by | Jun 7, 2024 | Uncategorized
Baptist confessions have long drawn attention beyond the church. The proposal on male pastors will too.
Messengers from around the country will soon gather in Indianapolis to conduct the business of the Southern Baptist Convention. As in recent years, they will consider the exact relationship between the association and its member churches—a question of unique significance to Baptists who have historically valued local church independence.
This week, they will be asked to take final action on an amendment that would alter the SBC constitution’s understanding of a cooperating church from one that “closely identifies with” the complementarian stance of the Baptist Faith and Message (BFM) to one that “affirms, appoints, or employs only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture.”
The proposal came in the wake of last year’s disfellowship of Saddleback Church after it installed three women as staff pastors (which an overwhelming majority of messengers understood to be in conflict with the BFM).
Despite this swift and certain response, proponents believe the Law Amendment, named after its author, Mike Law, is necessary to further unify practice. Others worry that such reforms move the convention toward a form of “subscriptionism,” which would use bureaucracy to enforce norms on individual churches, putting the SBC at odds with historic polity.
But the concern for Baptist identity highlights another, often overlooked, aspect of the debate: Historically, Baptist confessions were a form of public witness.
The earliest Baptist confessions emerged in 17th-century Reformation England, a time of tremendous social, political, and religious instability. Unlike their Presbyterian and Anglican counterparts, which established and enforced denominational teaching, Baptist public …
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by | Jun 7, 2024 | Uncategorized
Christians who wave away the former president’s sexual immorality may be the most anti-Trump constituency of all.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
For the first time in history, a former (and possibly future) president of the United States is now a convicted felon. A jury found that Donald Trump falsified business records to cover up a hush money payment to a porn star, with whom he had an affair, in order to keep the story from hurting his 2016 presidential campaign. If only President Trump could have seen the reaction from many white evangelicals to his sexual crimes and misdemeanors, he could have saved some money.
Pundits are probably right that this conviction—like all the revelations of the past almost-decade—will have little effect on the actual election. At this point, people know who they are supporting or opposing—and it’s hard to imagine many who didn’t know all along. The implications, though, are moral, not just legal or political, and on that ground, we should ask whether the most politicized evangelicals should actually love Donald Trump more.
One might reasonably ask how white evangelicals could possibly love Trump more. The most visible evangelical supporters of the former president have been willing, since at least 2016, to wave away criticisms of his character, from the Access Hollywood tapes onward. Many of these voices defended the former president as fit for public leadership, even after a jury found him liable for doing just what he bragged about in those tapes of yesteryear: groping a woman’s genitals against her will. And now this. But all of that is precisely what I mean by asking about love.
The question has been on my mind since I read the galleys of a brilliant book on former president Richard Nixon, coming out this August, by Christianity …
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by | Jun 7, 2024 | Uncategorized
Worship leaders convince curriculum company of the value of lifewayworship.com.
Lifeway no longer plans to shut down its online music ministry resource lifewayworship.com .
In July 2023, the company announced its plan to retire the platform—a “digital hymnal” that provides users with chord charts, vocal arrangements, and orchestrations—then paused those plans a week later after a strong response from customers. After a year of reevaluation and interviews with worship leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) who use the site, Lifeway has changed course and decided to continue maintaining and updating the resource.
“Lifeway is a curriculum company,” Lifeway Worship director Brian Brown said. “These worship leaders reminded us that music is their curriculum. It ministers to the whole body.”
Lifeway arranged panel discussions with more than 200 worship leaders between July 2023 and May 2024. The ministry was surprised to learn how many of these leaders—who served in churches of many different sizes and with a wide range of musical styles—relied on lifewayworship.com .
“We undervalued some of the unique things we provided, and we didn’t see how much support we were giving these churches. Much more than we realized,” said Brown.
Will Bishop, associate professor of church music and worship at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said that when Lifeway announced the end of lifewayworship.com a year ago, he didn’t think it would be controversial.
“I sort of thought, Who’s going to ever miss this?” he said.
But six months ago, Bishop began leading worship at a small SBC church in Louisville, Kentucky, and says the experience has completely changed his mind; the resource is invaluable to his ministry. …
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by | Jun 7, 2024 | Uncategorized
An excerpt on grief, forgiveness, and the gospel from Beechdale Road: Where Mercy Is More Powerful Than Murder.
On Sunday, June 21, 2020, 18-year-old Linda Stoltzfoos of Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania, was kidnapped and later murdered by Justo Smoker—my brother-in-law.
As you might expect, my family journeyed through tremendous grief, anger, and pain. But as you might not expect, we also journeyed through the challenge of receiving unexplainable grace, kindness, and mercy at the hands of the Amish community, of which Linda Stoltzfoos was a part.
The story to be told is not just another story of grief and healing but a story about the gospel. It’s a gospel story embedded in the very tangible way the Amish community poured out grace and mercy on my family—and our struggle to receive it. As a pastor for over 20 years, I have preached the gospel countless times, but through my encounters with the Amish community, it was preached to me in a way that was deeper and more personal than anything I’ve ever encountered before.
Many years ago, I memorized Paul’s words in Ephesians 2:8–9: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.” But in the last four years, for the first time in my life, I’ve had to wrestle with what it really means to receive unmerited grace when there is absolutely nothing you can do to make things better on your own. My family experienced what it’s like when undeserved mercy confronts undeniable evil, when kindness upends condemnation, when heaven engages hell.
This experience began with a knock on the door that I had no interest in answering. I was in no mood to talk to anyone just a few hours after it became public that Justo …
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by | Jun 6, 2024 | Uncategorized
With Modi’s BJP denied an outright majority in parliament, church leaders credit prayer movements and hope the restoration of coalition politics will protect religious minorities.
The world’s largest democracy underwent a significant political shift in its 2024 general election, as Indian voters upended the previously unshakable dominance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) remains the largest coalition and will form the next federal government, likely making Modi the first Indian head of state to serve three terms since Jawaharlal Nehru led the subcontinent’s initial post-independence government. But as the official vote counting stretched past midnight on June 4, results indicated that voters rejected Modi’s aspirations for an overwhelming majority that many feared would have empowered him to reshape India’s secular and democratic foundations.
Christians and other religious minorities in India rallied for the cause of pluralism.
“The people have spoken clearly for a return to the founding ideals of India,” said Vijayesh Lal, general secretary of the Evangelical Fellowship of India (EFI), which represents more than 65,000 Protestant churches. “They prefer harmony over narrow sectarianism and divisive politics.”
Running a populist campaign of Hindu nationalism, in 2014, Modi led the BJP to a landslide victory, securing 282 of 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, India’s lower house of parliament—the first outright majority for a single party in 30 years. His mandate was strengthened in 2019 when the BJP increased its tally to 303 seats.
Having won political control over the federal legislature and many of India’s 28 states, Modi seemed invincible heading into 2024. Many critics worried that the nation’s multiparty democracy was sliding toward authoritarianism.
Instead, …
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