Friday Church News Notes
October 9, 2026 - Volume 27, Issue 41
The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, though this does not imply an endorsement.
ARCHAEOLOGICAL WORK BENEATH THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE CONFIRMS PRESENCE OF FIRST CENTURY GARDEN (Friday Church News Notes, October 9, 2026, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - “Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid” (John 19:41). The following is excerpted from “Ancient Seeds and Pollen Beneath Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre,” Political.org, Sept. 2, 2026: “Archaeologists excavating beneath one of Christianity’s most sacred sites have uncovered ancient botanical evidence--seeds and pollen from olive trees and grapevines--that corroborates the New Testament’s description of a garden at the site where Jesus Christ was crucified and buried. The findings, led by Professor Francesca Romana Stasolla of the Sapienza University of Rome, align closely with John 19:41, which states that a garden stood near the place of crucifixion, containing a new tomb where no one had yet been laid. Archaeobotanical analysis of soil samples extracted from beneath the church’s stone floor revealed ancient seeds and pollen consistent with olive trees and grapevines--characteristic plants of a cultivated first-century Judean garden--dating to approximately 2,000 years ago. ... The church has long been believed to sit on the site of both the crucifixion and burial of Jesus, but until now there had been no archaeological evidence of the garden described in scripture. ... One expert noted that scholars had largely doubted whether Jesus would have been buried in an orchard, but said, ‘instead we find confirmed that there was a garden there--and so the Gospel of John has been proven to be accurate again in the details.’” The following is from “Site where Jesus was crucified and buried,” Fox News, Sept. 2, 2026: “The findings add archaeological support to details described in the Gospel of John, said Douglas Estes, associate professor of religion at New College of Florida. Estes, who specializes in early Christianity and was not involved in the research, told Fox News Digital that the Book of John is often dismissed by skeptics as exaggerated. Archaeology has ‘over time, confirmed, again and again, details from the Gospel of John.’ ... He added, ‘For example, in the 19th century, scholars questioned whether or not there could be five colonnades [at the Pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem], as John 5 describes. Later archeological discoveries have found that, yes, there were five colonnades there.’”
ALTAR PREPARED FOR THIRD TEMPLE (Friday Church News Notes, October 9, 2026, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Rabbi Tovia Singer,” Israel365News, Oct. 4, 2026: “The stones have already been prepared, uncut as prescribed by the law. The priestly garments are sewn, and the silver trumpets are made. According to Rabbi Tovia Singer, the only thing missing for sacrifices to resume in Jerusalem is the decision to carry the altar up the Temple Mount. ... Singer, the founder of Outreach Judaism and one of the most widely followed Jewish teachers on the internet, described watching the mizbeach (altar) being assembled. ... He described the work of the Temple movement this way: ‘They’re saying, ‘Look, Lord, we’re going to go as far as we can on this one, and we’re going to walk until the water is up to our nostrils.’” CONCLUSION FROM FRIDAY NEWS EDITOR: The Third Temple (referenced in Daniel 9:27; Matthew 24:15; 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4; Revelation 11:1-2) will be built during the early days of the Antichrist, in his phony “Mr. Peace” era (Da. 8:25; 9:27; 2 Th. 2:9-12). The Third Temple, which is not the Millennial Temple described in Ezekiel 40-48, will be occupied by the Antichrist, not the Lord Jesus Christ. The Antichrist will declare himself as God and require the nations to worship him on pain of death. There is no greater sign of the lateness of the prophetic hour than the ongoing determination to build the Third Temple. “Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand” (Revelation 1:3).
THE CHOSEN WRAPS UP FILMING AFTER EIGHT YEARS (Friday Church News Notes, October 9, 2026, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The Chosen has wrapped up filming after eight years. Season 6 is scheduled to launch in November and Season 7 (the final) is scheduled to debut in the spring of 2028. The wildly popular series, which has been watched by more than 280 million people worldwide and translated into 125 languages, has been treated like a biblical Christian series by most of the popular press, but it is a dangerous mixture of truth and error. It is yet another example of evangelicalism’s apostasy. Dallas Jenkins, co-writer and director, is the son of Jerry B. Jenkins, who co-authored the Left Behind series with Tim LaHaye and was closely associated with Moody Bible Institute. Yet “the Mormon influence on The Chosen is considerable: the executive producer is Mormon, the distributor is Mormon, certain episodes were shot on a special Mormon set in Utah, and the crowdfunding and media expertise is provided by Mormons. ... Dallas Jenkins told one interviewer that ‘95% of the content [of The Chosen] isn’t from the Bible.’ This means that The Chosen is almost completely man’s word--not God’s Word. ... For example, Mary Magdalene backsliding is not in the Bible; Matthew portrayed as autistic--not in the Bible; Jesus rehearsing His sermon on the mount--not in the Bible (John 12:49-50; John 17:8). ... the apostle Peter had a gambling debt that pressured him to fish overtime on the Sabbath to pay back what he owed [not in the Bible]... Jonathan Roumie, the actor who plays Jesus in The Chosen, is a fervent Catholic with a strong affinity toward the New Age. ... he claims to have had ‘personal interactions’ with a deceased Catholic ‘saint.’ ... Roumie’s recommended reading list on Amazon includes The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything by Jesuit priest and New Age sympathizer, James Martin. The book openly teaches the panentheistic New Age doctrine of God ‘in’ everyone and everything as the following quotes from that book illustrate: ‘God can be found in everything. And everyone too’; ‘We’ll look at how to find God in everything and everything in God’” (The Chosen Series - 10 Critical Concerns, Lighthousetrails.com). Mormonism is false Christianity with a false gospel of works and a false Christ who is not eternal, is the spirit brother of Lucifer, and earned his way to godhood.
