The Southern Baptist Convention has lost 2.3 million total members — or 14% of its membership nationwide — since its peak in 2006. New annual data tracking key metrics for the nation’s largest non-Catholic Christian denomination was released last week,…
Dreamers want White House and Congress to do more for their protection
The Biden Administration must do more to protect DACA than invite Dreamers to the White House and streamline the bureaucratic process that grants temporary residency to immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally as children, recipients of the program say. So…
Q&A with a traumatologist on how to prevent clergy abuse and burnout
Editor’s note: The following article was published by BNG on June 7, 2021, but is being republished today because of its relevance to the new report on sexual abuse in the SBC. The unwillingness or inability to do the…
Separation of church and state looks different through the eyes of minorities, BJC speaker says
The First Amendment and concepts such as separation of church and state and freedom of religion seem to signal that religious diversity is strong in the United States. “Well, that’s not really true,” Khyati Joshi, author of White Christian Privilege:…
With a Catholic president in office, America’s bishops threaten to sanction him over abortion
U.S. Protestants are not alone in believing modern-day politics are rending their fellowships in two. American Catholics are fighting about the same things, only this time with one of their own sitting in the White House. Joe Biden’s election as…
Coalition of evangelical Christians advocates third way on immigration reform
Amid the highly contentious debate about how best to enact comprehensive immigration reform on a federal level, several thousand evangelical Christians have signed on to a set of recommendations drafted by the Evangelical Immigration Table. Organizers say they are presenting…
New book brings together lessons learned in study of pastoral imagination
Ongoing social and political upheavals intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic have presented clergy with challenges that will require more than rational brain power to solve, said Baptist minister and author Eileen Campbell-Reed. In her new book, Pastoral Imagination: Bringing the…
Religious coalition files suit to stop Georgia’s new voter law
Bishop Carl McRae remembers growing up in the Jim Crow South as a native Georgian. What he sees happening in Georgia with new restrictive voting laws feels even worse than that, he said. “I’ve never seen anything so bold. And…
America’s divide between left and right more severe than in Western Europe
The growing cultural and political gulf between Americans is not unique in the world today but appears to be more extreme than what is happening in several Western European nations, according to Pew Research Center. Its new study, “Views About…
BNG names Ellis and Pidcock as Clemons Fellows
A Baptist News Global internship program named for the late Ardelle and Hardy Clemons will become a graduate-level fellowship this summer. Laura Ellis and Rick Pidcock have been named BNG’s first Clemons Fellows and will serve 10 weeks this summer…
Russell Moore leaves ERLC for Christianity Today, highlighting the new schism within SBC
Russell Moore’s critics in the Southern Baptist Convention think his departure to the evangelical magazine Christianity Today proves what they’ve believed all along: He’s a liberal. Moore, head of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission for the past eight…
What to do if you unearth a history of slavery in your church, college or institution?
With increasing attention to the roots of American slavery in religious life, more churches and faith-based ministries that existed prior to the Civil War are unearthing truths they wish weren’t true. Then the hard questions arise: How should a church,…