Baptist News Global

New Food and Faith course at Wingate University has college students gardening and learning to cook as they learn about religions

New to Wingate University’s religion department is a course titled Food and Faith, a class that takes freshmen through the basics of religious eating practices, discusses the ethics of food in popular culture and even incorporates some instruction time in…

Celebrating Christmas with extravagant joy

A few years back, Catherine bought me a T-shirt that says, “In a world of Grinches, be a Griswold!” I love Christmas. I am a Griswold. I go all out with decorations, both outside and inside. I just put up…

Transitions for the week of 12-16-22

Please submit transitions — including staff changes, ordinations, anniversaries or deaths — to Barbara Francis. This page will be updated bi-weekly. STAFF CHANGES Amanda Allard, to Westwood Baptist Church, Cary, N.C., as children’s minister. Daniel Bailey, to Latonia Baptist Church, Covington,…

Pioneering missionary journalist Craig Bird dies in Texas

Baptist journalist and educator Craig Bird died Dec. 12 at age 73 due to complications from a fall he experienced the week before, according to his family. Bird, who was born in Arkansas on Oct. 4, 1949, to Clyde and C.W….

Solving the Jesus-Joshua Problem

When I was an early adolescent, I decided to read the Bible straight through. I had been exposed to carefully curated snippets of Joshua, but the full genocidal thrust of the narrative was a revelation. I couldn’t help feeling sorry…

‘Everybody’s doing it’: United Methodists ignoring their own rules as break-up continues

I am utterly spent and crushed; I groan because of the tumult of my heart. — Psalm 38:8 Church politics, like all politics, creates noble achievements and underhanded dealings. As the year draws to a close, United Methodists find themselves…

Amanda Tyler testifies before Congress against Christian nationalism

For an ever-so-brief moment Dec. 13, a congressional hearing on the rise of anti-democratic extremism morphed into a Sunday school lesson as Amanda Tyler, executive director of Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, fielded questions on the history of Baptists…

That time I was suddenly responsible for getting nine migrants through security at DFW Airport

Even though I graduated from both high school and college in New Mexico, my Spanish is pretty bad. But I understood clearly what Pastor Isabel Marquez was telling the 52 migrants gathered in a small room at Oak Lawn United…

Have the ‘nones’ hit a plateau?

The so-called “nones” may now have something in common with most American churches: They’ve plateaued, according to Gallup. Amid all the attention that’s been given to the dramatic growth of this segment of the American population — those who tell…

I asked people why they’re leaving Christianity, and here’s what I heard

For some time now, Christianity has been on the decline. According to a September 2022 Pew study, people identifying as Christian have decreased from 90% of the U.S. population in 1972 to 64% in 2020. But it’s not just researchers…

The Advent witness of Rosa Parks, Ita Ford, Alfred Delp and Antonio de Montesinos

Invocation — The Whole World Is Waiting, Kate Hurley The whole world is waiting, The whole world cries. The whole world is waiting For our hope to shine. For you sweet Jesus Will make all things right. The whole world…

ECFA study finds pandemic hit church finances harder than for other nonprofit ministries

Individual evangelical churches struggled financially much more during the COVID-19 pandemic than other kinds of ministries and nonprofits, leaders of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability revealed in a webinar hosted to unpack ECFA’s “2022 State of Giving” report. “Unfortunately,…

An American experiment: 250 years of trying

10 reasons America is not a ‘Christian nation’

American Dominion traces deep roots of Seven Mountain Mandate

Lindsey Graham and the history of ‘widow’s succession’