Blog
Blog  K. Holly Hollman, General Counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty
From our beginning, Baptists have been relentless in the battle to protect religious liberty. As we commemorate four centuries of Baptist life, the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty continues to honor our heritage by promoting the right to be free from government interference in matters of faith. We are a nonprofit education and advocacy organization promoting religious liberty for all and upholding the principle of church-state separation. Baptists have always understood that the two must go together, and we are continuing the campaign that began 400 years ago.
by Paula Clayton Dempsey, Minister for Partnership Relations
During my initial involvement as a representative of the Alliance of Baptists at the National Council of Churches, I grew to realize that all I need to know about ecumenism, I learned in Hurdle Mills, N.C. — not from my home church, but from the farming community in which I was nurtured.
by Paula Clayton Dempsey, Minister for Partnership Relations
Since living in western North Carolina I have had the pleasure of experiencing shape note singing — a two-centuries-old method used to teach the singing of four-part harmony. In the
Asheville area, we sing from The Christian Harmony, a hymnal that includes songs preserved and passed on by William Walker and his contemporaries. Some of the tunes are joyful, some mournful; all have texts expressing theology deeply rooted in Biblical text and life experience.
by Susan Parrish, Minister for Development
Would you like to be able to catch people’s attention with your printed materials?
Would you like to save money from the high cost of quality printing by doing it better at your own church or place of business?
Would you like to receive a high-end printer that does this and yet cost you nothing?
by LeDayne McLeese Polaski, Program Coordinator, Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America
What do you get when you bring together a bunch of American Baptists with a
40-year organizational history dedicated to peacemaking and a gaggle of
Southern Baptists with little organization but a huge commitment to
following the Prince of Peace?
by Brian Dixon, Pastor of Dolores Street Baptist Church in San Francisco, California
Where do we find God? How do we find God? Does God only show up in our pristine sanctuaries, with dark wooden pews, high lofty ceilings, and brightly colored stained glass windows? Does God speak only through well-tuned choirs, eloquent prayers, and polished and well-rehearsed preachers? Of course the answer is a resounding “No.” But do we really live out of that belief or do we instead offer implicit claims that indeed these are the only places and the only ways that God shows up in our world, the only altars where the divine is met?
by Diane Lipsett
Let’s turn our imaginations toward this fascinating passage from the Gospel of Luke. What a textile this Gospel is, shot through with references to the Spirit, but containing a surprising mixture of fibers. Our story this morning has dark tones of confrontation but also light threads of comedy. There are moments here where Jesus tugs so hard on the strands of what seems normal that normalcy itself starts to unravel. But that unraveling produces new cloth.
by Brooks Wicker, Alliance of Baptists President
In what was surely the longest annual meeting in recorded history, or so it seemed to me, longtime Alliance members and at least one Alliance Founder were caught catching some zzzz’s in the comfy chairs of the Park Road Baptist Church Narthex. I point this out only because I was extremely jealous that I did not get an opportunity to join their napping regimen.
by Mahan Siler, an Alliance of Baptists Founder
Dear Stan,
I feel deeply the privilege of speaking to you on behalf of the Alliance. I represent not only all of us here but also the many who wanted to be present, and those departed Alliance friends whose spirits surround us as a great cloud of witnesses. I have been asked to put some words to our appreciation. This I will do, drawing from the contribution of others.
Stan, thank you for the gift of you, Stan, your humanity. You have allowed us to experience your intelligence, your creativity, your disappointment, your joys, your pain, your playfulness, your sense of grace, your passion for God’s justice love, and your devotion to the Alliance and our vision. As a colleague of yours put it, “When Stan participates in a conversation his thoughtful listening is marked by a profound graciousness matched only by the humility he embodies in his reflections.”
by Karen Thomas
Hi Alliance friends,
I have been thinking about the Alliance this weekend, wishing I could be at the convocation, and I thought it might be time to give you all an update on some of what I am doing.
Thanks to the Alliance of Baptists, I was able to attend the Global Baptist Peace Conference in Rome where I was an official "storyteller". This was a deeply moving experience for me, as I reconnected with Baptist friends from Italy whom I had not seen in 24 years. It was a great joy to discover that they are leaders in the UCEBI (Italian Baptist Union) for issues of peace and justice. I also made new friends (including the Hoskins who are fellow Kentuckians and Alliance folks) and felt that wonderful feeling again of not being crazy; to get nods instead of blank stares when I talk about redefining Christian mission as pursuit of the Kin(g)dom of God that can be done hand-in-hand with Muslims and other persons of faith and good will, where Muslims are not seen as targets for evangelism or enemies to be vanquished, but rather neighbors to be loved and partners for peace.
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