Miracle Hill Ministries, lawsuit asks: Who is a Christian? – RNS
Miracle Hill, the largest provider of care to the needy in the Upstate, runs a vast network of homeless shelters, thrift stores, drug-recovery programs and a foster care agency. While it takes no government money for its adult programs, four years ago the ministry began accepting federal and state dollars for its foster care program.Miracle Hill CEO Reid Lehman. Photo courtesy of Miracle Hill. Last year, it received about $600,000 in public funding.
But Miracle Hill doesn’t view itself as a social service agency. It is first and foremost a ministry and chooses to allow only churchgoing Protestants — “born-again Christians,” in its parlance — to staff the ministry, volunteer and foster children.“We are an arm of the Protestant church,” Reid Lehman, Miracle Hill’s CEO, told Religion News Service recently. “We exist to be a mission arm of Protestant churches and to proclaim Protestant faith. It’s not a judgment or an exclusion. It’s simply that we’re going to be consistent with that.”Lehman, like his father who preceded him as CEO, graduated from Bob Jones University, a bastion of Christian fundamentalism, just five miles away from the Miracle Hill offices.
Bob Jones Jr., the school’s former president, was a known for his hostility to the Catholic Church, calling it “a satanic counterfeit,” for example, and “drunk with the blood of the saints.”In 1987, when St. John Paul II visited South Carolina and held an ecumenical service at the state university’s football stadium, Bob Jones’ leaders protested.
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