily a faith show,” said Robertson, noting there was no way to “get around” talking about their Christian beliefs, though, “because it’s who we are.”

To read the full story, visit our content partners at Faithwire.

Reprinted with permission from cbn.com. Copyright © 2024 The Christian Broadcasting Network Inc. All rights reserved.

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A now-former Starbucks employee is claiming the Seattle-based coffee café fired her after she openly objected to the company’s Pride month display.

Taylor Trice opened up about her ouster in a viral TikTok video, explaining she was cut from the Starbucks store in Apex, North Carolina, because she took issue with an LGBT display as well as a policy requiring her to use a transgender-identifying employee’s “preferred pronouns.”

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The display and policy, she said, doesn’t “go along with God’s Word.”

“Prior to working at Starbucks, I knew nothing about it except that it was considered a bougie coffee shop,” she said in an interview with Fox News. “So I didn’t know that it was a very liberal company.”

Trice, who worked for Starbucks for two years, said she started working at the café because the company offered tuition assistance for Arizona State University’s online program. She was fired from her job in 2022, she said in the video.

The ex-employee said she was willing to call the transgender-identifying staffer by name and avoid the use of pronouns altogether, because her Christian faith didn’t allow her to lie.

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“That means, if I see you are a man, and I call you a woman, that is lying,” she explained. “That is identifying you as something that God did not create you to be. And it’s identifying you as something that Satan wants to identify you as, and Satan’s ultimate goal is to confuse you and deceive you about your identity.”

To read the full story, visit our content partners at Faithwire.

Reprinted with permission from cbn.com. Copyright © 2024 The Christian Broadcasting Network Inc. All rights reserved.

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More than one-in-five members of Generation Z now identify as LGBT, with close to 30% of generational women falling into that category, according to new data released this week by Gallup.

Roughly 22% of young adults ages 18 to 26 self-identified as LGBT, a higher percentage than the nearly one-in-10 Millennials—ages 27 to 42 years old—who identified as such, and even greater than the 5% of Generation X, 2% of Baby Boomers, and 1% of the Silent Generation who claimed such identities.

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Taken as a whole, 7.6% of adults in the general population identified last year as part of the LGBT community. Slightly more than 85% of those polled identified as heterosexual.

Jeffrey Jones, a senior editor for Gallup, told NBC News the uptick is largely driven by Gen Z women.

“That’s where a lot of the growth seems to be happening,” he said.

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The explosion of LGBT-identified youth comes as many on the left and even in federal government agencies—like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—have pushed for LGBT ideologies to be hoisted upon children and teenagers.

As CBN News reported in early 2023, the CDC released materials at the time urging public school educators and administrators to embrace LGBT causes, all in the name of inclusivity. The agency provided a “self-assessment tool” to help school officials determine just how supportive they are of sexual minorities.

To read the full story, visit our content partners at Faithwire.

Reprinted with permission from cbn.com. Copyright © 2024 The Christian Broadcasting Network Inc. All rights reserved.

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It took Zach Williams traveling to Europe, riding in a van and hearing Big Daddy Weave to realize things needed to change.

“It’s a pretty incredible story, what God’s done in my life, throughout my life,” reflected Williams during a recent appearance on CBN’s “Faith vs. Culture,” where he talked about his forthcoming memoir, “Rescue Story: Faith, Freedom, and Finding My Way Home,” releasing Feb. 27.

In high school, Williams developed a penchant for drugs—addictive behaviors he carried into his twenties, when he joined a rock band, stepping into a world of decadence and indulgence.

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“We started traveling and touring, which that just led me down an even darker path,” said Williams. “I thought, in order to play music, I needed to live a certain lifestyle. If I was gonna be in a rock band, that meant you did drugs and you use alcohol on a daily basis and you live this reckless lifestyle.”

For more than a decade, Williams was all in, trapped in a downward spiral.

“I went pretty hard,” he admitted. “I didn’t think about the next day; I just lived for the moment. And I carried it into a marriage, I carried it into being a father and a husband.”

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In the summer of 2012, as he was traveling to Europe with his band, Williams said he came to the realization the way he was living was not sustainable. He was raised in the church and knew—unless something changed—he was on a path that would cost him everything, including his wife and children.

Sick and tired of being sick and tired, Williams asked God to prove Himself to him.

“I was riding in a van one day and the guy driving the bus was scanning radio stations and, out of nowhere, I hear this song called ‘Redeemed‘ by Big Daddy Weave come across the radio and, man, that song just hit me; it struck a chord,” said Williams. “I listened to the lyrics when I got to the hotel room and I called my wife and I said, ‘Hey, I’m done. I’m out of here,’ and she couldn’t believe it. But I came home from that tour and quit my band and I cancelled all my shows.” {eoa}

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To read the original story, visit our content partners at Faithwire.com.

