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Tag: Baptist

  • Southern Baptists expel California megachurch for having female pastors

    Southern Baptists expel California megachurch for having female pastors

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    New Orleans — The Southern Baptist Convention on Wednesday upheld a decision to expel two churches — including Southern California megachurch Saddleback — for ordaining female pastors.

    The approximately 13,000 representatives — known by the SBC as messengers —  also overwhelmingly voted in favor of a constitutional amendment that would require that only men be employed as qualified pastors at member churches.

    The vote at the annual convention in New Orleans was met with cheers and was praised by “messengers” like a Sunday sermon. 

    “It puts us all on the same page about what a pastor is, and who a pastor is: a biblically qualified man,” Mike Law, a pastor at Arlington Baptist Church in Texas, said Wednesday of the amendment in an address to the convention.

    The amendment will need a second vote by a two-thirds margin at next year’s convention in Indianapolis before it would take effect, according to the Baptist Press, the news service for SBC.  

    The conservative SBC refused to reinstate Saddleback Church, a megachurch in Lake Forest, California, founded by the now retired Rick Warren, author of “The Purpose Driven Life.” 

    The SBC’s Executive Committee had voted in February to expel Saddleback, and Wednesday’s member vote upheld that decision.

    Prior to the vote, Warren made a futile appeal to the messengers.

    “I’m not asking you to agree with my church,” Warren told the convention Tuesday. “I am asking you to act like a Southern Baptist.”

    Rick Warren
    FILE — Pastor Rick Warren at Roma Downey’s star ceremony held on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame on Aug. 11, 2016 in Hollywood, California.

    Albert L. Ortega / Getty Images


    In total, five churches have been expelled from SBC for having women pastors. Also expelled Wednesday was Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky.

    “This is a sad day for Southern Baptists because they are losing gifted and talented and called women of God, as we continue to proclaim the gospel. Why they want to get rid of folks like us, makes no sense,” Fern Creek pastor Linda Barnes Popham told CBS News, adding that the message the expulsion sends to millions of female members of SBC churches is that “you are not valued.”

    SBC is the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, with more than 13 million members. However, it has seen its membership drop 9% over the past three years.  

    The SBC was also rocked by a bombshell report released in May of 2022 which found that its Executive Committee mishandled allegations of sex abuse and stonewalled survivors.

    Janet Shamlian


    Janet Shamlian

    Janet Shamlian is a CBS News correspondent based in Houston, Texas. Shamlian’s reporting is featured on all CBS News broadcasts and platforms including “CBS Mornings,” the “CBS Evening News” and the CBS News Streaming Network, CBS News’ premier 24/7 anchored streaming news service.

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  • Walker, Warnock offer clashing religious messages in Georgia

    Walker, Warnock offer clashing religious messages in Georgia

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    ATLANTA — One candidate in Georgia’s Senate contest warns that “spiritual warfare” has entangled America and offers himself to voters as a “warrior for God.” But it isn’t the ordained Baptist minister who leads the church where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached.

    It’s Republican Herschel Walker, the sports icon who openly questions the religious practices of Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, who calls himself “a pastor in the Senate” and declares voting the civil equivalent of prayer.

    Both men feature faith as part of their public identities in a state where religion has always been a dominant cultural influence. But they do it in distinct ways, jousting in moral terms on matters from abortion, race and criminal justice to each other’s personal lives and behavior.

    Their approaches offer a striking contrast between political opponents who were raised in the Black church in the Deep South in the wake of the civil rights movement.

    “It’s two completely different visions of the world and what our biggest problems actually are,” said the Rev. Ray Waters, a white evangelical pastor in metro Atlanta who backs Warnock in Tuesday’s election.

    How religious voters align could help decide what polls suggest is a narrow race that will help settle which party controls the Senate the next two years. According to Pew Research, about 2 out of 3 adults in Georgia consider themselves “highly religious.”

    Warnock, 53, preaches a kind of social justice Christianity that echoes King, the slain civil rights leader who also led Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

    The senator embraces the Black church’s roots in chattel slavery and Jim Crow segregation. From the pulpit, he acknowledges institutional racism and calls for collective government action that addresses inequities and other social ills. He often notes his arrests as a citizen protester advocating for health insurance expansion in the same Capitol where he now works as a senator.

    “I stand up for health care because it’s a human right,” Warnock said. “Dr. King said that of all the injustices, health care inequality is the most shocking and the most inhumane.”

    Walker talks, too, of society’s shortcomings, but the 60-year-old points to the expansion of LGBTQ rights, renewed focus on racism and “weak” politicians, who, he says, “don’t love this country.” He has called for a national ban on abortions but has faced accusations from two former girlfriends who said he pressured them into terminating pregnancies and paid for their procedures. He has said the claims are lies.