THE APEX OF APOSTASY (Friday Church News Notes, October 9, 2026, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The great apostasy, the false Christianity, prophesied in Scripture is nearing full bloom. The evidence is everywhere. Episcopal priest Flourish Klink, a man who “identifies” as a woman, said in March at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, “God is nonbinary. But I’m going to go further than that, and I’m going to say God is actually also trans. ... When we trans people are born, folks assign us a gender based on what they see. Then, when we’re old enough, we realize that wasn’t right and we’re not, in our deepest selves, the gender that everyone thought we were, right? ... When God, who is nonbinary, was born in human flesh, Mary said, ‘O look, a baby boy.’ God isn’t a boy or girl. God was assigned a gender at birth, and later on it became clear that the gender wasn’t quite right” (X, @disntr, Sept. 24, 2026). Meanwhile, an Anglican who calls himself “Rev. Sarah Hobbs,” speaking at a “Love Wins” conference at the All Nations Church, Keighley, West Yorkshire, U.K. on Sept. 13, said his transgenderism is actually the bread of life given to him by God (X, @disntr, Sept. 23, 2026). Meanwhile, at Fountain Street Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the female pastor preached a sermon entitled “Deconstructing Homophobia,” in which she announced the “Beatitudes of a Queer Church,” including these jewels: “Blessed are those who try, who transform, who transition. ... Blessed are the closeted, God sees you shine anyway. ... Blessed are the queers who love creation enough to live the truth of it despite a world that tells them they cannot” (X, @disntr, Sept. 29, 2026). All Saints Catholic Church in Syracuse begins its “Pride Mass” by “bowing down in front of a pride flag, saying ‘Namaste,’ and calling the rainbow a “beautiful symbol of God’s diversity’” (Pulpit & Pen, Sept. 3, 2026). Babs Miller, a “nonbinary” who uses “they/them pronouns” and a minister of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, said recently, “Jesus didn’t die to save our sins. That makes a whole lot more sense to me than to say that some God would kill his Son for us. ... Mary and the virgin birth come out of the pagan belief ... We have no way of knowing if Jesus really existed, any more than we have of knowing that the original Buddha ever existed. And whether or not Jesus existed doesn’t really matter to me” (DailyWire, Sept. 23, 2026).
THE OLD BAPTISTS AND DISCIPLINE (Friday Church News Notes, October 9, 2026, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - Independent Baptists, taken as a whole, have never been very strong for church discipline, but the old Baptists who followed the Bible more than tradition, were. J.L. Dagg, Manual of Church Order, 1857, wrote, “It has been remarked, that when discipline leaves a church, Christ goes with it” (p. 274). In that day, the Baptist churches disciplined for drunkenness, absence from services, resisting the authority of the church, interpersonal hostility, slander, anger, quarreling, cursing, swearing, profanity, falsehood, adultery, fornication, fighting, abuse, theft, debt evasion, neglecting family, neglecting duty, dancing, horse-racing, and gambling (Gregory Wills, Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South 1785-1900). The mention of “debt evasion” reminds us that they disciplined for bankruptcy. “[T]he eighteenth-century Calvinist Baptists were firmly convinced that one of the marks of a genuine church is that it upholds regular and orderly discipline. And among the offences they regarded as meriting the disciplinary action of the church was bankruptcy. In their thinking, insolvency was a breach of the apostle Paul’s explicit command to ‘Owe no man anything’ (Romans 13:8) and was evidence that business had not been conducted with due regard for others or for one’s Christian witness in the world. While the Baptist community recognized that there were some instances of bankruptcy where the person concerned was not to blame, such instances were considered rare. ‘Not one instance out of ten, or perhaps twenty ... can be entirely exonerated from blame and criminality,’ wrote the Welsh Baptist Micah Thomas (1778-1853) in 1821” (Michael Haykin, One Heart and One Soul: John Sutcliff of Olney his friends and his times, p. 285).
