Kerala floods: Sikh volunteers clean up Alleppey church in time for Sunday Mass
After the clean-up that took two days for a team of around fourteen volunteers, locals were able to offer Sunday prayers at the Thalavady St John’s Marthoma Church at Neerattupuram in Alleppey. While the Sikh volunteers from Khalsa Aid continue to prepare Guru ka Langar(community kitchen) and serve over 13,000 meals a day in flood-hit Kerala, a team of around fourteen of them have come forward to clean up a church in Alleppey. Only after the cleanup, which took two days to complete, locals were able to offer Sunday prayers at the Thalavady St John’s Marthoma Church at Neerattupuram in Alleppey (officially district Alappuzha). The church premises were filled with slush from the floodwaters, making it inaccessible to the public. “The local Christian community was unable to offer their Sunday Prayers as the church was filled with water and people were unable to access it. They requested our volunteers to clean the church for the Sunday mass. Our team sprung into action and cleaned the church in two days so that the community could offer prayers without any hurdles. They were overwhelmed by the dedication of our volunteers,” said
Amarpreet Singh, Asia Pacific managing director for Khalsa Aid to The Indian Express. Gurpreet Singh, a volunteer from Patiala, said, “It took us two days to clean the whole church. We completed the work on Saturday and it felt very satisfying when people were able to do their Sunday prayers in the church. A message of humanity and communal harmony was given by our volunteers in these testing times for Kerala.” Currently, a team of 22 volunteers of Khalsa Aid is in Kerala for relief operations and providing fresh hot meals in several camps.
Sen. John McCain: Known as a veteran but also a man of quiet faith
Sen. John McCain, a former prisoner of war who embraced patriotism loudly and religion quietly, died Saturday (Aug. 25) at the age of 81. McCain was diagnosed in July 2017 with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. The longtime Arizona Republican senator, reared in the Episcopal Church, attended a Southern Baptist megachurch in his later years. He viewed himself as a Christian but had “a distrust of the religious right and a faith that is too public, too political,” author Stephen
Mansfield, author of books about the faiths of presidents and presidential candidates, told Religion News Service in December 2017. It was during McCain’s runs for president, especially his second campaign in 2008, that he spoke about his faith. But, even then, he tended to tell a story about a silent expression of belief in God. In a family memoir, a campaign ad as well as a televised interview with megachurch pastor Rick Warren, he recalled a guard in his prisoner of war
camp in Vietnam who shared his faith one Christmas. “He stood there for a minute, and with his sandal on the dirt in the courtyard, he drew a cross and he stood there,” McCain told Warren at the Saddleback Civil Forum in August of that campaign year. “And a minute later, he rubbed it out, and walked away. For a minute there, there were just two Christians worshipping together.” Asked by Warren what being a Christian means, McCain simply replied: “It means I’m saved and forgiven.”