Telling the Story of Tennessee Baptists Since 1835
Baptist and Reflector
BRENTWOOD – Tennessee Baptist Convention churches contributed $2,789,097 through the Cooperative Program in February.
For the year-to-date, Tennessee Baptists have given $11,818,634. The amount is $145,614 or 1.2 percent below what was given at the same time last year. [Read more…]
Baptist Press
Aaron and Melissa Stormer, sent to take the gospel to American peoples by Hilldale Baptist Church in Clarksville, Tennessee, share their testimony during a Sending Celebration March 1 near Richmond, Va. “We are going because we know that God’s heart is for all people to know his name,” Aaron said. Photo by Roy M. Burroughs/IMB
RICHMOND — Twenty-nine Southern Baptists were appointed as missionaries to the nations during the International Mission Board’s trustee meeting Feb. 28-March 1 near Richmond.
Trustees also heard numerous reports and recognized 63 missionaries who retired or died within the past year.
Among those appointed were Aaron and Melissa Stormer of Hilldale Baptist Church in Clarksville, who are being sent to the American peoples. Aaron said they are going “because we know that God’s heart is for all people to know His name.”
Melissa noted she realized God’s heart for the nations while sharing the gospel in a small mountain village in Haiti. … God has called us to go and carry out His mission in order that the lost may be found and His truth proclaimed,” she said.
By Diana Chandler
Baptist Press
Southern Baptist Convention President Steve Gaines encouraged prayer and evangelism in his sermon at the SBC Executive Committee meeting Feb. 20-21 in Nashville.
-Photo by Morris Abernathy
NASHVILLE — In Nashville all of 24 hours while his wife Donna was home in Memphis, Southern Baptist Convention President Steve Gaines had already spoken with her four times, he said, because he loves her and simply loves to hear her voice.
The conversations with his wife served as an analogy to encourage Southern Baptists to talk with God and tell others about our Savior, the theme of his sermon on the first evening of the SBC Executive Committee meeting in Nashville Feb. 20-21. [Read more…]
By Lonnie Wilkey and Chris Turner
Baptist and Reflector
BRENTWOOD — For the past few years, giving through the Cooperative Program has been on an upswing in Tennessee and throughout the Southern Baptist Convention.
Recent developments across the Southern Baptist Convention, however, raise questions about whether the upswing in Cooperative Program giving will continue. [Read more…]
By Diana Chandler
Baptist Press
NASHVILLE (BP) — A fictional and emotionally destroyed Mack Phillips answers a mysterious invitation to a remote, isolated cabin. There he finds a trinity of fatherly love in a woman named “Papa” whose cohorts teach Phillips forgiveness and the faith to run on water — literally.
It’s the synopsis of the movie “The Shack,” based on William Paul Young’s New York Times bestseller and award-winning book by the same title, that some described as a biblically sound parable. And as with the 2007 controversial book that sold more than 20 million copies, others are criticizing the movie as a farce that serves to deeply distort rather than affirm biblical truths. [Read more…]
By David Roach
Baptist Press
Rendering from NASA
NASHVILLE (BP) — At least some of scientists’ enthusiasm over discovery of seven potentially habitable planets seems to reflect the misplaced hopes of a secular worldview.
That is the assessment of a Union University physicist and a Gateway Seminary Old Testament professor following NASA’s Feb. 22 announcement that astronomers have detected the first known system of seven Earth-sized planets rotating around a single star. [Read more…]
By Carolyn Tomlin
Contributing Writer, B&R
BROWNSVILLE — When the call came a few years ago from Tennessee Baptist Disaster Relief to assist people who had been affected by an ice storm in Missouri, Woodland Baptist Church here responded.
In the summer of 2016, the team once again loaded up trucks and equipment and headed to Louisiana to help flood victims when the mighty Mississippi River overflowed. [Read more…]
By Diana Chandler
Baptist Press
WASHINGTON (BP) — The Trump administration has reversed an Obama-era directive that advised schools to open bathrooms and locker rooms to students based on their perceived sexual identity or risk losing federal funding.
The new ruling leaves bathroom use policies to the discretion of state governments and local school districts, but the issue is already set to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. The court is scheduled on March 28 to hear a case from the Gloucester County School Board in Virginia challenging a lower court ruling allowing transgender teen Gavin Grimm to use the boys’ bathroom at school. Grimm, a biological female, identifies as male. [Read more…]
By Connie Davis Bushey
News Editor, Baptist and Reflector
Retired USAF Col. Jim Harding, right, of Huntingdon stands with his wife Barbara and former President George W. Bush at an event in 2010.
HUNTINGDON — “We had probably what everybody thought was an impossible rescue,” said Retired United States Air Force Col. Jim Harding of one of his experiences during the Vietnam War.
Harding, a member of First Baptist Church, Huntingdon, and one of the top 25 most decorated veterans in U.S. history, used the event as an illustration of the importance of saving one life in a session of the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board staff recently. [Read more…]
