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...
Serve and lead at the table where God places you, no matter your position or title. That’s the message I heard from T.D. Jakes during a recent interview. This was my fourth time to interview the pastor of The Potter’s…
It’s amazing what four weeks off can do for a minister after a year spent leading a church through a pandemic, said Leah Grundset Davis, pastor of Ravensworth Baptist Church near Washington, D.C. “I came back with more bandwidth, and…
“Make your peace with being honest in ministry today. Don’t wait until you’re older or find the ‘perfect’ church. If you aren’t honest today, you may never make it that far.” I was a youth minister when my pastor and…
In this land where we’re supposed to have a free press, ensuring a range of perspectives on any given topic, I’m finding it hard to see any difference at all between various media outlets in their news coverage on Cuba….
As children return to school and adults return to offices this fall amid a severe surge in coronavirus cases, expect to hear more talk about “religious exemptions” to vaccine requirements. Even before COVID-19, sincerely held religious beliefs have provided a…
My wife might tell you that I seem more comfortable than most in staking out a confrontational, or even controversial, position and then defending it as if I were in a bare-knuckled brawl with my life at stake. It’s hard…
In my seminary days, I was taught that a good sermon or Bible study begins with a provocative question. So, when Nancy and I became pastors 41 years ago, I introduced a Sunday school class with the story about David,…
Carolyn Weatherford Crumpler was a Baptist icon of her generation. For 15 years, she served as executive director of Woman’s Missionary Union, an auxiliary organization to the male-dominated Southern Baptist Convention. When she retired in 1989, she was tired of…
Netflix recently debuted a documentary titled “Pray Away.” This film chronicles the rise and fall of Exodus International, an evangelical-based therapy group that claimed to be able to change the orientation of LGBTQ people. This type of therapy, commonly known…
Just as advocates expected, raising the annual refugee cap for 2021 by the Biden administration is proving a challenge to domestic resettlement agencies and overseas candidate screening centers that atrophied from underuse during the Trump presidency. According to newly released…
I write this post on Aug. 6, the 76th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which destroyed that city and killed 70,000 to 80,000 people. Today, Aug. 9, is the anniversary of the day the U.S. bombed Nagasaki,…
Even parents who are willing to be vaccinated against COVID-19 themselves may be hesitant to have their eligible children vaccinated, according to new data from Public Religion Research Institute and Interfaith Youth Core. That finding doesn’t surprise Rhonda Walton, a…
