Baptist News Global

The Oscars go to church

This year’s Academy Awards ceremonies made me think about some of the best attributes of church. I cried several times unexpectedly, but that’s just one of the parallels with church. What really got my attention was the personal tributes given…

On interdepencence

On this International Day of Women and Inclusivity, I am inspired by an image that first came to me on Facebook. A pastor/priest is presiding at Communion, standing at the table with her infant child on her back in a…

Baylor Religion Department expands, diversifies and thrives

Baylor University’s Religion Department is not your grandparents’ or your parents’ religion department. It’s not even the religion department it was just a decade ago. It has changed dramatically in faculty and academic direction, featuring a wide diversity of educators…

Confessions of a white preacher

Two stories. Two young men. One white. One black. It was a number of years ago now. I was a pastor in the suburbs of Washington, in a multiethnic congregation of people from the very poor to the quite wealthy….

Chaplains and religious leaders mount campaign against school chaplain bill in a dozen states

A growing coalition of faith-based and civil rights groups has launched an opposition movement to bills in more than a dozen states that seek to replace school counselors with untrained chaplains. “Putting chaplains in public schools erodes the separation of…

Ukrainian Baptists should be shocked that Baptists in America are abandoning them

I don’t understand why Speaker Mike Johnson, by all accounts a committed Baptist, is abandoning the Baptists of Bucha, Ukraine. We all remember Bucha as the city where, two years ago, Russian invaders raped, tortured and murdered. I also remember…

Searching for Grace: First Sunday

This is the second of a five-part fictional story set in the early 1990s about Paul Graham and his congregation, Grace United Church of Christ. In Part 1, Paul made the difficult but necessary decision to leave the Southern Baptist…

How does a pastor survive a 59% vote of confidence?

Life moved on, and somehow I missed that two weeks ago the deacons of Immanuel Baptist Church in Little Rock, Ark., finally took a vote of confidence in Pastor Steven Smith. According to published reports, 59% of those voting supported…

The Department of Justice has closed its investigation of the SBC — maybe?

To add further intrigue to the Southern Baptist Convention’s reckoning with sexual abuse in its churches, the denomination announced March 6 that a federal investigation into the SBC has been closed — but abuse survivors who say they are in…

Metaxas calls Bonhoeffer’s relatives ‘Jew-hating lunatics’

North Carolina pastor abruptly forced out of prominent pulpit

Responding to the militarization of immigration policy

Meddling with Methodism and domesticating the Baptists