Church

The great contradiction of Boston’s Old North Church is that a site pivotal to the freedom of the nation is the same place where slave owners and traders once worshiped.

On Friday, Southwest Baptist University announced its new president to lead the school after its previous president resigned amid an ongoing nearly three-year conflict over power and theology. Rick Melson, vice president for advancement at Cedarville University in Ohio, will become SBU’s 26th president.

The return to in-person school in many communities across the country means many houses of worship are grappling with whether children — especially those under 12 who do not have access to a COVID-19 vaccine — should be exposed to adults, vaccinated and unvaccinated.

In a pathbreaking decision, the Rev. Gina Stewart has been elected as the first woman president of the Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Society, marking the first time a female has been chosen for the highest post of a Black Baptist organization. 

Across the nation’s deeply-religious Bible Belt, a region beset by soaring infection rates from the fast-spreading delta variant of the virus, churches and pastors are both helping and hurting in the campaign to get people vaccinated against COVID-19.

A national nonprofit group of professors devoted to academic freedom, shared governance, and quality higher education, recently argued that Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Missouri, is not an institution where academic freedom can be expected.

Senior Editor Beau Underwood interviews Vicki Flippin, who pastors First and Summerfield United Methodist Church in New Haven, Connecticut, for the latest installment of our “Behind the Pulpit” series intended to pull back the curtain on the minister’s life.

Russell Moore, Southern Baptist ethicist-turned-public theologian, said that knowing people who became seriously ill or died from COVID-19 may be causing some vaccine-hesitant individuals to change their minds.

Facebook already asks for your thoughts. Now it wants your prayers. The social media giant has rolled out a new prayer request feature, a tool embraced by some religious leaders as a cutting-edge way to engage the faithful online. Others are eyeing it warily as they weigh its usefulness against the privacy and security concerns they have with Facebook.

The PNBC is considered the “spiritual home” of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and formed as a breakaway group from the National Baptist Convention in 1961 after the NBC opposed sit-ins and other civil rights protests.