BNG’s new limited-series podcast, “Stuck in the Middle with You,” now has 10 episodes available for streaming and download. The series features BNG Executive Director Mark Wingfield in dialogue with Benjamin Cole, also known as The Baptist Blogger. Each episode…
Gladys the Baptist paved a way for women
Perhaps the greatest moniker Gladys Lewis ever was given was when the comedian Grady Nutt called her “Gladys the Baptist.” This Oklahoma City woman is not someone most contemporary Southern Baptists and Cooperative Baptists have heard of, but she helped…
Gaston Christian Center in Dallas — the place where hope lives
I remember the first Monday in February of 2010. I was on my way to Gaston Oaks Baptist Church in Dallas to serve as interim pastor to an aging congregation with a 62,000-square-foot facility. The church at that time had…
Baptist educator receives Order of the Rising Sun from Japanese government
Decades in Japan revealed Gary Barkley’s approach to evangelism was better suited for Japanese culture than for the Southern Baptist Convention, which appointed him as a teaching missionary to the island nation in 1984. “I always felt it was my…
Why the Haitian shoe seller can’t sell shoes
Last month, controversy around the true nature of former NFL football player Michael Oher’s relationship with his adoptive family, depicted in the 2009 movie The Blind Side, reignited a conversation around “white saviorism” — the tendency for privileged white Westerners…
Baylor professors unearth a sordid tale of 19th century whitewashing of sexual assault
The way a group of 19th-century Baptists covered up a sexual assault committed by one of their own testifies all too clearly about the misuse of privilege and power when protecting beloved institutions, according to the authors of Remembering Antônia…
In Zimbabwe, churches turn from free schools to lucrative tuition-based schools
Zimbabwe used to be among Africa’s top five most educated nations in terms of literacy and basic education enrollment. Legacy Christian denominations that accompanied colonial subjection in the early 1900s provided the bulk of quality public education for 100 years….
19th century Baptist influence in Northeast India continues
The Christianity introduced to Northeast India by Baptist missionaries in the 19th century inspired advances in education, communication and ethnic cohesion but also left descendants coping with fundamentalism and patriarchy that persist today, experts on faith in the region said…
First American woman appointed a missionary beat the system by funding herself
In 2013, Reid Trulson was researching the history of missions in the American Baptist Churches USA when he stumbled across the name of a Charlotte H. White, a previously unremembered 19th century missionary. Then serving as executive director of ABCUSA’s…