When I was growing up in Eastern Kentucky, I spent most of my time inside the doors of our Southern Baptist church. Sunday mornings, Sunday nights, Wednesday evenings — I was there. We were one of those small “church plants”…
Consider the cost of staying in the SBC
Although I left the Southern Baptist Convention several decades ago, I still keep up with them, especially during their annual meetings. This year’s SBC gathering, like all the others since I left, both saddened and disturbed me, including the constitutional…
The SBC is afraid of women who come to the tomb
My favorite pericope in the entire Bible is John 20:11-18. Days after the Crucifixion, Mary comes to visit her friend Jesus in the tomb, only to realize his body is no longer there. In shock and confusion, she races back…
Democracy and religious freedom
For 2,000 years, Christians have worshiped God and followed Christ in an extraordinary variety of political circumstances. They have lived under Caesars and kings, republics and parliaments, democracies and dictators. The church has survived — and often thrived — without…
I grieve for SBC women
I grew up in a Southern Baptist church. I attended Sunday school as a child in a Southern Baptist church. I made a public profession of faith, accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and was baptized at the age…
How a ‘good kid’ makes a catastrophic choice
There is a particular kind of grief that settles over a community when a young person kills another young person. It is not only the grief of a life lost, but the grief of a life ruined. It is the…
We also need a reckoning with racist words that cut like a knife
In North Texas last week, all eyes were on a trial in Frisco, a northern Dallas suburb. The person on trial was Karmelo Anthony, a 19-year-old accused — and now convicted — of stabbing to death 17-year-old Austin Metcalf at…
To understand today’s SBC, listen to history
Across America this week, Baptist women are carrying a familiar weight. Some are pastors who have faithfully answered the call of God, only to watch the Southern Baptist Convention debate whether God possibly could have called them. Some are seminary…
What was there left to argue?
I was 6 years old the first time I was told I couldn’t do something because I was a girl. I could be a teacher or a nurse when I grew up, but I couldn’t play on that team and I couldn’t do that thing because…
The ridiculous attack on women in ministry
As the president of another Kentucky-based seminary, I have to note Al Mohler’s forced conversation on women in ministry, like so much in our world today, is ridiculous. Those like Mohler wish to drag us into a debate about “what…
The denomination that protected predators just banned prophets
God calls women to preach. This is not a progressive talking point or a cultural accommodation. It is a theological fact, attested across centuries of Christian witness and confirmed in the lives of countless women who have heard the Spirit’s…
Democracy as the practice of loving our neighbors
In November 1883, 38-year-old Emma Lazarus wrote a poem as part of a fundraising effort for Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s “Liberty Enlightening the World” — what we now know as the Statue of Liberty. Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled…