Justin Cox is a first-year student at Wake Forest University School of Divinity, a Cooperative Baptist Leadership Scholar, and minister to students at First Baptist Church in Statesville, N.C. Not bad for a guy who’s only been Baptist for just…
After all these years, why still Baptist?
I hear the question all the time. I meet someone for the first time at a party, they eventually ask what I do for work, and then the follow-up is some version of, “How are you Baptist?”
Ole Miss honors Will Campbell
By Bob Allen Sixty years after he was forced out of a job for challenging racial segregation on campus, the University of Mississippi is naming a plaza for the late Will Campbell, a renegade Baptist minister and author active in…
Remembering Will Campbell: does anyone here NOT know Amazing Grace?
Remembering Will Campbell: Does Anyone Here NOT Know Amazing Grace? Memorial Service for Will Campbell, Mt. Juliet, Tennessee Saturday, June 22, 2013 Sitting under the words “Love your enemies” I feel my heart swell. They are painted on the walls high…
My connection with the Rev. Will D. Campbell
In the fall of 2004, I was taking a seminary course on Thomas Merton. It was being taught by Merton friend and scholar E. Glenn Hinson. Dr. Hinson knew of my near-obsession with all things Will Campbell, and he helped…
What happened to the Baptists?
By Will Campbell When I was going to school on the G.I. Bill of Rights, right after the Spanish-American War, they told me that the first few minutes of any address or sermon should be given over to sheer foolishness…
What happened to the Baptists
By Will Campbell When I was going to school on the G.I. Bill of Rights, right after the Spanish-American War, they told me that the first few minutes of any address or sermon should be given over to sheer foolishness…
Remembering Will Campbell, a spiritual brother
Some years ago, songwriter and poet Mickey Newbury sat down to pen a song about Cortelia Clark. With the background full of sounds of distant trains and despair dripping from the trees, he led with this verse . . ….
Son of Amite County, child of God
By Merrill Hawkins I preached my first sermon in 1980 at Mt. Vernon Baptist Church in Amite County, Miss. Walter Stewart, a kind and gentle man, always with several days of beard growth and always at Sunday-morning church, told me…
The freedom of Will
By Bill Leonard Will Campbell — preacher, writer, lecturer, farmer, raconteur, soulful iconoclast and equal-opportunity prophet — died in Nashville on Monday, June 3. He was a month this side of 89 and had spent more than two years in…
‘Bootleg preacher’ Will Campbell dies
By Bob Allen Will Campbell, an author, activist and iconoclastic Baptist minister who described himself as a “bootleg preacher,” died June 3 from complications following a stroke suffered in 2011. He was 88. The Mississippi native was one of the…