“Take him out! Blow him up! Take him out! Blow him up!” the children chant during a vacation Bible school program at Mt. Olivet Baptist Church in Lexington, Ky. With eerie music looming over the scene, the viral TikTok video...
Throughout 2022, I spent the year learning about various holiday traditions and seeking to gain a greater understanding of what they teach us about God. My theme verse for the year was Psalm 145:7: “They celebrate your abundant goodness and…
The governor of the state where I live proved himself to be a Grinch of the first order Christmas Eve — and apparently a coward too. Three busloads of migrants were delivered outside the door of Vice President Kamala Harris’…
Don’t let my name fool you. One of my most redeeming qualities is being a realist, often named by others as pessimist. In the spirit of that title, or misplaced naming, I am unsure how I will stomach Christmas this…
Winter in Scotland is cold and dark. The sun struggles to scrape together seven hours of daylight, and each day travels a little lower across the gray sky. For the emerging agrarian societies of pre-history, making spiritual sense of the…
My worst course in college was German; thank God I needed only four semesters to graduate. But I am too well acquainted with the German word that describes a malady of the spirit, schadenfreude, our joy at another’s misfortune. It…
Some pastors may dread having to move their congregation from a prominent church building into former retail space with a liquor store on the property. But not Jakob Topper, senior pastor of NorthHaven Church in Norman, Okla. “I’m actually excited…
We often perceive the holidays as a time of togetherness and joy, where we reunite with families and enjoy the presence of each other. However, what we do not talk about is the grief that often coincides with the Christmas…
Olena Levchenko and her Christian family barely escaped Russian forces in Ukraine and bounced from nation to nation in Europe before learning a Baptist congregation in Atlanta, was willing to sponsor them as temporary refugees in the United States. Levchenko…
The real estate value of a church’s land is usually irrelevant. There’s no property tax, and unless a church is ready to sell its land, the fluctuations in value over the years don’t matter much. Until the property becomes too…
I am a part of the resistance. While I sense I am not all alone, I also sense my number is small, especially so in my own ecclesial family of moderate to progressive Baptists. Many of the current responses to…
Anyra Cano, director of programs and outreach for Fellowship Southwest, recently interviewed a young man from South America who was released from a U.S. immigration detention center. To protect his identity, that man is identified here as “PR.” PR,…
Charlotte’s westward expansion — beyond Uptown, Biddleville, Wesley Heights — was in full swing around 1924, when Julia Alexander and her family decided to subdivide and sell off her deceased father’s estate, called Enderly. The old farm would become the…