Reprinted with permission from cbn.com. Copyright © 2024 The Christian Broadcasting Network Inc. All rights reserved.

Like Dan Aykroyd said in “The Blues Brothers,” actor Jonathan Roumie is “on a mission from God.”

Roumie—a devout Catholic from New York City—sees his work portraying Jesus on the hit Bible-based series “The Chosen” as ministry, he told CBN News. The 49-year-old actor made the comment during a brief interview from the Four Seasons Hotel at Beverly Hills in Los Angeles.

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He was relaxed but engaged, composing himself after learning seconds earlier his image—dressed in first-century clothing, of course—is one of the top results that appear in a Google search for “Jesus.”

It’s no surprise Roumie’s face has, for many, become inextricably linked to their perception of their Savior—a complex phenomenon no doubt weighing heavily on the celebrity’s mind. But with a series that has been streamed more than 500 million times, the correlation was bound to happen.

Snapped back to reality, where he was wearing a velvet fedora and blazer adorned with leopard spots, Roumie said it’s “completely humbling to be even in the same sentence as Jesus.”

“But He kind of put me here,” Roumie said after exhaling his emotion. “So I can’t shy away from the association completely. There is, for me, a sense of mission about what I’m doing and it happens to be in the form of entertainment. And that’s the gifts that I was equipped with by God, I believe.”

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“I’m just kind of following where He’s leading me,” the actor continued. “And my entire life and career has led me to this point, and what happens going forward and where God puts me and how He develops my career is up to Him. I just pray to always be complicit in His designs and to not try to steamroll with my own hopes and desires.”

As an actor who believes in the divine inspiration of the show’s source material—the Bible—Roumie knows where his character is heading. With the lingering crucifixion hanging overhead, the actor said it’s perhaps more important now than ever to be “present,” personally and professionally.

Season four, set to debut in theaters Feb. 1, centers on the persecution of the disciples as Jesus prepares His perplexed and, at times, discouraged followers for what is coming.

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To read the original story, visit our content partners at CBN News.

Reprinted with permission from cbn.com. Copyright © 2024 The Christian Broadcasting Network Inc. All rights reserved.

Mixed among the thousands of Americans marching in Washington, D.C., Friday were a handful of women whose paths to the nation’s capital city were marked by the very action being protested: abortion.

Mingling among the masses were Mary and Shawna, two women who spoke with CBN News during Friday’s March for Life about the regretful choices they’d made in their respective pasts, and why it was important to each of them to march from the Washington Monument to the U.S. Supreme Court Building.

“I had an abortion when I was 18 and, at this point, I really am marching on behalf of my child, who was not born and I want women to know—and I want others to know—that there were a lot of ramifications to me after I had the abortion,” said Mary. “I thought I was taking care of a short-term problem, but really, it was not as positive as I was led to believe; it was really a very negative experience.”

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Like many women, Mary said she was coerced into believing an abortion would be the right decision that would, in some way, correct the trajectory of her life.

Abby Johnson, a former executive for a clinic with Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, has recounted she and others within the organization were encouraged to “sell” more than 1,000 abortions per year, because terminations are the biggest moneymaker for the business.

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“Abortion is not a good thing,” Mary said Friday. “I did kill my son, and I’m sorry. I regret that. And I want other people to know that, for the inconvenience of the relatively short time of pregnancy, you can give your child life. And there are a variety of ways of taking care of that child. If you cannot, there are others who can. I’m hoping you have hope for healing if you have had an abortion.”

To those who might be considering abortion, Mary urged those women “to reconsider that” and reach out to crisis pregnancy centers instead.

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To read the original story, visit our content partners at Faithwire.

Reprinted with permission from cbn.com. Copyright © 2024 The Christian Broadcasting Network Inc. All rights reserved.“

Thousands of Israelis flocked on Wednesday to the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem—a spiritually significant site for Jewish people—to “cry out, plead, and invoke heavenly mercy upon all of Israel,” particularly for those still held hostage by Hamas in Gaza.

More than 50,000 people thronged the alleyways of the prayer site, according to i24 News.

Thousands came together in prayer for the kidnapped victims at the Western Wall, including dozens of hostages’ family members ❤️

UNITED AS ONE pic.twitter.com/xiscyPr4tr

— Adam Albilya – אדם אלביליה (@AdamAlbilya) January 10, 2024

A cohort of chief rabbis, prominent Jewish faith leaders, religious organizations and loved ones of those still held hostage by the terrorist group called on the people of Israel to join them in prayer for God’s mercy and protection.

“We pray for God’s mercy on Klal Yisrael, for the healing of the wounded bodies and souls, for the success of the IDF soldiers and the security forces, for the safe return of the hostages,” they said in a joint statement, All Israel News reported.

To read the full story, visit our content partners at Faithwire.

Reprinted with permission from faithwire.com. Copyright © 2024 The Christian Broadcasting Network Inc. All rights reserved.

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