CONCLUSION: The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, but this obviously does not imply an endorsement. We trust that our readers will not be discouraged. It is God’s will that we know the times (1 Ch. 12:32; Mt. 16:3) and that we be as wise as serpents and harmless as doves. The News Notes remind us that the hour is very late, and we need to be ready for the Lord’s coming. Are you sure that you are born again? Are you living for Christ? “And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof” (Ro. 13:11-14).
ALTAR PREPARED FOR THIRD TEMPLE (Friday Church News Notes, October 9, 2026, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Rabbi Tovia Singer,” Israel365News, Oct. 4, 2026: “The stones have already been prepared, uncut as prescribed by the law. The priestly garments are sewn, and the silver trumpets are made. According to Rabbi Tovia Singer, the only thing missing for sacrifices to resume in Jerusalem is the decision to carry the altar up the Temple Mount. ... Singer, the founder of Outreach Judaism and one of the most widely followed Jewish teachers on the internet, described watching the mizbeach (altar) being assembled. ... He described the work of the Temple movement this way: ‘They’re saying, ‘Look, Lord, we’re going to go as far as we can on this one, and we’re going to walk until the water is up to our nostrils.’” CONCLUSION FROM FRIDAY NEWS EDITOR: The Third Temple (referenced in Daniel 9:27; Matthew 24:15; 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4; Revelation 11:1-2) will be built during the early days of the Antichrist, in his phony “Mr. Peace” era (Da. 8:25; 9:27; 2 Th. 2:9-12). The Third Temple, which is not the Millennial Temple described in Ezekiel 40-48, will be occupied by the Antichrist, not the Lord Jesus Christ. The Antichrist will declare himself as God and require the nations to worship him on pain of death. There is no greater sign of the lateness of the prophetic hour than the ongoing determination to build the Third Temple. “Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand” (Revelation 1:3).
THE CHOSEN WRAPS UP FILMING AFTER EIGHT YEARS (Friday Church News Notes, October 9, 2026, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The Chosen has wrapped up filming after eight years. Season 6 is scheduled to launch in November and Season 7 (the final) is scheduled to debut in the spring of 2028. The wildly popular series, which has been watched by more than 280 million people worldwide and translated into 125 languages, has been treated like a biblical Christian series by most of the popular press, but it is a dangerous mixture of truth and error. It is yet another example of evangelicalism’s apostasy. Dallas Jenkins, co-writer and director, is the son of Jerry B. Jenkins, who co-authored the Left Behind series with Tim LaHaye and was closely associated with Moody Bible Institute. Yet “the Mormon influence on The Chosen is considerable: the executive producer is Mormon, the distributor is Mormon, certain episodes were shot on a special Mormon set in Utah, and the crowdfunding and media expertise is provided by Mormons. ... Dallas Jenkins told one interviewer that ‘95% of the content [of The Chosen] isn’t from the Bible.’ This means that The Chosen is almost completely man’s word--not God’s Word. ... For example, Mary Magdalene backsliding is not in the Bible; Matthew portrayed as autistic--not in the Bible; Jesus rehearsing His sermon on the mount--not in the Bible (John 12:49-50; John 17:8). ... the apostle Peter had a gambling debt that pressured him to fish overtime on the Sabbath to pay back what he owed [not in the Bible]... Jonathan Roumie, the actor who plays Jesus in The Chosen, is a fervent Catholic with a strong affinity toward the New Age. ... he claims to have had ‘personal interactions’ with a deceased Catholic ‘saint.’ ... Roumie’s recommended reading list on Amazon includes The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything by Jesuit priest and New Age sympathizer, James Martin. The book openly teaches the panentheistic New Age doctrine of God ‘in’ everyone and everything as the following quotes from that book illustrate: ‘God can be found in everything. And everyone too’; ‘We’ll look at how to find God in everything and everything in God’” (The Chosen Series - 10 Critical Concerns, Lighthousetrails.com). Mormonism is false Christianity with a false gospel of works and a false Christ who is not eternal, is the spirit brother of Lucifer, and earned his way to godhood.
