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.
Pastor, judge, activist, agitator: As he strives for justice, Wendell Griffen stretches the lexicon of adjectives
Wendell Griffen, 66, is all of these things. But his persona is so large, his reputation so loud, his “rightness” so locked in and eagerly defended, that the man’s depth can be lost in the shallows in which he must wade.
Racially diverse church occupies campus where Baptist pastor once proclaimed racist views
In one of life’s delicious little ironies, New Millennium Church now meets on the campus associated with one of Little Rock’s most ardent racists of the 1950s.
Photo Gallery: Wendell Griffen
View the photo gallery of Wendell Griffen.
Baptist pastors gather in Boston to discuss ministry in divisive times
Close to 40 Baptist ministers gathered in Boston Sept. 17-20 for Baptist News Global’s second Conversations that Matter event. Centered in church venues on and around Harvard University, the gathering this year was themed “Pastoral Leadership in a Polarized and…