Five days before Christmas, the Southern Baptist Convention’s Sexual Abuse Task Force released an update on its work, right at the halfway mark in the 12-month timeline between its creation and its required report to the 2022 SBC annual meeting….
‘Bindergate’ story shows the behind-the-scenes struggle for unity versus strict orthodoxy in SBC
Southern Baptists were early to the cultural war over Critical Race Theory, but documents obtained by the Nashville Tennessean show the tightrope denominational leaders have walked trying to placate white ultra-conservatives while not running off Black conservatives. A Dec. 8…
Mike Stone drops defamation suit against Russell Moore, claiming God will judge
The Southern Baptist pastor who in October filed suit against a former Southern Baptist Convention agency head for defamation has withdrawn the suit, explaining that he trusts God to take care of him and judge the matter. “This was a…
The weakness of complementarian theology on display in Duggar trial
As we reflect back on 2021, one theme will be how three of the major conservative evangelical denominations have become compromised by sexual abuse and sexual abuse coverups. The Presbyterian Church in America became embroiled in a scandal over the past…
Conservative Baptist Network launches attack on James Merritt for saying something nice about his son
One of the groups aiming to take the Southern Baptist Convention in a more conservative direction continues to sound the alarm about liberalism in the nation’s largest non-Catholic Christian denomination and now has attacked one of the icons of the…
Upton announces retirement from Virginia Baptist post after 20 transformative years
After two decades of leadership, John Upton has announced he intends to retire as executive director of the Baptist General Association of Virginia July 31, 2022. Since his election to the post in 2001, the landscape of Baptist state conventions…
After the storm, a lull of information from the SBC Executive Committee
This story now includes significant updates below. After weeks of making national headlines, the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee has gone virtually silent about its internal workings and its relationship to the SBC Sexual Abuse Task Force. The two top…
How the SBC employs the Sodom Strategy to avoid talking about real sexual abuse
Growing up in the Atlanta suburbs during the 1990s, I roamed about with much greater freedom than 9- and 10-year-olds enjoy today. But each time my mother released my sister and me to gallivant unsupervised around the mall or Six…
In Touch grants Southwestern Seminary $2 million to endow academic chair named for Charles Stanley
In Touch Ministries, the global broadcasting ministry founded by Charles Stanley in 1977, has made a $2 million gift to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary to create an endowed chair in Stanley’s name. The Charles F. Stanley Chair for the Advancement…