Gamma Alpha Upsilon, suffered a setback May 17 when Baylor University’s board of regents declined to change Baylor policy banning “advocacy groups which promote understandings of sexuality that are contrary to biblical teaching.”
Everybody’s: sometimes the gospel finds us in the ‘world’ before we find it in the Church
My long interest in American religion doubtless began in the 1950s and ’60s at Everybody’s, Fort Worth’s first real discount store. All kinds of people shopped at Everybody’s, but not everyone was treated equally.
Baylor’s decision on LGBTQ inclusion: Will my alma mater become invested or irrelevant?
If Baylor University doesn’t begin to recognize and respond in Christian love to the diversity of its students we not only have failed to measure up to the model of Jesus; we are identifying with the rigid textual literalism he faced 2,000 years ago.
Supreme Court to hear three cases pitting conservative religious views against LGBTQ rights
The United States Supreme Court on Monday accepted three cases to decide whether a federal law prohibiting discrimination because of “sex” includes sexual orientation and gender identity, setting the stage for a new round of tension between fundamentalist Christianity and LGBTQ rights.
As a pastor, I tried engaging the issue of abortion with Facebook friends. Here’s what I learned
No matter if we are talking about abortion, LGBTQI issues or politics, we need to stop thinking we can change the world with an angry Facebook post or a partisan online article. We need face-to face conversations that humanize one another.
Why a biblical inerrancy-based bill in the Texas Senate matters
Texas Senate Bill 17 raises serious questions. This year’s Bible-impacted legislation is intended to protect people of faith from the LGBTQ “agenda.” Fifty years ago, the debate involved a similar “biblical” and “legal” response to civil rights for African Americans.
North Carolina Baptist church ordaining trans woman to gospel ministry
A Baptist church that meets on the campus of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, plans to ordain a transgender woman to the gospel ministry this Sunday.
Not that kind of Methodist: my sojourn as a Baptist minister in a Methodist church
As a Baptist minister, I owe much to an inclusive, gracious and open-minded Methodist church in Texas that invited me as a new Baptist seminary graduate to be their associate pastor. That gives me hope, despite the General Conference’s recent vote.
Inclusion can get messy: gospel implications of a ‘Wider Welcome’ for United Methodists and the rest of us
Christian history is replete with the expulsion of persons from the church; times when sin, sex, orthodoxy and “special needs” all run together and somebody or some bodies had to go. Perhaps we should add an asterisk to “Everybody is Welcome” on our church signs.