In early 2025, when Paul Taylor left the Palo Alto church he’d pastored for 18 years to focus on nonprofit work, he didn’t know where it would lead. Certainly, Taylor didn’t anticipate that, in September, he would be invited to…
A Year After Assad, Evangelicals Help Syria Heal
Last year, Nahla Ishak drove about three hours from Damascus, Syria, to attend a fundraising conference in Amman, Jordan. As the founder of Generations Over Crisis, a nonprofit supporting Syrian families affected by trauma, Ishak relies on these trainings to sustain…
How the Black Church saved me from white evangelicalism
There was a time when I almost lost myself trying to fit into white evangelical spaces that never were designed for me. These were spaces where I was preemptively labeled a “liberal” and my passion for racial justice was dismissed…
Spanking is often normalized in evangelical culture. When does it become child abuse?
Last week, an Alabama second-grade Christian school “teacher of the year” was allegedly shown in a viral video hitting her son with a belt. She also allegedly verbally abused him, pulled his hair and berated him for failing to complete his chores,…
A Path To a Healthy Black Evangelicalism
A few years ago, our son Jaden called my wife and me and said he wanted to be a pastor. When we got off the phone, I was excited and fearful. It warmed my heart to hear that my 20-year-old…
A ‘weird mirror that is Brazil’: New film examines link between evangelicalism, far-right political power
Protesters were dressed in national colors, holding Bibles and signs with crosses, singing Christian hymns and shouting battle cries as a mob violently invaded and vandalized the federal government’s headquarters. This scene of red, white and blue is familiar to…
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…
Evangelicalism isn’t dying; it’s already dead
Long before there was evangelicalism, before there was even such a thing as Christianity, there was good news. As the earliest Jesus followers wrestled with exactly what it meant that this prophet from Nazareth had been crucified and resurrected, what…
Who needs the church when we have the biblical worldview?
After his second visit to New York in 1939, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrestled with the character of Protestant churches in America versus those in Europe in an essay titled “Protestantism without Reformation.” Even as he introduced his argument, which plays up…
I want to experience Christianity much bigger than a shoebox
Every year about this time, old content from the Baptist News Global website starts lighting up, due to searches for “Operation Christmas Child.” As it turns out, people are not just searching these words because they love the program and…
Trump didn’t dupe evangelicals; they chose him, Baptist author says
Author and Baptist pastor Rodney Kennedy is no fan of Donald Trump or of the evangelicals who helped put the former president into the White House in 2016. But he’s equally disdainful of those who portray Trump’s conservative Christian base…
Six ways to survive the fall of evangelicalism and the rise of emergence
Fall is my favorite time of year, and this year I find in it a metaphor for the current identity crisis within the evangelical church. Just as the leaves fall from the trees, so it seems that evangelicalism is falling…