Baptist

Incoming Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Moderator Carol McEntyre, senior pastor at First Baptist Church in Columbia, Missouri, urged those watching CBF’s virtual general assembly to work for racial justice.

The journey toward bold faithfulness demands more of ourselves and more of the church in this current cultural moment marked by racial injustice and the sins of white supremacy, CBF Executive Coordinator Paul Baxley preached Thursday during the 2020 virtual CBF General Assembly. 

As debates continue across the country about monuments and honors for Confederate generals and slaveholders, some Black Southern Baptists are calling on Southern Baptist Theological Seminary to remove names of slaveholders and Confederates from buildings and other places of honor on the campus.

As COVID-19 surges in southwestern Missouri, a Baptist pastor, his family, and his church members are among those impacted. Joshua Manning, pastor of Community Baptist Church in Noel, is seeing coronavirus now moving into his rural area.

The leaders of the Mississippi Baptist Convention urged state legislators Tuesday (June 23) to change the state’s flag, the last in the nation to include the Confederate battle emblem in the design. As Confederate monuments across the country have been defaced, toppled by protesters, and removed by officials this month amid “Black Lives Matter,” the design of the state flag of Mississippi has again come to the forefront.

As states across the country lift some or even all restrictions intended to slow the spread of coronavirus, new hotspots of the virus erupt in churches from Oregon to Kentucky to West Virginia. Baptist churches are among those hit with infections after resuming in-person services.

First Baptist Church of Crestmont in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, is among several Southern Baptist congregations celebrating for the first time Juneteenth, or June 19th, the day in 1865 when enslaved black people in Galveston, Texas, learned they were free.

Rolland Slade, senior pastor of Meridian Baptist Church in El Cajon, California, has been elected as the first African American chairman of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee, the group that runs the business of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination outside its annual meetings. He was elected unanimously.

More than a century ago, a Baptist church in Kentucky's state capital city was started by slave owners and had a slave owner as its pastor. But a church service on June 10 stands in stark contrast to the past as the pastor gathered several African American pastors and leaders to pray with them and for them — and to wash their feet — in a demonstration of gratitude and humility. 

As Confederate statues across the country are defaced, toppled by protesters, and removed by officials, the incoming president of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship on Sunday (June 14) urged Christians to back the removal of such monuments.