Baptist News Global

Majority of churches plan flat budgets for 2021, large survey finds

Fall is a traditional season for budget planning in many churches and denominations, with stewardship drives often following into the holidays, but COVID-19 has flattened expectations and heightened uncertainty, according to a new survey conducted by the Lake Institute on…

What if they don’t all come back to church?

Slumping church attendance is not a new trend for a majority of North American churches. The conventional wisdom may be to blame the previous decade’s slips on the younger generations, but in reality, the North American exodus from church is…

Why Baptist women in ministry feel a kinship to Justice Ginsburg

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, associate justice of the United States Supreme Court and tireless advocate for gender and racial equality, died on Friday, Sept.18. One of eight Jewish justices to sit on the Supreme Court, Justice Ginsburg’s death came just as…

Alliance offers online watercolor series with reflections on racial injustice

Kathy Manis Findley made a career pursuing justice as a Baptist minister, and she is up to it again with a virtual watercolor exhibit offered as both a clarion call and lament for racial inequity in a time of pestilence….

Q&A with June Joplin on life as an itinerant (transgender) preacher

Earlier this summer, June Joplin made international headlines when she used a Sunday morning sermon at her Baptist church to come out as transgender. Nearly three months later, more has changed than her gender. The Canadian Baptist church she had…

We must not look away from 8,800 expelled immigrant children

In mid-September, U.S. Customs and Border Protection revealed it has expelled 8,800 unaccompanied immigrant children along the U.S.-Mexico border, based on COVID-19 emergency orders. The children did not receive basic protections. They didn’t have access to legal counsel. They didn’t…

Would you let Donald Trump be your medical power of attorney?

One of the nice things we say about friends to others to indicate the level of trust we have in them is, “I would trust him with my life.” By this we usually mean we have so much confidence in…

Letter to the editor

Andrew Smith, associate professor of religion at Carson-Newman University, writes in response to a recent opinion piece by Isaac Sharp. Read all Letters to the Editor and find guidelines for how to submit your comments.

Do Southern Baptists need a rebranding?

In the midst of a turbulent summer of police violence against Black Americans, the pressure for institutional fixtures of American society to examine the legacies of their names never has been greater. Now the Southern Baptist Convention, according to the…

‘Practicing Christians’ less likely to see race as problem than one year ago

Months of America’s so-called “racial reckoning” appear to have changed little in the perceptions of a majority of Christian worshipers, according to new data from Barna Research. Comparing attitudes from July 2019 to July 2020, Barna found that “practicing Christians”…

Most church records oddly silent on 1918 pandemic

The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 was deadly but not altogether noteworthy to many Baptists, historians say. In fact, those who earn a living combing through denominational newspaper archives and associational records say they are astonished how little attention churches,…

It’s time to break the chains of slaveholder religion

I first came across the phrase “slaveholder religion” when I read the book by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove titled Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion. The premise of the book is that America’s original sin of chattel slavery persists as…

Trump’s war on ‘woke’ targets federal grants and foreign relations

Reflections on In the Twilight of the Christian West

Why rural families need support now

Why do we keep sounding the alarm?