More than one third of seminaries are on the brink, with less than a year's worth of spendable assets, says the Association of Theological Schools' fall, 2008 report. Plus, enrollments are down.
Likewise members of the Association for Biblical Higher Education (ABHE).
They're adapting: Cutting staff and programs, using satellite campuses, teaching lot more via the Web.
It was within the law to require Jose Juan Hernandez to leave church one Sunday in Texas to be arrested on suspicion of illegal re-entry after deportation. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was performing his sworn duty.
Yet such an arrest, unless to safeguard public safety, unnecessarily disregards the socially constructive tradition of churches as a place of both real and spiritual sanctuary.
Seven denominations have signed a Church World Service (CWS) letter [.pdf] of concern about the arrest to President Obama.
The letter makes three, reasonable requests:
First, make public the current “informal” ICE guidelines that have allowed agents to make arrests at churches under specific circumstances. These guidelines have been kept secret and thus have created fear among immigrants and the faith communities that serve them.
Second, revise these guidelines to prohibit the arrests of undocumented persons in churches and schools unless there is a direct and clear threat to community safety.
And third, work with Congress to pass immigration reform that unites families, provides a pathway for undocumented immigrants to earn legal status and eventual citizenship, and respects the God-given dignity of all persons.
While honoring and enforcing the law, let us not forget that we are fundamentally a nation of immigrants.
Despite the complex balances required by immigration law, do we not believe and wish to honor the promise inscribed on that iconic statue:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Is it not the door that has made us strong?
On behalf of gifted Southern Baptist women:
www.bWebaptist.com asks Southern Baptists to:
- Pray for women pastors and for women who are being called into ministry.
- Pray for a softening of the heart of the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention toward women in the United States.
- Start an email cell group which would commit to pray and to enlist others.
Unusual (in our experience the email cells are) and sound strategy.
Advised to fall silent about First Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Fla., "until certain on-going events run their course," the Watchdog has proclaimed himself "muzzled."
Watchdog promises to tell his story then, and it sounds both interesting and illustrative of what can befall anonybloggers:
When I tell my story, it will be the entire story of what has occured regarding this blog, the legal proceedings, Comcast subpoenas, field reports, official JSO trespass warnings ... all of it. It isn't pretty, and many people will be sorely disappointed at what has transpired in the last few months behind the scenes.
Public-spirited anonymous blogging deserves our support and defense. After all:
Do we not protect the discourse itself by protecting this one blogger?
A collapse of anonymity appears to have led to this silence -- a caesura in self-expression about matters which at every step have appeared to be legitimate public concerns.
Do not look here for a celebration of such silence.
Allison Hantschell writes:
I had an Easy-Bake Oven, when I was 9. It made tiny cupcakes and itty-bitty cookies, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since I read about the girl in Brazil.
I don't know her name, but she's 9 years old, living in Brazil. Brutally raped by her stepfather, multiple times over a period of years, and finally impregnated with twins.
Nine years old. And instead of playing baseball, or learning numbers, or baking tiny cupcakes and itty-bitty cookies, this little girl is at the center of a worldwide controversy over the Roman Catholic Church, its views on abortion, and, above all, the role of mercy and the incoherence of men.
Raped by a parent until precocious adolescence led to pregnancy, and the church at last took action . . . .
Southern Baptist blog-world need not be a sometime verbal brawl. Enid, Okla., pastor Wade Burleson, whose blog is well-known and who has been on the receiving end of considerable harshness, has a good idea.
He's talking "out loud" in his blog space about how "many Southern Baptists can debate theological issues with a spirit of grace, never demeaning those who disagree, while displaying a humility that conveys they don't feel they always have all the right answers."
Positive examples are offered, the existence of the negative noted, and the benefits of civil discourse underlined.
To us, it sounds dangerously like old-fashioned, humility-rich, Christian civility. Can it prevail in Southern Baptist blogger-world?
Christa Brown called Frank Page out on his uncorrected 2007 abuse of the victims of clerical sexual predation. In an article for the Florida Baptist Witness entitled "Guarding against sexual abuse in the church," he wrote:
. . . please realize that there are groups who claim to be one thing when in reality they are another. It would be great if the many groups who are claiming to be groups of advocacy and encouragement in ministry were that which they claim. Please be aware that there are groups that are nothing more than opportunistic persons who are seeking to raise opportunities for personal gain.Such sweeping assaults are generally a ham-handed politician's attempt to tar everyone in sight who disagrees with him/her. Neither clarification nor apology and retraction = irresponsibility.
It's all part of the heritage the former Southern Baptist Convention president took with him to President Obama's White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships advisory council.
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