In the wake of the violence of January 6, 2021, some observers wondered why the insurrectionists at the U.S. Capitol weren’t charged with domestic terrorism. The reason is simple: There is no standalone federal crime on the books for domestic...
Amid an American culture that appears as divided over race as during the Civil Rights Movement comes surprising news from Gallup: Nearly all Americans now approve of marriages between Black people and white people. What many take for granted today…
On Sunday, Aug. 15, two Muslim Afghan women walked into Grace Community Church in the middle of worship. As they walked about halfway into the sanctuary, we made eye contact. The look on their faces was of hopelessness. They were…
The Southern Baptist Convention currently faces one of the greatest tests ever of its internal governance while also fending off serious accusations of mishandling sexual abuse claims. This dual problem consumed the Sept. 20-21 meeting of the SBC Executive Committee…
The church my wife and I have served since 2000 was founded 70 years ago as a Southern Baptist mission, a church plant in a neighborhood that had just been converted from a dairy farm. The founding pastor understood his…
Politicians and religious leaders opposed to President Biden’s new COVID-19 vaccine mandates are concerned not with protecting the personal freedoms of Americans but with expanding control through political and social discord, Arkansas judge and Baptist pastor Wendell Griffen said in…
When churches turn on themselves, things get very ugly very quickly. As if it weren’t already hard enough to be and do church in this culture, we face an exponential increase in internal congregational conflict and turmoil. American Christians are…
White evangelical Protestants are the only religious group in America among whom a majority believe Donald Trump is a “true patriot” who bears little responsibility for the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and was denied rightful re-election by…
At the end of the day, my theology means very little until it touches the ground. I am an Episcopal priest, spiritual director and recovery coach, so my whole ministry rests inside the stories that are shared with me, the…
Robert Jeffress and Pope Francis agree on at least one thing: There is no moral reason for Christians to resist getting a COVID-19 vaccine. And further, neither the Baptist pastor nor the Catholic pontiff will give you a religious exemption…
I have spent 50 years teaching college students from coast to coast and points in between, and while much has changed over the course of those 50 years, one thing has remained unchanged: the students’ abysmal ignorance of the negative…
Anyone who assumed that a growing number of Americans would abandon a politicized evangelicalism over its support for Donald Trump appears to have been wrong, new research shows. On the contrary, a new analysis reveals no significant abandonment of evangelicalism…
The words came out of my mouth before I realized what I was saying: “This is the only conversation that matters right now in the church.” I was teaching my adult Bible class Sunday morning, continuing a slow verse-by-verse exposition…
