Church

Ask Americans if they believe in God and most will say yes. But a growing number have lost faith in organized religion. For the first time since the late 1930s, fewer than half of Americans say they belong to a church, synagogue, or mosque, according to a new report from Gallup.

As Southwest Baptist University searches for a new president, trustees sparked additional concerns by creating a presidential search committee made up only of themselves and two Missouri Baptist Convention leaders. The school’s Faculty Senate passed a resolution on Friday criticizing this search process.

Many women preachers and teachers say their call to ministry was inspired in part by Beth Moore’s example. Some have been able to stay in evangelical churches by avoiding the title “pastor” and going by “Bible teacher” instead. Others have had to leave their home churches.

The National African American Fellowship of the SBC issued a statement Wednesday asking presidents of SBC seminaries to take steps to help defuse current racial tensions within the convention.

On Thursday evening, a memorial vigil at nearby Fairview High School organized by the Colorado chapter of gun control advocacy group Moms Demand Action and attended by more than 1,000 people, was led by clergy from around Boulder.

More than 100 congregants of the parish in the mostly Latino Corona neighborhood of Queens died of COVID-19, many of them in the early days of the pandemic. Today, the surviving congregants return as they lament their lost loved ones.

Baylor University released a report Tuesday documenting its slavery legacy and offering recommendations for more fully telling its history. The 94-page report focuses on monuments and markers on its campus honoring various founders who enslaved Black people and supported the Confederacy.

Even before a member of a Southern Baptist church was accused of the Georgia spa massacre, motivated, he told police, by guilt over a “sex addiction,” the Southern Baptist Convention was under scrutiny over its teachings on gender and sexuality.

About 30 people gathered for a prayer walk on Sunday to pray for victims of a mass shooting at three Atlanta-area spas last week, including two in the Buckhead neighborhood.

The church attended by the White man charged with killing eight people at three Atlanta-area massage businesses, most of them women of Asian descent, condemned the shootings Friday and said they run contrary to the gospel and the church’s teachings.