Church

The bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church opened their denomination’s major meeting — a year after it was delayed due to the coronavirus — with a call for greater worldwide access to COVID-19 vaccines and testing.

The Catholic bishop of Syracuse, New York, is speaking out against the Doctrine of Discovery and revealing plans to ask Pope Francis to repudiate theological teachings used for centuries to justify the subjugation of Indigenous peoples.

A judge in Bolivar, Missouri, ruled Thursday in favor of three individuals who filed motions to challenge new governing documents for Southwest Baptist University. The rare move further delays the school’s new articles of agreement from going into effect.

With millions of people having stayed home from places of worship during the coronavirus pandemic, struggling congregations have one key question: How many of them will return? Some houses of worship won’t make it.

The Evangelical Covenant Church became the latest Protestant denomination in the United States to repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery, the theological justification that allowed the discovery and domination by European Christians of lands already inhabited by Indigenous peoples. 

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops recently approved drafting a document on receiving Communion in the Catholic Church. Mathew Schmalz, a Catholic scholar of religion, argues that battles over Communion are nothing new in the Catholic Church.

The newly elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention has apologized for giving a sermon where he used material from his predecessor without revealing where it came from.

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.