In the farming community of Dirt Town Valley, family friends grapple with a difficult truth: One ancestor was enslaved by another. Friends and neighbors Stacie Marshall and Melvin and Betty Mosley chat over coffee in Marshall’s farmhouse kitchen in Dirt Town Valley, Georgia. Windows frame cattle pastures in every direction as they catch up on…
The costs and complications of UMC disaffiliation are leaving many congregations stuck. Editor’s note: This story was updated with the new information about disaffiliations on June 14. Carolyn Moore assumed that her Evans, Georgia, church would be one of the congregations disaffiliating from the United Methodist Church (UMC). Across the country, as of June 14,…
(UPDATED) The costs and complications of UMC disaffiliation are leaving many congregations stuck. Editor’s note: This article was updated with new information about disaffiliations on June 16. Carolyn Moore assumed that her Evans, Georgia, church would be one of the congregations disaffiliating from the United Methodist Church (UMC). Across the country, as of June 16,…
Scripture is clear that both go hand in hand. In seminary, my discipleship courses had a particular focus: passing on what the apostles had taught about doctrines like the Atonement and practices like Bible reading and prayer. For me, as for many evangelicals today, this made discipleship mainly a matter of nurturing faith and spiritual…
No less than her martyred husband, she could be inspiring and frustrating all at once. Elisabeth Elliot was one of the most extraordinary and controversial evangelicals of the post–World War II era. Anyone even marginally affiliated with the American missionary community knows the stirring and tragic story of Elisabeth and her first husband, Jim Elliot,…
The city some dismiss as “The Swamp” is fertile ground for evangelicals. The District Church could be a Baptist church. The lead pastor, after all, grew up as a Southern Baptist missionary kid and still has a lot of ties to that denomination. It could also be Anglican, with the way it leans into liturgy…
Our view of the end times should affect our politics. But how? For decades, the dominant evangelical perspective on the end times has been a premillennial, dispensationalist eschatology. As shown in the Left Behind series, this view says the end is nigh and the world—politics included—will grow increasingly wicked and catastrophic until the end comes….
Can we recover a healthy, Christ-honoring vision for masculinity? In recent decades, evangelicals have invested a colossal amount of discipleship, activist, and publishing energy toward promoting “sexual purity” and a “biblical” vision for sexuality. Despite this, the pattern of scandal, abuse, and misconduct by men and male leaders makes clear that the purity movement has…
For Amos, it depends on whether the God we worship demands justice. In this Close Reading series, biblical scholars reflect on a passage in their area of expertise that has been formational in their own discipleship and continues to speak to them today. My mother was Guatemalan, and she went to great lengths to make…
Chosen by Sarah J. Hauser, author of “All Who Are Weary: Finding True Rest by Letting Go of the Burdens You Were Never Meant to Carry.” The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness: The Path to True Christian Joy Timothy Keller When we connect every experience and interaction with ourselves, constantly overanalyzing what we’ve said or what people…
