My first visit to a Southern Baptist church occurred in 1971, when I was 15 years old. My family had just moved from Alamogordo, N.M., to my parent’s hometown of Muskogee, Okla. On my first Sunday in town, my aunt,…
My Old Kentucky Prayer
The world is always falling apart. The sun stops shining. The sky goes dark. The war in Israel is overwhelming. The divisions in our country are painful. Poverty and prejudice surround us. After a recent Gallup Poll, the headline was,…
HERITAGE: An overlooked story
Lynn Blue, minister of music at Poplar Springs Baptist Church near Richmond, is interested in his family’s history and shared with the Virginia Baptist Historical Society an overlooked story about one of his ancestors. Blue grew up in Richmond and…
HERITAGE: Perfect timing
Iris Ellen Wright Taylor of Waynesboro, Va., visited the Virginia Baptist Historical Society on a recent Wednesday. She came to present a second installment of papers and books related to her grandfather, James Henry Wright, who was a Baptist minister…
HERITAGE: On sailing: unfurling and taking in
The Baptist General Association of Virginia will consider its Governance Study Committee report at its annual meeting in Fredericksburg. The plan replaces a large board composed primarily of representatives of district associations to a small governing board of 15-20 persons…
HERITAGE: ‘The Column’ at 30
Thirty years ago this fall the editor and associate editor of the Religious Herald, Julian H. Pentecost and Tom Miller, respectively, invited this soon-to-be-columnist to lunch. They presented a proposition that their lunch guest begin to write a Baptist history…
HERITAGE: The secret behind the struggle
People today like to blog. They spill forth their innermost thoughts and share them on all forms of social media. In earlier times people did the same thing, only they wrote formal letters. In the 1860s one Richmond pastor wrote…
HERITAGE: Finding home
Two months ago Jonathan Cordell of Jacksonville, Fla., had never heard of Poplar Springs Baptist Church, the church of Slovakian heritage in the Richmond area. Interested in family history, he discovered the baptismal certificate of his great-grandfather, Martyn Gregor. In…
HERITAGE: Working the short row
Charles A. Moore, pastor of Warfield Baptist Church in Brunswick County of Southside Virginia, is a long-timer in pastoral ministry who admits, “Like they say in the country, I am working the short row now.” On Sept. 15, Warfield Baptist…