The work of the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) is becoming even more important at a time when communication is increasingly reduced to technique at the service of partisan interests and profit, the organization’s president told its board of directors on the opening day of their Oct. 9-14 meeting here.

An increase in world migration has spurred the growth of new dynamic Christian communities in many countries, but the trend also poses many challenges for older churches, said religious leaders.

After a drunk driver killed his parents and left him paralyzed, the fictional character John Weller was a bitter 22-year-old in St. Louis who sat in his wheelchair and watched television.

That all changed on a rainy night when he met two other characters from a new animated feature film, “The 99: Unbound.”

Dana Ibrahim (a.k.a. Noora The Light) and Nawaf Al Bilali (a.k.a. Jabbar The Powerful) told Weller that the gemstone he received from a nurse endowed him with the powers of causing or reliving pain.

“Where are you from?” Weller asked.

“We’re from all over,” answered a man, calling himself Ramzi Razem, “but we have much in common.”

The scene from “Unbound,” which premiered Oct. 2 at the New York Film Festival, is based on “The 99,” a popular Kuwaiti comic book series whose superheroes each represent one of Islam’s 99 attributes of God.

God’s declaration in the book of Isaiah to call God’s house “a house of prayer for all nations” is a charge First Thai-Laotian Presbyterian Church of Las Vegas, Nev., takes to heart as they build a multicultural ministry. But little did church members know that they would welcome into their house of prayer people from a “nation” forgotten in this country: men living on the Las Vegas streets and sometimes in the bushes behind the church. 

When the church organized in 2002 it consisted of four families meeting in one another’s homes for prayer groups. Now on any given Sunday those attending the afternoon Bible study, dinner and worship service might include people from a dozen different ethnic groups. Rev. Prachuab Dechawan leads the growing congregation, which numbers 60 members. He has been shepherding the growth of Thai Presbyterian churches in the United States since the early 1970s, when he helped to establish the first congregation, Thai Community Church in Hollywood, Calif. Other churches formed in Fort Worth, Chicago, New York, and San Jose.

The 2012 Presbyterian Mission Yearbook for Prayer and Study has just been published, but what exactly is this resource and how do you use it?

There is no one answer — and that flexibility is part of what has made the book such a valuable resource for 120 years.

“In the complex religious and ecumenical situation, but also the economic, political and social one that we are living, God calls us as the Evangelical Theological Seminary (SET) of Matanzas, each one of us who attempt to respond to that call, to give a reason for hope,” said seminary president Reinerio Arce Valentín in his message on the occasion of the 65th anniversary of SET, celebrated Oct. 3-4.

When he dies, Clem Parnell expects his soul to ascend heavenward. He wants his ashes to be loaded into a shotgun shell and blasted at a turkey.

The kitchen table was where the Rev. Ron Peters learned most about theology and inclusiveness, the president of the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta told participants in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s biennial synod Committee on Representation (COR) training event here.

“The kitchen table where I was raised ― that’s where I got my theology,” Peters said during his Oct. 14 sermon. “It was my parents’ house, but was all our table. Now we try to do the same thing for our children and grandchildren,” he said.  “They all know where their places are and the conversation just flows ― the nurturing and shaping, where we share far more than food.”

That’s why the Christian church finds the table such an important image, Peters said. And for Presbyterians, it’s Committees on Representation that help assure everyone’s place at the denominational table ― a common table that expresses and reflects oneness in Jesus Christ.

One of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize winners, Leymah Gbowee, a Liberian activist who helped bring her country out of a brutal civil war, said on Oct. 7 that the best way to achieve global peace is to start in local communities.

Ten years after tiny St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church was destroyed by falling rubble from the World Trade Center towers, church leaders reached an agreement Oct. 14 to rebuild at Ground Zero.

The church, founded by Greek immigrants in 1916, sat in the shadow of the twin towers and was the only religious building to be completely destroyed during the 9/11 attacks.