As the Southern Baptist Convention in its recent annual meeting has proved itself unreliably Baptist, it gives me pause to think about how quickly the transmogrification of this Baptist denomination into its ecclesiastical opposite has happened. Baptist folk often have...
One of the top documentaries on Netflix right now is Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey. It’s about the FLDS, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, who once were in Utah and then in Texas. If you were…
Over the past two years, the word “Juneteenth” has been one of the most-searched terms on the Baptist News Global website. That quest for understanding coincides with a sudden growing awareness of this milestone day in civil rights history, fueled…
Letter to the Editor June 17, 2022 Dear Editor: In a 2014 article in BNG, writer Marion Aldridge penned an excellent piece on pastoral search committees. According to the article, “Even a tiny, troubled Baptist church can get 100 resumes.”…
Baptist churches in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine face increasingly desperate humanitarian conditions while responding with increasingly creative physical and spiritual outreach efforts, the European Baptist Federation said in its most recent warzone communique. The situation report was released just days…
Baptist churches may soon face clergy shortages like other faith traditions. Emily Brown, in a February 2022 Relevant article, “The Great American Clergy Shortage is Coming,” noted: “Roughly 3,544 Catholic parishes in the U.S. lack a parish priest,” and “in…
Please submit transitions — including staff changes, ordinations, anniversaries or deaths — to Barbara Francis. This page will be updated bi-weekly. STAFF CHANGES Kristofer Anderson, to Buechel Park Baptist Church, Louisville, Ky., as interim music director. Mike Anderson, to Springwood Baptist…
Four weeks after the brutal mob murder of Deborah Samuel, a 22-year-old Nigerian Christian student of Shehu Shagari College of Education, reactions to her killing and the demand for the prosecution of her killers have not ceased. On May 12,…
Members of the Religious Liberty Council on June 15 elected two candidates to serve as representatives on the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty board of directors and re-elected three already serving on the board. The council, which is one…
Do you remember singing the children’s Sunday school song “I will make you fishers of men”? Often it accompanied learning the biblical narrative of Jesus calling his first disciples, Simon Peter and Andrew. This stirring song so captured our imaginations…
For at least two years, critics of the current leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention North American Mission Board have been seeking some way to crack open the mission board’s books, where they believe fraud is being hidden. This week,…
By some accounts, the Southern Baptist Convention once again rejected its most extreme factions during this year’s annual meeting in Anaheim, Calif. But by any outside measure, the nation’s largest non-Catholic denomination remains extremely conservative. Defining the term “conservative” within…
In yet another setback to the most conservative wing of the Southern Baptist Convention, an attempt to disband the denomination’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission failed June 15. This vote was the culmination of a years-long campaign against the ERLC…
