In Primitive Baptists of the Wiregrass South, author John G. Crowley writes that for those Appalachian Baptists, “the use of fermented wine, usually made by the deacons” is standard in their celebration of the Lord’s Supper, a biblical mandate they…
‘O Freedom’
O Freedom, O Freedom Freedom over me And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave, And go home to my Lord, And be free. I first heard that poignant spiritual (author unknown) in the 1960s,…
Finding the gospel amid a ‘churchgoing bust’
In a recent Atlantic essay titled “The True Cost of the Churchgoing Bust,” columnist Derek Thompson writes that “more Americans today have ‘converted’ out of religion than have converted to all forms of Christianity, Judaism and Islam combined. No faith’s…
‘Broken Churches, Broken Nation?’ A crisis of our times
“The very worst omen of the times is the fact that the religious (people) of the country stand apart to so great an extent in this hour of trial. Most of the Churches have split on the very rock upon…
What keeps me awake at night: ‘Bystander’ is both a noun and a verb
“At this moment in American religious and political life, what question should we let disturb us and keep us up all night?” That’s the query Tripp Fuller put to Corey Walker and me at the end of a two-hour Homebrewed…
Would today’s Christian nationalists exile Roger Williams — again?
In October 1635, five years after arriving in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Puritan Separatist minister Roger Williams was brought before the colony’s General Court, charged with insisting that magistrates stay out of church affairs; that Native Americans were the real…
Consider the martyrs, then and now
The announcement of the death of Russian dissident Alexei A. Navalny on Feb. 16 sent me running to the iconic work, THE BLOODY THEATER OR MARTYRS MIRROR OF THE DEFENSELESS CHRISTIANS … COMPILED FROM VARIOUS AUTHENTIC CHRONICLES, MEMORIALS, AND TESTIMONIES,…
The gospel according to comeuppance
Sixty years ago this year, I experienced a profound sense of “Christian comeuppance,” at a student-oriented retreat sponsored by Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas. It was my first semester at Texas Wesleyan College (now University), and the retreat…
Where have all the evangelical convictions gone?
Merriam-Webster Dictionary says it like this: A person of conviction means you seriously spend time considering whether what you are doing is right or wrong. People with weak convictions tend to wander into moral ambiguity and end up in a…