THE APEX OF APOSTASY (Friday Church News Notes, October 9, 2026, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The great apostasy, the false Christianity, prophesied in Scripture is nearing full bloom. The evidence is everywhere. Episcopal priest Flourish Klink, a man who “identifies” as a woman, said in March at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, “God is nonbinary. But I’m going to go further than that, and I’m going to say God is actually also trans. ... When we trans people are born, folks assign us a gender based on what they see. Then, when we’re old enough, we realize that wasn’t right and we’re not, in our deepest selves, the gender that everyone thought we were, right? ... When God, who is nonbinary, was born in human flesh, Mary said, ‘O look, a baby boy.’ God isn’t a boy or girl. God was assigned a gender at birth, and later on it became clear that the gender wasn’t quite right” (X, @disntr, Sept. 24, 2026). Meanwhile, an Anglican who calls himself “Rev. Sarah Hobbs,” speaking at a “Love Wins” conference at the All Nations Church, Keighley, West Yorkshire, U.K. on Sept. 13, said his transgenderism is actually the bread of life given to him by God (X, @disntr, Sept. 23, 2026). Meanwhile, at Fountain Street Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the female pastor preached a sermon entitled “Deconstructing Homophobia,” in which she announced the “Beatitudes of a Queer Church,” including these jewels: “Blessed are those who try, who transform, who transition. ... Blessed are the closeted, God sees you shine anyway. ... Blessed are the queers who love creation enough to live the truth of it despite a world that tells them they cannot” (X, @disntr, Sept. 29, 2026). All Saints Catholic Church in Syracuse begins its “Pride Mass” by “bowing down in front of a pride flag, saying ‘Namaste,’ and calling the rainbow a “beautiful symbol of God’s diversity’” (Pulpit & Pen, Sept. 3, 2026). Babs Miller, a “nonbinary” who uses “they/them pronouns” and a minister of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, said recently, “Jesus didn’t die to save our sins. That makes a whole lot more sense to me than to say that some God would kill his Son for us. ... Mary and the virgin birth come out of the pagan belief ... We have no way of knowing if Jesus really existed, any more than we have of knowing that the original Buddha ever existed. And whether or not Jesus existed doesn’t really matter to me” (DailyWire, Sept. 23, 2026).
THE OLD BAPTISTS AND DISCIPLINE (Friday Church News Notes, October 9, 2026, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - Independent Baptists, taken as a whole, have never been very strong for church discipline, but the old Baptists who followed the Bible more than tradition, were. J.L. Dagg, Manual of Church Order, 1857, wrote, “It has been remarked, that when discipline leaves a church, Christ goes with it” (p. 274). In that day, the Baptist churches disciplined for drunkenness, absence from services, resisting the authority of the church, interpersonal hostility, slander, anger, quarreling, cursing, swearing, profanity, falsehood, adultery, fornication, fighting, abuse, theft, debt evasion, neglecting family, neglecting duty, dancing, horse-racing, and gambling (Gregory Wills, Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South 1785-1900). The mention of “debt evasion” reminds us that they disciplined for bankruptcy. “[T]he eighteenth-century Calvinist Baptists were firmly convinced that one of the marks of a genuine church is that it upholds regular and orderly discipline. And among the offences they regarded as meriting the disciplinary action of the church was bankruptcy. In their thinking, insolvency was a breach of the apostle Paul’s explicit command to ‘Owe no man anything’ (Romans 13:8) and was evidence that business had not been conducted with due regard for others or for one’s Christian witness in the world. While the Baptist community recognized that there were some instances of bankruptcy where the person concerned was not to blame, such instances were considered rare. ‘Not one instance out of ten, or perhaps twenty ... can be entirely exonerated from blame and criminality,’ wrote the Welsh Baptist Micah Thomas (1778-1853) in 1821” (Michael Haykin, One Heart and One Soul: John Sutcliff of Olney his friends and his times, p. 285).
CONCLUSION: The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, but this obviously does not imply an endorsement. We trust that our readers will not be discouraged. It is God’s will that we know the times (1 Ch. 12:32; Mt. 16:3) and that we be as wise as serpents and harmless as doves. The News Notes remind us that the hour is very late, and we need to be ready for the Lord’s coming. Are you sure that you are born again? Are you living for Christ? “And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof” (Ro. 13:11-14).
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Distributed by Way of Life Literature, publisher of Bible Study Materials and reports for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. Established in 1974, Way of Life Literature is a fundamental Baptist preaching and publishing ministry based in Bethel Baptist Church, London, Ontario, of which Wilbert Unger is the founding Pastor. Brother Cloud lives in South Asia where he has been a church planting missionary since 1979. OUR GOAL IN THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT OF OUR MINISTRY (REPORTS AND FRIDAY NEWS) IS NOT DEVOTIONAL, BUT TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR.
David Cloud, Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org
The Way of Life Literature preaching and publishing ministry is based at Bethel Baptist Church, London, Ontario, of which Wilbert Unger is the founding Pastor. A mail stop is maintained in Port Huron, Michigan.
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