In December of 2013, something remarkable happened. More than 30,000 people — including many Baptist leaders from around the world — gathered in Burma to celebrate the life and legacy of a man and woman they’d never met.
God is (still) waiting
By Eileen R. Campbell-Reed This coming Sunday, Watts Street Baptist Church, Durham, N.C., will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first ordination of a woman in a Southern Baptist church. On Aug. 9, 1964, Watts Street ordained Addie Davis to…
Loving the person in front of you
By Adam McDuffie Christians are traditionally characterized by a desire to live a Christ-like life. While that can take a variety of forms, we often see this expressed in a desire to be as close to Jesus as possible. We…
The past ain’t what it used to be
By Bob Setzer Jr. When I was a boy, there was one Sunday night a year my siblings and I got to stay home from church: the night The Wizard of Oz was on television. On that very magical night,…
Blessed are the barely there
Believing in God is hard. If anyone tells you otherwise they’re lying, or they’ve been frozen for eons under a housing development in Southern California like a Cro-Magnon Brendan Frazier in Encino Man.* (*NOTE: “The 90s were the gilded age…
Repenting of Christianity
By Greg and Helms Jarrell Chinua Achebe’s classic novel Things Fall Apart centers around the life of Okonkwo, the powerful leader of his clan and their village, one of nine in the Umuofia region of Nigeria. Okonkwo is a fearsome…
Preachers, politicians part ways at the border
By Alan Bean While politicians apportion blame for the thousands of unaccompanied Central American children arriving at our border, the faith community looks for ways to help. I over-simplify, of course. We confront a complex tangle of rhetoric and response,…
The power of witness
On July 28 I was one of about two dozen clergy, activists, family and friends who traveled with a couple to the Jefferson County courthouse in Louisville, Ky., to get a marriage license. We went knowing it was a fool’s…
Who really created the border crisis?
By Michael Greer The wise leaders of ancient Israel were keenly aware that the failure to publically atone for the corporate sins of the nation would result in a national catastrophe. The current obsession with fixing blame for the refugee…
The taller I become …
By Greg and Helms Jarrell We’re remembering the Freedom Summer of 1964 this year, 50 years later. During those momentous times in U.S. history, a broad group of organizations worked together to break the tyranny of the Jim Crow laws…
When government spies on religion
By Aaron Weaver On June 30, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. In the immediate aftermath of that landmark ruling, Christian conservatives took to social media and television to declare victory and many…
A case for hopefulness
By Joseph Phelps Today’s news, from wars to weather, make many wonder if our world is spinning toward disintegration. Will bad news win in the end? Albert Einstein theorized, “God did not create evil. Just as darkness is the absence…