Church

About 75 people gathered Friday afternoon outside the administration building at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Missouri, to protest the treatment of several professors in recent months.

After 3 1/2 years living inside a Missouri church to avoid deportation, Honduran immigrant Alex Garcia finally stepped outside Wednesday (Feb. 24), following a promise from President Joe Biden's administration to let him be.

Now that former President Jimmy Carter and his wife are vaccinated against COVID-19, they have returned to one of their favorite things: church. Maranatha Baptist Church in tiny Plains, Georgia, announced on its Facebook page Wednesday that the Carters were again attending worship in person.

Southern Baptist Convention President J.D. Greear called out fellow Baptists who he said were sowing dissension and lies in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination at the meeting of the SBC’s Executive Committee on Monday. 

Divisions over race, politics, gender, and LGBTQ issues are roiling America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, ahead of a meeting of its executive committee next week.

After nearly two weeks of controversy following an unusual move to deny tenure or promotion to five faculty members, the Board of Trustees for Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Missouri, reversed some of those decisions in a meeting held virtually Tuesday.

A hundred years after a horrific massacre, Deron Spoo hopes to set the foundation for a new narrative. The senior pastor of Tulsa’s First Baptist has studied the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, in which as many as 300 Blacks were killed and 35 blocks of Black-owned homes and businesses were reduced to ashes.

Dozens of immigrants have taken sanctuary in churches as a last resort to stay in the country. Newly hopeful, they’re trying to capitalize on the moment, even with setbacks like a ruling blocking the Biden administration from enforcing its deportation moratorium.

After Word&Way reported yesterday that trustees at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Missouri, had denied tenure or promotion to five faculty members, an SBU student created a petition at change.org urging the trustees to reverse their decision.

Southern Baptist Convention officials have strongly condemned a letter sent by a critic of the SBC to the Rev. Dwight McKissic, a Black pastor in Texas who recently announced he was pulling his church out of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention.