PRATTVILLE, Ala. (BP) -- A bivocational Southern Baptist pastor resigned from his church Wednesday (July 29), after backlash resulting from his participation in an annual birthday celebration for Nathan Bedford Forrest, a leader in the Confederate Army and the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

ORANGE, Calif. (BP) -- For Ricardo Vides, young adults pastor at Ministerios Betesda Church in Orange, Calif., approaching ministry from an ethnically diverse perspective is just reality. A more pressing reality all the time.

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) -- Mississippi will retire the last state flag in the U.S. with the Confederate battle emblem, more than a century after white supremacist legislators adopted the design. A broad coalition of lawmakers -- Black and white, Democrat and Republican -- voted Sunday (June 28) for change as the state faced increasing pressure amid nationwide protests against racial injustice.

NASHVILLE (BP) -- Calling the racial unrest roiling the nation "spiritual warfare," and saying "unless hearts change, nothing will change in America," Philadelphia pastor K. Marshall Williams urged Southern Baptists to stand together in unity against injustice. "The world is waiting for us to come together," said Williams, senior pastor of Nazarene Baptist Church of Philadelphia. "Because Beloved, truth be told, this is just a dress rehearsal for when we get around the throne. I think maybe God is stripping us. I don't know about you, but this has been a stripping time for me, a pruning time for me, a time in the refiner's fire, that God would see what He really has as far as the church of the Lord Jesus Christ."v

CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP/RNS) -- Before the COVID-19 pandemic forced Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church to livestream its services, visitors to "the Holy City," as Charleston is sometimes called, could often be spotted wandering outside, taking photos of the façade. Worship on a given Sunday might include people from across the U.S. and some foreign countries.

NASHVILLE (BP) – Given the current upheaval race relations in the United States, Vance Pitman, senior pastor of Hope Church in Las Vegas, said the Southern Baptist Convention must seize the tumultuous moment to change. "We have to move past as a denomination being ‘not racist,’ to being anti-racist," said Pitman during a panel discussion Tuesday (June 9) hosted by Baptist 21. "That’s got to become who we are."

CLINTON, Miss. (BP) -- Tiki Broome, interim student pastor at First Baptist Church of Yazoo City, Miss., woke up Tuesday morning, June 2, to find a racial slur keyed into the side of his car. Broome, who said he had been outspoken about racial injustice, had recently received some backlash via social media. But the defacement of his car, he told Jackson, Miss., television station WLBT, was another level.

"I can't draft national policies ... or write enough columns to change anybody's mind," Todd Brady says, "but I can ... teach what is right and good to the boys in my house."

RICHMOND, Va. (BP) -- As a child growing up in Virginia, Marshal Ausberry never understood it. Why were monuments to Confederate soldiers prominently displayed in public spaces across his state? "To see the Confederate flag and these larger than life statues to over-romanticized Confederate heroes of the Confederate South strewn throughout Virginia constantly reminded me that there were people who were willing to fight, bleed, sacrifice and die to keep black people chained into a system of brutality and bondage," said Ausberry, who pastors Antioch Baptist Church in Fairfax Station, Va., and is first vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention.

"I speak out about issues of racial injustice for the same reason I speak out on abortion and same-sex marriage," David Prince says. "Namely, because I am a theological conservative committed to the authority and sufficiency of God's inerrant Word."