    It’s a culturally conservative pitch tied to individual morals rather than collective responsibility and effectively holds that the United States is a Christian country. That aligns Walker with the mostly white evangelical movement that has shaped the modern Republican Party.

    Those approaches, varied in substance and style, are traced through the two rivals’ biographies.

    Warnock, the son of Pentecostal ministers, pursued a similar educational path as King. Both attended Morehouse College, a historically Black campus in Atlanta. Warnock followed that with Union Theological Seminary in New York, a center of progressive Christian theology. Now with more than a decade in one of the nation’s most famous pulpits, he sometimes quotes Scripture at length and peppers his arguments with Latin references.

    “I believe a vote is a kind of prayer for the world we desire … and that democracy is the political enactment of the spiritual idea that each of us was created, as the scriptures tell us, in the ‘Imago Dei’ — the image of God,” Warnock told a group of Jewish supporters last month.

    At the same event, during observances of the Jewish New Year, Warnock noted a passage often used as part of Rosh Hashanah fasting. “Is this the fast that the Lord is looking for,” he said, “that you would loose the chains of injustice and you would set the oppressed free, that you would feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger.” Offering the citation — Isaiah 58:6 — he called it “a favorite of mine.”

    Walker also is a Pentecostal pastor’s son and now attends nondenominational Bible churches. A star high school athlete in rural Georgia, his football prowess took him in 1980 to the University of Georgia, a secular public campus that was then overwhelmingly white. Walker never graduated, though he claims otherwise.

    He talks often of Jesus, typically as a figure of “redemption” rather than a guide for public policy.

    “Let me acknowledge my Lord and savior Jesus Christ, because it’s said if you don’t acknowledge him, he won’t acknowledge you,” Walker said at his lone debate with Warnock. “When I come knocking, I want him to let me in.”

    Many Walker events open with prayers, some led by other Black conservative evangelicals. Yet Walker’s scriptural and theological references are scattershot, usually nonspecific allusions as part of broadsides against Warnock and “wokeness.”

    On transgender rights, Walker has said: “I can’t believe we’re discussing what is a woman. That’s written in the Bible. … We got to not let them fool us with all those lies.”

    At a “Women for Herschel” event in August, Walker suggested Warnock is anti-American, and he alluded to the biblical story of the Hebrew God expelling dissident angels from heaven. “It’s time for us to kick those people who don’t like America, kick ‘em out of office,” he said, concluding to his largely white audience: “Don’t let anyone tell you you’re racist.”

    On abortion, he said directly to Warnock on the debate stage: “Instead of aborting those babies, why are you not baptizing those babies?”

    It’s a compelling argument for voters such as Wylene Hayes, a 76-year-old retired schoolteacher in Cumming. “You can just tell Herschel is a man of strong faith, and just humble,” she said. “I don’t have anything against Sen. Warnock, but I do question how he can be a pastor and support abortion.”

    Warnock counters that he supports abortion access because “even God gives us a choice,” while Walker’s position would grant “to politicians more power than God has.”

    Waters said Walker’s collective argument is targeted squarely at white suburban Christians like those he led for decades before moving closer to the Atlanta city center, where he saw more problems to fix and people to help. “It seems to me the central issues in wokeness are … compassionate habits that are a lot of what Jesus said to do,” Waters said.

    Warnock largely sidesteps Walker’s attacks. He has recently begun framing Walker as “not fit” for the Senate because of Walker’s “lies” about his business record and allegations of violence against his ex-wife. The closest Warnock comes to questioning Walker’s faith is to say redemption requires that a person “confess … and be honest about the problem.”

    “I will let him speak for himself,” Warnock said. “I am engaged in the work I’ve been doing my whole life.”

    The Rev. Charles Goodman, an Augusta pastor and friend of Warnock, said it’s not new for outspoken Black pastors, especially those with a more liberal theology, to be tarred as dangerous and anti-American.

    “They called Dr. King a ‘communist,’ and now it’s ‘radical’ and ‘socialist,’” Goodman said. “Dr. Warnock loves this country. There will always be tensions between our aspirational views of the country versus our struggle trying to get to that place. He’s a very hopeful minister, and he’s always going to speak truth to power and live in that tension.”

    ———

    Learn more about the issues and factors at play in the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections. And follow the AP’s election coverage of the 2022 elections at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections.

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  • Hurricane Ian shakes SW Florida’s faith but can’t destroy it

    Hurricane Ian shakes SW Florida’s faith but can’t destroy it

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    FORT MYERS, Fla. (AP) — As Hurricane Ian approached last week, Jane Compton and her husband — who lost their home and possessions to the storm — found sanctuary at their Baptist church, huddling with fellow parishioners through wind, rain and worry.

    They prayed for the gusts to subside and for God to keep them from harm as the hurricane made landfall last Wednesday. Floodwaters swept under the pews, driving the congregation to the pulpit and further testing their faith. The intensifying storm ripped the church’s steeple away, leaving a large gap in the roof. The parishioners shuddered.

