God loves the senior ministers whose portraits are on the wall in the church parlor, but God knows the real saints are the ones who care for children. For almost 20 years, Julia Rassmann has been a big fun, big…
The silence of our friends
If you were to survey the most significant decades in human history, the late 1950s to late 1960s undoubtedly would be at the top of the list because of the Civil Rights Movement, better known as the Southern Black Freedom…
Every member of the SBC’s abuse reform task force should resign in protest
When a member of the Southern Baptist Convention’s prior Sexual Abuse Task Force emailed me to apologize, I felt grateful for the candor and honesty. “I want to personally apologize to you,” the person wrote, “if anything I did ever…
A mother’s honest story: The very beginning
Editor’s note: Normally we place the writer’s bio at the end, but for this piece you need to know up front who you are reading and why it matters. Ann Bell Worley is a Houston-based writer and editor and a mother of…
Beyond ‘I Have a Dream’: Meditations on Martin Luther King Jr.’s hard words for white Christians
I rarely crosspost old columns, but this year, I’m re-upping a relevant column I penned two years ago, which contains with one plea for white Christians: If we want to honor Rev. Dr. King and think honestly about ourselves, white…
‘A failure of imagination would be fatal to democracy’
On Jan. 6, 2021, “a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked” by ground forces loyal to then-President Donald Trump. They interrupted the constitutionally required certification of electoral votes from the…
Calmly navigate this election year with strategy, not emotion
Now that the Twelve Days of Christmas are behind us and the confetti we tossed to usher in the new year has been swept up, we finally can be honest: 2024 is going to be a dumpster fire. Perhaps you…
A hostage’s mother recounts the harrowing agony of the past 100 days in Gaza
Jan. 14 will mark 100 days since the inhuman Oct. 7 Hamas massacre of more than 1,200 people in Israel and kidnapping of hundreds more, 136 of whom still are held hostage in Gaza. They are citizens of 20 nations…
Biden’s appearance at Mother Emmanuel Church belies his hypocritical stand on Israel
President Joe Biden’s successful campaign for the presidency in 2020 was resuscitated from near intensive care desperation thanks to Black voters in South Carolina and the endorsement of South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn. South Carolina is the first Democratic Party…
Reflections upon how to respond when terror strikes again
It has been six years and less than one month since the last time my life came to standstill over a medical emergency. That was Dec. 13, 2017, when I unexpectedly suffered a spinal cord injury during a surgery that…
Politics, Faith and Mission: A BNG interview series on the 2024 election and the Church
Of late, as regular readers know, I’ve been reflecting on how conservative American Christianity has chased political and temporal power to the great detriment of its mission and our common witness, how the Church, instead of being light and leaven,…
Identity, ideology and gospel 2024
They “drove them out.” That’s what the book of Acts says a certain religio-political contingent did to Paul and Barnabas in Antioch of Pisidia, a crossroads of Roman-controlled towns in first century Asia Minor. As the text tells it, they…