by | Jun 12, 2024 | Uncategorized
Leaders and advocates are grateful for the convention’s support but frustrated at the inability to enact their plans.
Jules Woodson remembers the spark of hope she felt when a sea of yellow ballots went up across the hall at the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meeting in 2022. The vote in favor of abuse reform following a watershed abuse investigation was her sign that the messengers cared about victims like her and were willing to listen and make changes.
At this year’s annual meeting in Indianapolis, the recommendations on abuse reform passed again, with another wave of thousands of ballots, but she teared up for a different reason: disappointment over how little had been done.
SBC entities have pledged millions to fund the cause. The convention has repeatedly voted in favor of abuse prevention and response efforts by overwhelming margins. Task forces appointed by the convention president have volunteered their time to develop training resources, a database of abusive pastors, and an office to oversee the ongoing work of abuse reform.
“For messengers for whom abuse isn’t on the forefront of their minds, they think, Oh, we’re doing good,” said Woodson, whose testimony of abuse by her Texas youth pastor launched the #ChurchToo and #SBCToo movements six years ago. “But there’s so much more to be done.”
The abuse victims and advocates calling for reform in the SBC are now watching Southern Baptist leaders within the convention try to navigate the kinds of denominational hurdles and roadblocks they faced for years from the outside.
“We’ve been told over and over again, You can’t do this, you can’t do that,” said Mike Keahbone, a candidate for SBC president who serves on the Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force (ARITF). “You have to ask yourself, Why in …
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by | Jun 12, 2024 | Uncategorized
A new book explores why what was once a default life stage now feels like an increasingly fraught choice.
In a recent Guardian article about “America’s premier pronatalists,” the journalist mentions her own assumption that “the main thing that [makes having kids] hard [is] that it’s now so incredibly expensive to raise children.”
“No,” the father of the profiled family replies. “Not at all”—and in a significant sense, I think he’s right. So do Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, authors of the newly released What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice.
That’s not to say Berg and Wiseman (or I) would ever be dismissive of the real financial hardships many would-be parents face. On the contrary, they devote the first of the book’s four long chapters to a sober examination of such “externals.”
But the delight of the book is that they do not stop there. Berg and Wiseman equally reject the assumption—seen in many lesser entries in the kids conversation—that the externals are the whole of the matter, that all this ambivalence would melt away with just the right package of policies to extend parental leave and make childcare affordable.
It wouldn’t, and What are Children For? is a welcome complication of that simplistic account. As the title signals, Berg and Wiseman aim to deliver a sharp cultural and philosophical analysis, giving rigorous but sympathetic examination to a “world that is both pro- and anti-natalist.” Though they embrace at the last moment a major claim they seem to resist throughout the text, their project succeeds.
A sea of options
Readers familiar with the Christian philosopher Charles Taylor’s idea of secularism in A Secular Age will be well-prepped to understand a core contention of …
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by | Jun 12, 2024 | Uncategorized
Readers of the Latin Bible could see how close love and diligence are.
Anyone who has studied a foreign language knows the fun of stumbling across a word that looks familiar. It’s like a treasure hunt. In my first weeks of high school Latin, I found that my own surname, Vincent, was a Latin word for “conqueror,” which gave rise to the word vanquish. That’s a pretty cool find for a slightly bored 15-year-old!
It was my enthusiasm for surprising derivatives that inspired me to surf the pages of the Vulgate, which Jerome translated in the late fourth century. This Latin translation of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures served as the standard translation of the Bible in churches throughout the Western world for centuries, and many of Jerome’s interpretive decisions provide a glimpse into the heart of the church’s historic understanding of Scripture. For me, it was a hotbed of etymological discoveries.
Several years ago, I stumbled across one such nugget of linguistic history hidden in the Vulgate. It started as I was reading the Great Commandment from Luke 10:27 (ESV throughout):
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.
When Jesus told an inquisitive lawyer that all the Law and Prophets hung on these two commandments (Matt. 22:40), he knew that his audience would recognize them. Both were drawn directly from the Torah (Deut. 6:4–9; Lev. 19:18) and would have been intimately familiar. But Jesus imbued them with a new and shocking centrality, and he spoke them with an unprecedented authority (Matt. 7:29).
He also spoke them in a new language. Although Jesus himself spoke primarily Aramaic, the Gospels record his words in Greek, with “love” …
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by | Jun 11, 2024 | Uncategorized
My theology is squarely orthodox. Now I need fellow Christians to help me work out a sustainable vision of day-to-day life with my children.
For evangelical parents who hold to the church’s long-standing doctrines on gender and sex, waking up to the reality of LGBTQ children in our homes frequently marks the beginning of a difficult journey.
Often blindsided by the development, many parents feel ill-prepared for the work of discernment required to move forward. They hunger for instruction and understanding. Above all, they yearn for relief from the burdensome fear of “getting it wrong” as they navigate uncharted waters requiring many choices, day after day, year after year.
This is the context that produces high turnout for events that try to help Christian parents find responses, beyond fight or flight, to their LGBTQ children—events like last year’s Unconditional Conference hosted by the church of influential pastor Andy Stanley.
The conference was controversial because it featured several speakers who don’t hold orthodox evangelical views on sex and gender. To prominent evangelical critics, the whole affair amounted to “a clear and tragic departure from Biblical Christianity” (Albert Mohler) and a “profound failure of pastoral responsibility” (Sam Allberry).
Similarly, in a more recent dustup, pastor and author Alistair Begg, who holds to the historical doctrine on marriage, saw his popular radio show dropped by a conservative Christian network. It came to light that he’d counseled a woman that she could attend her grandchild’s wedding to a transgender person, though she opposed the union on doctrinal grounds. Writing for First Things, theologian Carl Trueman argued that attending such a wedding is itself a doctrinal drift and “a very high price tag for avoiding …
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by | Jun 11, 2024 | Uncategorized
As a former police officer and PCA elder, I believe this basic step can protect congregations from predators.
For years, Jimmy G was seen as great guy and a leading member at his local community church—he was the go-to volunteer for all the ministries others avoided. On most Sunday mornings, you would see him serving alongside his wife in children’s ministry. But then something happened. Jimmy was suddenly arrested for multiple counts of aggravated sexual assault—some of them involving a minor. “Surely, Jimmy was framed,” thought everyone who knew him.
But then reports started showing up in local newspapers. This was not the first time Jimmy had been charged with such crimes. This had happened in another state years before, and his mode of operation was the same. It didn’t take long for new visitors to stop coming to this church—and as reports kept appearing on the front pages of local newspapers, even the faithful started peeling away from the congregation. The church’s reputation will take decades to recover in that close-knit small town.
I wish this account was fictional, but it isn’t. These events took place at a church in a neighboring community when I was a police officer. And although I’ve changed his name, the facts of his case, which I was privy to, are as stated. Sadly, this situation is repeated far too often in Christian churches today. During my time in law enforcement, I learned all too well how people with predatory proclivities can camouflage their activities behind church walls. And now, as the executive director of a large PCA church, I am personally aware of pastors’ immense responsibility to protect their flocks from harm.
Our churches are supposed to be sanctuaries of grace and peace, but the last few years have witnessed …
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