Church

Senior Editor Beau Underwood interviews Will Dyer, senior pastor of First Baptist Church in August, Georgia, for the first installment of our “Behind the Pulpit” series intended to pull back the curtain on the minister’s life and introduce our readers to how a diverse set of leaders go about shepherding their flocks.

In this edition of A Public Witness, we’ll walk you through the theological missteps being made by Catholic leaders attempting to deny communion to President Joe Biden and other politicians over the issue of abortion. And we’ll look at why the politics of communion matter so much to non-Catholics like us.

The nation’s largest Protestant denomination is based on voluntary cooperation by more than 40,000 churches. That cooperation is threatened by growing distrust of national leaders.

A photo essay by Editor-in-Chief Brian Kaylor about what happened during the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting this week in Nashville, Tennessee, both inside and outside the convention hall.

Members of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have voted to draft a document on the Eucharist, green lighting a controversial effort championed by a group of conservative clerics who have called for denying Communion to President Joe Biden and other Catholic Democrats who support abortion rights. 

After Ed Litton emerged victorious in the Southern Baptist Convention’s presidential election on Tuesday, reports and analysis quickly portrayed the news as a defeat for the denomination’s fundamentalist wing. But rather than fundamentalism being dismissed, anti-elitism was embraced. 

One of the hot-button items expected to be on the agenda when Southern Baptists met for their annual meeting this week was critical race theory. But, in the end, the resolution the committee chose to bring to the floor for a vote did not mention CRT.

Delegates at the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to create a task force to oversee an independent investigation into the denomination’s handling of sexual abuse.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ spring meeting begins Wednesday with as much interest for political observers as religious ones, as what is typically a mundane clerical confab takes up an escalating debate over President Joe Biden and Communion.

During the 2021 Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting, speakers wrestle with issues of patriotism and the Gospel. But a planned resolution to denounce the Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol was pulled.