By Bob Allen The congregation of First Baptist Church in Nashville, Tenn., voted Oct. 26 to sell 1.26 acres of its downtown property for $18 million to a buyer planning to build a Hyatt Regency hotel. A fixture of downtown…
Name changes challenge churches on Baptist identity
By Jeff Brumley Over the weekend, Virginia Heights Baptist Church in Roanoke, Va., plunged headlong into a continuing, decades-long trend in American Christianity by dropping the denominational reference from its name. So when Nelson Harris showed up for work Monday…
White evangelicals feel heat of religious decline, surveys show
By Jeff Brumley Two new polls show that religious conservatives — mainly white evangelicals — are complaining louder as they lose ground in the so-called culture wars. They also describe a widening gap between the faithful and religiously unaffiliated Americans. What’s it…
Historic Baptist church sold to fraternity
By Bob Allen The Tau Nu chapter of Phi Gamma Delta at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will move into the former First Baptist Church in downtown Troy, N.Y., in early October, according to the Troy Record. The fraternity reportedly purchased the…
New book proposes a theology for ‘other’ Baptists
By Bob Allen Four centuries after originating as a protest movement within the church, Baptists today have evolved into a distinct sect committed to preserving its place in a hierarchy of denominations, Baptist theologian Curtis Freeman argues in a new…
Recovering the “new evangelism”
Fifty years ago, in May 1964, a diverse group of Baptists from across North America gathered in Atlantic City to celebrate the culmination of a five-year evangelism campaign (1959-1964). With the participation of American Baptists, African-American Baptists, Canadian Baptists and…
Counting the cost of government funding
The White House recently announced that President Obama would make good on a 2008 campaign promise and sign an executive order banning workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. According to a White House Official, the…
Churchcraft
I have coined a new word: Churchcraft. What I mean by Churchcraft is an individual’s ability to say and do the things that will help to build the organized church. My observation is that a lack of Churchcraft is the…
Opinions!
Baptists are an opinionated crowd. We were taught to be that way. Preachers invest a lot of time and energy saying we ought to do this and that we should not or must not do that. If you grew up…