By Norman Jameson Like a good son, Carlyle Hayes calls his mother every day to say he loves her. Unlike most good sons, Carlyle is 90 years old — and his mother is 112 and half. Sina Hayes is thought…
Lawsuit accuses once-admired evangelical family expert of sexual abuse
By Bob Allen A disgraced evangelical family expert accused in a lawsuit of sexually abusing or harassing 10 women was an early proponent of ideas now part and parcel of the Baptist Faith and Message. A second amended complaint filed…
Inspired by Obama, Baptist pastor offers ‘state of the church’
By Jeff Brumley Merianna Neely Harrelson was watching President Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night when it struck her: someone should do a state-of-the-church address. Then Harrelson, pastor at Emmanuel Baptist Fellowship in Lexington, S.C., thought that someone…
Longtime Baptist leader Bill Self dies at 83
By Robert Dilday Bill Self, a longtime Atlanta-area pastor and prominent Baptist leader for decades, died Jan. 9 after a long struggle with Lou Gehrig’s Disease. He would have turned 84 on Jan. 10. Self was pastor emeritus of Johns…
Baptist minister seeks to comfort war-ravaged refugees in Belgium
By Ashleigh Bugg Children from more than 30 ethnicities play on the winding stone streets of Antwerp, Belgium. Some don religious head coverings while others wear their hair in intricate braids as they run through the fountains at a nearby…
Accrediting agency head stepping down
By Bob Allen Daniel Aleshire, a former faculty member at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has announced plans to retire as executive director of the Association of Theological Schools no later than June 2017. Aleshire, 68, was hired in 1990 as…
Former CBF moderator dies
By Bob Allen Donna Forrester, the first ordained woman to serve as moderator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, died Dec. 31, more than 14 years after being diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Forrester, 66, served as minister of pastoral care…
Myanmar native serves fellow refugees through Student.Go
By Greg Warner At the age of 7, Mary Htoo and her family fled civil war and persecution in their native Burma. They spent the next seven-plus years living amidst the poverty and confinement of a mountaintop refugee camp just…
2015: The year in deaths
By Bob Allen Carolyn Weatherford Crumpler, 84, former head of the Southern Baptist Convention Woman’s Missionary Union and an early champion of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, died Jan. 2 after a long illness. John David Hopper, former president of the…