Baptist News Global

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Vann Newkirk II

Whenever I’m asked what contemporary writers people should be reading on race and culture, the first name I always produce is Vann Newkirk II. Vann is senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly, where he has written essential stories on race,…

Jim Wallis calls for an American revival flowing from a ‘remnant church’

Saving American Christianity from the idolatry of religious nationalism requires the creation of a church untainted by MAGA conservatism and its lust for racial and political dominance, according to Sojourners founder Jim Wallis. The new creation would be comprised mostly…

Searching for Grace: Haunting question

This is the fourth of a five-part fictional story set in the early 1990s about Rev. Paul Graham and his congregation, Grace United Church of Christ. In the previous episode, a lifelong member of Paul’s congregation contracted HIV/AIDS. In spite…

‘It ought to be like church’: Working out some lessons for congregational life

I once heard a pastor say, as he was getting into the sermon, “Now, hang with me, I’m working it out.” And, sure enough, there’s many a biblical text over which we have to labor and work out our understandings…

The cleansing of our temples and our forgiveness of church

This coming Holy Week, Christians remember Jesus’ “cleansing of the temple” in Jerusalem. He was setting his opposition to the temple priesthood and their collusion with Rome to sustain an unjust social order that oppressed the weak and poor. As…

Iorg gets a unanimous vote, and he’ll need that to do what must be done

By a unanimous vote of the 60 trustees attending today’s called meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee, longtime Gateway Seminary president and one-time Home Mission Board-appointed church planter Jeff Preston Iorg was elected chief executive officer of the Nashville-based administrative arm of the SBC. Today’s meeting marked…

Iorg elected unanimously to lead SBC Executive Committee

For the first time in two and a half years, the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee has a permanent staff leader. Jeff Iorg, president of Gateway Seminary in California, was unanimously elected president of the Executive Committee March 21 in…

Greenway files suit against Southwestern Seminary and former trustee chairman, claims Pattersons left president’s home in disrepair

Paige and Dorothy Patterson stripped the president’s home at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary upon their departure and left the 10,000-square-foot home in a state of disrepair, according to a new lawsuit filed against the seminary by former President Adam Greenway….

What keeps me awake at night: ‘Bystander’ is both a noun and a verb

“At this moment in American religious and political life, what question should we let disturb us and keep us up all night?” That’s the query Tripp Fuller put to Corey Walker and me at the end of a two-hour Homebrewed…

Bartering in the Marketplace of Violence

Our words don’t matter anymore. There once was a time when they did. Media reach was limited by its medium, be that print or electronic, but with the advent of social media and the omnipresent internet, something changed. Anybody’s thoughts…

New book shows how Mainline churches promoted Christian nationalism by another name

Mainline Christians should not let themselves off the hook for enabling the ideology of Christian nationalism that currently threatens American democracy, author and journalist Brian Kaylor says. While white evangelicals get most of the blame, Mainline and other non-evangelical Christians…

Second vote on Law Amendment will take the spotlight at this summer’s SBC annual meeting

When the Southern Baptist Convention meets in annual session in Indianapolis in June, one vote may be the most consequential in determining the future of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. And it will not be the vote to elect an…

Matthew Vines sets off a debate over what it means to be ‘queer’

Dear Mike Johnson, be careful what you ask for

What, to the white Christian, is America 250?

Four years later, anti-abortionists battle on other fronts