Baptist News Global

10 reasons your church should be welcoming and affirming

It’s Pride month, and here at Williamsburg Baptist Church we are wearing rainbow stoles in worship, hanging our usual rainbow banner out front and have rainbow origami butterflies hanging all about our sanctuary. It is a delightfully colorful season in…

The SBC just put the nail in its own coffin

I am thinking back on the past and looking at the present for the Southern Baptist Convention, the denominational body in which I was brought up and educated but which I left completely when the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message…

CBF will hire two full-time staff in advocacy

The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship intends to double its efforts on advocacy. For the first time, CBF plans to hire two full-time staff members working in this area, one as director of advocacy and one as congregational advocacy manager. Advocacy work…

Supreme Court sides with White House and against Greg Abbott on immigration

A June 23 Supreme Court ruling affirmed the Biden administration’s prerogative to implement immigration rules limiting deportation actions to immigrants deemed national security or significant criminal threats. The court’s 8-1 ruling in United States v. Texas found states do not…

Conservative Presbyterians reject four proposals to curb sexual abuse

Southern Baptists aren’t the only U.S. denomination struggling with how to prevent and respond to clergy sexual abuse. The Presbyterian Church in America — the more conservative wing of U.S. Presbyterianism — finds itself in a knot as well. An…

The Bible says nothing about queer people

For far too long the LGBTQ community has conceded Christianity to traditionalists and conservatives, allowing them to perpetuate the narrative that the Bible is clearly anti-LGBTQ and that being queer is a sin. But the truth is that most of…

Russell Dilday: A portrait of light

Less than a month after John F. Kennedy was buried in Arlington National Cemetery and the eternal flame was lit, it was extinguished. A group of Catholic schoolchildren visiting the memorial was blessing the site with holy water and managed…

‘I came to watch a great convention die’

I attended my first Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting in June 1987. Participation was part of my first class at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Bill Leonard’s J-Term study of the SBC. I was standing with Leonard, then and still our…

Amid an already difficult immigration system, LGBTQ asylum seekers are in ‘grave danger’

The Biden administration’s asylum restrictions place LGBTQ migrants in grave danger by exposing them to longer waits in nations hostile to those with alternative sexual orientations and gender identities, immigration rights advocates said during a June 22 webinar. “It will…

7 things every church member needs to know about spiritual gifts

There have been times in my ministry where I have understated the importance of spiritual gifts, partly because of the way some spoke of such gifts with an air of spiritual elitism, and partly because I didn’t want to mislead…

There is no way to be against racism and ethnic discrimination but remain in support of sexism and gender discrimination

Christine A. Smith calls sexism in the church’s ongoing life “the stained-glass ceiling” — the invisible but often impenetrable limits imposed upon female clergy. The stained-glass ceiling takes many forms. Among the most common are differences in salary between men…

Complementarianism harms men and women both

What no one seems to be talking about is the harm the Southern Baptist Convention is doing to both women and men. Demands to define a strict gender binary and assign specific roles by gender are causing harm to every…

Supreme Court slides into partisanship

Before the fireworks, be careful what you drink

The contemptible case of Clarence Thomas

The permanent paradoxes of Christian thinking about war