Church

Rev. Jonathan Lee Walton, an academician, preacher and administrator who has served on the faculties of Wake Forest and Harvard divinity schools, has been named the next president of Princeton Theological Seminary. He will be the first Black president of the seminary.

In this issue of A Public Witness, we introduce you to an effort earlier this month by ministers across the country to preach against Christian Nationalism on World Communion Sunday. We then take you to church to hear excerpts from the sermons before we issue an altar call of our own. 

The Native American International Caucus, which advocates for Native Americans both inside and outside of the UMC, is calling on lawmakers to get rid of Columbus Day. To replace the federal holiday, which this year falls on Oct. 10, the caucus is asking Congress to approve several bills formalizing Indigenous Peoples Day as a legal public holiday, according to a statement from the caucus posted on it website Tuesday.

Liz Cooledge Jenkins unpacks the hypocrisy in voicing support for Iranian women who protest oppressive patriarchy in their context while remaining strangely silent about oppressive patriarchy — and even hostile to those who speak up against it — in our own U.S. context. People in complementarian churches often hear feminist critique and feel like the good-hearted men in their lives are being personally attacked.

Though many congregations in the U.S. are relatively homogeneous, others are sharply divided. In some cases, divisions are becoming more pronounced as midterm election season heats up, leaving clergy to keep the peace while still meeting the spiritual needs of all of their members.

College Park Baptist Church in Greensboro, N.C., found itself in the news last week when the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee voted to remove it from its rolls because of its “open affirmation, approval and endorsement of homosexual behavior.” That action came 23 years after the congregation itself voted to leave the SBC shortly after the convention’s annual meeting approved a doctrinal statement that a wife should “submit herself graciously” to her husband’s authority.

For two decades, Hinkle was editor of The Pathway, the official publication of the Missouri Baptist Convention, founded in 2002 amid a feud between conservatives and moderates in the state. Conservative leaders hired Hinkle, a former newspaper editor turned seminarian and Christian journalist, to lead the new publication — meant to rival Word&Way.

Contributing writer Sarah Blackwell offers her thoughts on how the church's model of the larger group tending to the few in need was swept away during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our pastors were like skippers left on ships trying to throw out as many lifelines as they could while keeping the whole ship from going down and rescuing their own families. But now it's time to turn back to the boat and give each other some grace.

The community-based air quality monitoring initiative, AirWatch St. Louis, has been keeping track of what’s in the city’s air since December 2021. Low-cost sensors are placed on the roofs of Metropolitan Congregations United churches spread throughout the city to measure particulate matter, a mixture of solid particles and liquid droplets found in the air. Through the new digital map, the data collected is publicly viewable.

Houses of worship on Martha's Vineyard have long worked together to meet the needs of their neighbors. So they were ready to spring into action when refugees arrived unexpectedly after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday flew two planes of immigrants to Martha's Vineyard, escalating a tactic by Republican governors to draw attention to what they consider to be the Biden administration's failed border policies.