As First Baptist Church in Columbia, Missouri, celebrates its bicentennial, the church dedicated its worship service on Sunday to truth-telling and lament regarding its founders who practiced and defended slavery.
Contributing writer Sarah Blackwell makes the case that future Christians will point to the names of our colleagues and friends as those who first navigated the waters of leading a church and serving as a wife or mothering a family at the same time.
Middle Collegiate, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, is one of four Collegiate Churches of New York that sprung from a Reformed Church congregation in New Amsterdam founded in 1628, and they are considered the oldest continuous Protestant congregations in the Americas.
In this edition of A Public Witness, we explore some of the complexities that have emerged from the fire that gutted Middle Collegiate Church. To what degree should historic preservation laws limit what churches can do with their buildings?
David Hollinger, an emeritus history professor at the University of California, Berkeley, about his new book Christianity's American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular. He also discusses why evangelicals grew in the 20th century, what Donald Trump reveals, and a better
We review a book each month at A Public Witness and for this installment, Beau Underwood examines and recommends Beth Allison Barr's The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. He also discusses some of the strong reaction to
While many times it takes an anniversary, birth, or calamity to inspire gathering and preserving history, there is no best time – though there are a lot of worst times. Your history is continually subject to disaster, decay, death, dementia, or drive failure.
During the 1918 influenza pandemic in Birmingham, churches were closed. The Birmingham News offered to print sermons, service outlines, scriptures and announcements sent in by various clergy to help people worship at home.
Sometime in the late second century A.D., Christians in the city of Rome organized a collection to send to the followers of Jesus in the city of Corinth. Scholars are not sure why. At a time when countries across the globe are struggling to fight the
New research recently unveiled in Rome suggests women had a greater role in the early church's ministries and liturgies than previously thought and were present at church altars as deacons, priests and even bishops.