A historic Baptist congregation in Kentucky called a gay man as co-pastor Aug. 14. Jordan Conley will join Andrea Woolley as co-pastor of Crescent Hill Baptist Church in Louisville as Jason Crosby leaves the church staff for a position at…
Me and my multicultural medical procedure
I am not accustomed to discussing publicly my personal health on the internet (or most anywhere else), but in this case, I am going to make an exception and do just that. When Janice and I returned to the United…
What comes after the pulpit swaps and cultural awareness dinners?
The biblical command to welcome the stranger must be applied not only to immigrants and refugees but also to the way church members relate to demographically diverse people in their own congregations and communities, according to Daynette Snead Perez. Her…
9/11 was a day of dark despair but also multicultural unity
Serving amid the chaos and anguish of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks was more about ministers and congregations living into callings than it was about summoning great courage, said David Waugh, who was pastor of Metro Baptist Church in…
The big news from the 2020 Census is multiculturalism, which threatens some people and still eludes most churches
Demographers have been predicting for three decades that the United States was headed toward a non-majority status for any single racial group in the population. Results of the 2020 Census released last week confirm that ongoing trend, but the real…
Why multiethnic? Imagining together
To start out our conversation on multiethnic church, I did some work around clarifying terms of “multicultural’ vs. ‘multiethnic’. Because these terms are often used interchangeably, I wanted to posit our discussion around ethnicity or ethnos as the central theme…
Fostering multiethnic churches easier said than done, pastors say
By Jeff Brumley The Southern Baptist Convention can cure the nation’s racial tensions if its churches will embrace congregational integration, said Russell Moore, president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Moore has joined with other white conservative Christian…
Merger, not just ministry, is how this church is engaging Hispanics
By Jeff Brumley Cliff Temple Baptist Church was responding to the needs of the Dallas neighborhoods around it long before the term “missional” came into vogue, and before Brent McDougal took the helm as senior pastor. But since McDougal’s arrival five…
Crisis or opportunity?
In 1883, Emma Lazarus penned the words to the poem, THE NEW COLOSSUS, to be used commemoration of and as a fund raising initiative for the pedestal on which would stand the Statue of Liberty. Some of the words toward…