Baptist - Word&Way

Baptist

HomeNewsBaptist (Page 3)

A state appeals court in Texas ruled last week that a sexual abuse lawsuit could go forward against Paul Pressler, a former judge and influential Southern Baptist who helped lead a rightward shift in the denomination in the 1980s and 1990s.

About 75 people gathered Friday afternoon outside the administration building at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Missouri, to protest the treatment of several professors in recent months.

Now that former President Jimmy Carter and his wife are vaccinated against COVID-19, they have returned to one of their favorite things: church. Maranatha Baptist Church in tiny Plains, Georgia, announced on its Facebook page Wednesday that the Carters were again attending worship in person.

Southern Baptist Convention President J.D. Greear called out fellow Baptists who he said were sowing dissension and lies in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination at the meeting of the SBC’s Executive Committee on Monday. 

Divisions over race, politics, gender, and LGBTQ issues are roiling America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, ahead of a meeting of its executive committee next week.

While defending Southern Baptist pastors who called Vice President Kamala Harris a ‘Jezebel,’ Southern Baptist pastor Tom Ascol declared Harris was going to hell. He also consigned journalists Anne Branigin and Jake Tapper to that fate for reporting on pastors who compared Harris to the biblical character Jezebel.

After nearly two weeks of controversy following an unusual move to deny tenure or promotion to five faculty members, the Board of Trustees for Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Missouri, reversed some of those decisions in a meeting held virtually Tuesday.

A hundred years after a horrific massacre, Deron Spoo hopes to set the foundation for a new narrative. The senior pastor of Tulsa’s First Baptist has studied the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, in which as many as 300 Blacks were killed and 35 blocks of Black-owned homes and businesses were reduced to ashes.

As controversy grows about comments by Southern Baptist pastors comparing Vice President Kamala Harris to the biblical character Jezebel, a leader in Founders Ministries, a group pushing Calvinism within SBC life, claimed critics of the pastors worship a false religion.

Two Texas Baptist schools have regained control over a Texas foundation established by a long-time benefactor. The two schools filed suit in September, alleging trustees of the Texas-based Harold E. Riley Foundation were part of a “coup” to divert support away from the schools.