By Bob Allen The Florida Baptist Convention is contesting a May 17 jury verdict that found the Southern Baptist Convention affiliate liable for sexual abuse committed by a former church planter. The Florida Baptist Witness reported June 12 that the…
Baptist school fires gay librarian
By Bob Allen A gay librarian at Shorter University who refused to sign a statement rejecting homosexuality has been fired, the Save Our Shorter website reported June 7. Michael Wilson, 50, off-campus librarian for professional studies since 1998, returned his…
CBF assembly sessions to be webcast
By Bob Allen Five main sessions of the upcoming June 20-23 Cooperative Baptist Fellowship General Assembly in Fort Worth, Texas, will be broadcast live online. Sessions can be viewed live or accessed later from archives at www.thefellowship.info/fortworth. The first webcast…
Church aids widow facing eviction
By Jeff Brumley Mary Cate Jones never doubted her congregation would help when it learned she faced a foreclosure crisis last month. But raising $35,000 in the last two weeks of May and finding a donor to match the rest?…
OPINION: ‘Melancholia’ and the Good War
Death. Final, epic, Wagnerian death in a colossal collision between a rogue planet off-course and Earth. Somehow Melancholia makes it beautiful, poetic and completely and peacefully final. The film by director Lars von Trier is a sumptuous exploration of the…
WINN RECOMMENDS
Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind, Mark Noll (Eerdmans) More than 15 years ago, Noll fired a shot across the bow of the evangelical ship with his book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. In those pages, he…
OPINION: Signs of the spirit
Rolling out with those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer is the longest and perhaps most difficult season of the church calendar. From May 27 until Nov. 23—24 Sundays in all—the Church is in a season simply known as “after…
VITAL SIGNS: Jesus on strategic planning
Building a congregation’s life around a clear vision and purpose is an easy thing to believe in. Aligning that purpose with biblical teaching and witness is an agreeable notion. I seldom encounter a leader or leadership group who resists the…
OUT LOUD
“Mormonism isn’t a denomination. It’s a different religion but calling it a ‘cult’ is not helpful.” Ed Stetzer The president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s LifeWay Research, in a tweet. (RNS) “Praise the Lord and pass the rattlesnakes, brother.” Mack…
LEADERSHIP LINK: No more giant apps—a browser is all you need
In my bookshelf sits a copy of the B&H Publishing Group classic trade book from 1991, Help, There’s a Computer in My Church! Suprisingly, I have yet to be able to convince our leadership team to convert it into ePub….
LEADERSHIP LINK: Does your church conduct an annual audit?
For most of us the term “audit” calls to mind the potential of being notified by the IRS that our income tax returns will be scrutinized by their examiners. But the term simply means to examine or evaluate. Originally it…
HERITAGE: A bold friend to truth
Julian Howell Pentecost felt called to the ministry as a young boy. He once confided his feelings to his mother who prayed for God’s guidance. He was affirmed by his home church, Lawrenceville Baptist Church. In 1942 he entered the…