A few weeks ago, I sat with a Baptist leader who described himself as a “moderate Baptist.” He meant it as a compliment, and most people in our circles would receive it that way. After all, “moderate” is one of...
The candles haven’t even been lit for Christmas Eve services, but for pastors and church staff looking ahead to the new year, an unusual calendar conflict is waiting in the wings two months from today. For only the fifth time…
Lifeline Children’s Services, a ministry co-founded decades ago by a Baptist elder and now claims to be the country’s “largest evangelical adoption and child welfare agency,” is sounding an alarm about a proposed rule from the U.S. Department of Health…
The Southern Baptist speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives is leading an effort to impeach President Joe Biden with no evidence of wrongdoing, and religious leaders are largely silent about this turn of events 11 months before the next…
The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina in January will launch a pilot program to help congregations determine the health and direction of their churches. The Church Sustainability Initiative will include learning cohorts to walk participating churches through a process…
As we laid Phyllis, my paternal grandmother, to rest Dec. 11, 2019, I looked around and saw my family trying to piece themselves together. It was an intense funeral, the kind that comes after an unexpected loss; the kind where…
The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to take up the case of a Christian counselor who claimed a state law in Washington barring conversion therapy for gay youth infringed on his constitutional rights of speech and religion. This ends the…
My first visit to a Southern Baptist church occurred in 1971, when I was 15 years old. My family had just moved from Alamogordo, N.M., to my parent’s hometown of Muskogee, Okla. On my first Sunday in town, my aunt,…
For the first time, a Texas jury has found Baylor University liable for failing to prevent violence against a student amid the scandal that brought down Football Coach Art Briles and President Ken Starr. In 2016, Dolores Lozano filed a…
Thirty years ago, Secretary of Labor Robert Reich saw something on the horizon most of us missed. He spoke to the 1994 Democratic Leadership Council: My friends, we are on the way to becoming a two-tiered society composed of a…
A former Southern Baptist children’s minister accused of child sexual abuse has asked an Arkansas court to seal his record, an effort critics say would hinder other potential victims from coming forward. Meanwhile, the Southern Baptist church where he last…
As the cold winter months are upon us and we are now approaching the third Sunday of Advent, we want to stop and reflect upon the coming of Christ into a broken and destructive world. This Sunday’s Advent worship carries…
These days the stark realities of American culture can overtake us anytime, anywhere. I learned that again at a recent lunch with Doug Bailey, Episcopal priest and former Wake Forest School of Divinity colleague. We’d not seen each other in…
