For generations of Southern Baptist churches, the term “pastor” had a clear and rarely debated meaning. He was the man who preached on Sundays and led the church throughout the week. But with the rise of mega-churches inside and outside the SBC and the corresponding growth of church staffs, that simplicity has changed.
There may be nuances related to ordination and how it is observed from one church to another, but the qualifications for the pastor role are crystal clear, said a collection of Southern Baptist pastors and leaders.
Perhaps you’ve heard about the little boy who leaned over after the Sunday sermon to tell his mother, “I’ve decided to become a pastor when I grow up.”
SAN ANTONIO, Texas (BP) -- God still is calling His people to evangelism, and veteran evangelist Sammy Tippit has added identifying and encouraging new evangelists at the same time he continues proclaiming as well as training and equipping those who are drawn to God’s love through Sammy Tippit Ministries’ worldwide evangelistic outreaches.
PITTSBURGH (BP) – Siani Null thought she could earn God’s favor. If she got the right grades, spent time with the right people and gave her best as a competitive swimmer, the young college student would be the right version of herself. Not only would other people be pleased with her, but God would be pleased, too.
BIRMINGHAM, Ala.—As Sandy Wisdom-Martin approaches her fifth anniversary as executive director/treasurer of national Woman’s Missionary Union, she seldom experiences a “typical” day.
On a clear day from O. S. Hawkins’s office in a North Dallas high-rise, you can see all the way to Fort Worth, his hometown. It may be fewer than forty miles from Crenshaw Street on Fort Worth’s East Side, where Hawkins grew up, to GuideStone’s offices. But in many ways, it’s a world away and part of the culmination of a journey the Lord Himself orchestrated.
NASHVILLE (BP) – When messengers see more ethnic diversity on committees at this year’s SBC annual meeting, they shouldn’t be surprised. As a report by the convention’s Executive Committee puts it, such diversity long has been “the expressed desire of the Southern Baptist Convention.”
Irma Moss vividly remembers five or six Communist soldiers invading her family’s home in Cuba and whisking her father off to jail in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. That was more than sixty years ago.
Bruce Plummer, born on the Fort Belknap reservation, was twenty-one, stumbling drunk, and suicidal in a drenching rainstorm in Portland, Oregon, when with Native American awareness he crawled under a pine tree to avoid some of the wet. That tree was on church property, he realized the next day, as he watched vehicles coming and later going from the parking lot.
People don’t grow into mature Christians until they serve others. So says American Indian pastor and ministry leader Bruce Plummer, of Sioux, Assiniboine, and Cree heritage.
New Beginnings Pregnancy Center in Benton, Arkansas, has had a few new beginnings of its own. Originally established in 2003 as a nonprofit ministry to pregnant teens, it has grown to serve women of any age who can benefit from the ministry’s resources.
How can the crisis of an Iraqi refugee family’s house fire help churches engage young women in missions involvement amid their busy twenty-first century lives?
