“Taking on a role – and knowing that it can be multiple months before you actually stand in front of the whole congregation – I imagine can be frustrating.”
‘Will it come like this, the moment of my death?’ Living and dying in a COVID-19 world
This global pandemic requires us to confront the possibility of death – not fearfully or obsessively, but with intentionality born of the reality of the present moment, longing for Easter as Gethsemane and Golgotha linger.
Easter at the epicenter: last Sunday in New York
Sunday did not feel like Easter; except for this: what may have been our saddest Easter may also have been our most Easter-like Easter.
Zoombombing incident boosts church’s virtual ministry just in time for Easter
A recent cyberattack against virtual worship at First Baptist Church Jamaica Plain in Boston, Massachusetts, sparked Darrell Hamilton to re-imagine his calling and even that of the Church – capital C. How do congregations call and equip clergy and lay…
How to survive in a time of coronavirus: Turn down the volume
The stress of living in an age of COVID-19 is revealing all of us to be more of who we have been. It is amplifying our personalities – for good or for ill. Normally hidden emotions now rise to the surface, and we are more easily laid bare.
CBF announces virtual 2020 General Assembly in response to pandemic
The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s 2020 General Assembly will be an online experience instead of an in-person gathering due to the COVID-19 pandemic, CBF Executive Coordinator Paul Baxley announced in an April 2 statement. Instead of traveling to downtown Atlanta this…
From disorientation to reorientation: Turning forced isolation into Sabbath experiences
Sabbath strips away the notion that our worth is defined by our activity. Sabbath affirms that our worth is not in doing; it is in being.
A global pestilence stalks in darkness. Will we tempt God or take up our cross? | #intimeslikethese
We can hang onto Jesus with the right hand, grasp our brothers and sisters with the left, and take one bold step into the gathering gloom of Holy Week. That’s what Lent has always been about. That’s what it’s about now, amid a global pestilence that stalks in the darkness.
‘You can’t get a Ph.D. in caring’: COVID-19 calls for believer-priests | #intimeslikethese
With all this grief, on a societal level perhaps not seen since 9/11 or the stock market crash of 1929, we pastors and other church staff sure could use more ministers. For Baptists, this shouldn’t be a novel idea.
As gun sales spike amid COVID-19, we can choose caring over fear | #intimeslikethese
This is not about guns or the Second Amendment. This is deeper than that. This is a spiritual issue. This is about a fundamental cleavage in the soul of America.
Repent and be healed: Our response to the global pandemic has revealed our sin | #intimeslikethese
No, the COVID-19 virus is not some kind of divinely unleashed pestilence to punish us. But what seems clear is this: It is not the disease itself that has revealed our sin, it is the ways we have responded that have condemned us to our current misery and suffering.
Amid this pandemic, we need prophets like Daniel to decipher the handwriting on our wall | #intimeslikethese
The coronavirus pandemic, like the handwriting on the wall in Daniel 5, has interrupted our nation’s imperialist and idolatrous banquet of materialism, racism, white religious nationalism and militarism that Martin Luther King Jr. prophetically identified as lethal threats to the country and the world.