One of the most conservative public voices within the Southern Baptist Convention announced Jan. 4 that his Georgia church has left the SBC. Josh Buice is pastor of Pray’s Mill Baptist Church in Douglasville, Ga., and founder of an online…
In a reversal of a current trend, a Baptist seminary creates a Methodist House of Studies
In an era when many non-Baptist seminaries are creating specific space for Baptist ministers in training, a Baptist seminary is creating space for Wesleyan minsters in training. Baylor University announced Nov. 18 the endowment of a new academic chair that…
Looking for a religious exemption to a COVID vaccine mandate? Most denominations won’t help you
Unless you’re a member of a Dutch Reformed church or a Christian Science church, making a claim for a religious exemption to the COVID-19 vaccine as a Christian is going to be hard to prove. According to research by Vanderbilt…
Re-receiving the gift of inclusive liberty, with help from Pope Francis
This past weekend, I offered Baptist ecumenical reflections on Pope Francis’s most recent encyclical “On Fraternity and Social Friendship” (Fratelli Tutti) on the program of the Hearth for the Human Family conference sponsored by the Focolare Forum for Dialogue and…
Coronavirus challenging denominational summer conventions yet again
For the second year, denominational annual meetings are being derailed and reworked due to the coronavirus pandemic. This will have an urgent effect on the United Methodist Church, which already had delayed from last year a critical vote on the…
What should it cost a denomination to control governance of a university?
How much money should a denominational body have to give to a university in return for the ability to control that university’s governance? Turns out, not much in many cases. As state, regional and national denominational bodies have faced declining…
Are our churches and their leaders ready for the 2020s?
Rather than thinking of turnaround as simply a reversal of numerical decline, the real turnaround for congregations that thrive in the next decade will be a move from irrelevance to relevance in the lives of their constituents and their communities.
Is it time for those who identify as ‘Christian’ to name our differences and part ways?
When I listen to many Christians speak, more and more I respond with the thought, “Is it honestly fair to call what they believe and what I believe the same religion?”
For my Methodist friends (and others): how to survive the death of your denominational home. Or not
My sisters and brothers in the Methodist tradition (and elsewhere), if you do have to leave your denominational home, I hope that you keep your eyes and ears open for a God you or your tradition can’t hold on to: a God at the bottom of the slippery slope, in a field Rumi famously described as one beyond right doing and wrong doing.