Note: This article discusses suicide, child sexual abuse and domestic violence. It may be distressing for some readers. On June 30, child liberation theologian and abuse survivor advocate Ryan Stollar died by suicide, following a lengthy struggle with his...
The coronavirus and ongoing racial tensions are sending clergy stress levels skyrocketing, ministers and health experts say.
Recent church staff changes, anniversaries, ordinations and deaths within the moderate and progressive Baptist network.
This God-forsaken red stain on our white hands will never be washed clean until we white Christians repent and through peaceful, nonviolent protest declare, “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take any more dead black men at the hands of white police.”
I believe the current crises in our churches, our communities and our nation will only be transformed into avenues of blessing when we humbly adopt a commitment to cultivate a spirit of holy curiosity.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. If churches get this wrong, people will die. People we know and love, people we have never met, folks that count on the church to do the right thing. Yet pressures are mounting to open now.
“As a congregation and as a staff, the last thing we want is for someone to get sick and say it’s because they came to church.”
From my vantage point as a lawyer, judge and Baptist minister, I have reviewed carefully the matter of George Floyd’s death while in the custody of Minneapolis police officers and the stream of events in the wake of his death. The list of what went wrong is long and damning.
We have a systemic problem, one that our African American brothers and sisters have tried to warn us about year after year, decade after decade, only to be ignored.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a time of learning for churches as they adjust to virtual ministry, said Andy Jung, associate executive coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina.
Those of us who are white are asked by the cross to stand in solidarity with the crucified class to dismantle the structures of white supremacy that sustains itself through the use, abuse and destruction of black and brown bodies.
Now more than ever, we need that Breath in our bodies, that fire in our bones, that vision of an otherwise possibility that bespeaks sheer revolution and not a measured tinkering with a supposedly “broken system.”
The Holy Spirit is conceiving new life and needs a partner. The Church, the body of Christ, is called to be born again and again and again. May we be a body in the infancy of innovative growth, a body vulnerable and yet powerful as the Church enters an unknown future full of new possibilities.