    “Good Lord, please protect us,” Compton prayed, with her husband, Del, at her side.

    She compared the deluge to the biblical story Noah’s Ark, saying they had no idea when the water would stop rising. When it did, there were hallelujahs.

    With the storm now passed and its devastation abounding, churches across hard-hit Southwest Florida are providing a steadying force in the lives of those plunged into chaos and grief. Heartache, frustration and uncertainty now swirl in sanctuaries amid sermons about perseverance and holding on to one’s faith.

    “We believe this was a blessing in disguise,” said the Rev. Robert Kasten, the Comptons’ pastor at Southwest Baptist Church, a congregation of several hundred in one of the most devastated neighborhoods of Fort Myers.

    Also being tested are many of the nearly quarter million Catholics in the Diocese of Venice, which encompasses 10 counties from just south of Tampa Bay to the Everglades that bore the brunt of the hurricane. Bishop Frank Dewane has been visiting as many of the diocese’s five dozen parishes and 15 schools as possible.

    “A lot of people just wanted to talk about, ‘Why is there this much suffering?’” Dewane said of parishioners he met as he celebrated weekend Mass in a church in an inundated North Port neighborhood and in the parish hall of a storm-damaged Sarasota church. “We have to go on; we’re a people of hope.”

    Priests walked a fine line between holding Mass to provide comfort and not endangering older parishioners in areas with widespread lack of running water and electricity and flooded roadways. Dewane said one rescued man had kept asking about his wife, not realizing she had drowned in the storm.

    Around Kasten’s church, nearby mobile home parks where many of his parishioners lived became submerged. About a fourth of his congregation suffered major damage to their dwellings, with many like the Comptons losing nearly everything. The church’s sanctuary has become temporary quarters for nearly a dozen of the newly homeless.

    Most were handling things well, until the realities of tragedy hit.

    “When they saw pictures, they just burst into tears,” Kasten said.

    “Just the shock of knowing and seeing what you knew happened, it overwhelmed them. But they are just praising the Lord how he protected us, kept us safe,” he said.

    Barbara Wasko, a retiree who is now sleeping on a lounge chair in the sanctuary, said she has faith the community will rebuild.

    “We will get by,” she said. “We will make it.”

    Hurricane Ian’s fury — 150 mph (241 kph) winds and deluges of water — killed dozens of people and stranded countless in what for many communities has been their worst calamity in generations.

    Rhonda Mitchell, who lives near the Baptist church, said all she had left was her faith in God.

    “We don’t know what He is going to do,” she said, her belongings splayed to dry outside her mobile home as an empty U-Haul truck waited to be loaded.

    “I just lost my whole life,” she said, beginning to sob. “I’m still here but I just lost everything I own. … I’m just trying to figure things out.”

    At badly damaged Catholic churches and schools, reconstruction work is already underway. But Dewane said his priority is to “meet people where they are” and ensure the Catholic community can help overall relief efforts.

    That ranges from finding shelter for teachers whose homes were leveled even as many schools are re-opening this week to helping counsel elderly neighbors. The diocese is working with Catholic Charities to set up distribution centers for donations as well as supplies provided by FEMA.

    But many successful efforts are grassroots. When a group of nuns in small Wauchula, an inland town, lost power, they decided to just empty out their freezers of meat and other perishables, and invite the entire neighborhood for a barbeque. The fire blazing, hundreds of people lined up and started adding what they had in their own rapidly warming fridges.

    “We’re doing as well as we can,” Dewane said. “I think we can only be the Lord’s instruments.”

    The Rev. Charles Cannon, pastor at St. Hilary’s Episcopal Church, sermonized about the temporariness of the community’s losses. While much was lost, he said, not all is gone.

    “People think they have lost everything, but you haven’t lost everything if you haven’t lost yourself and the people you love,” Cannon said after Sunday services that were held outside amid the fallen boughs of once-majestic oaks.

    Cannon pointed out that the debris that left church grounds looking like an ugly, unearthly place can be cleaned.

    “Most of the work has been to get the people feeling safe again,” he said, “Almost everybody has been without power. All of them without water. Trying hard to get them feeling comfortable again.”

    Down the street, about 50 parishioners at the Assembly of God Bethlehem Ministry gathered to share in their hardships. They recounted how they had no electricity, no drinkable running water and, in many cases, were left with damaged homes.

    “But God has kept them safe,” said Victoria Araujo, a parishioner and occasional Sunday school teacher.

    “Some people lost a lot of things … We need to pray for the people who lost more than us,” said the Rev. Ailton da Silva, whose congregants are mostly immigrant families from Brazil.

    The storm has truly tested his community’s resiliency, he said, adding that “I think people will think about faith, family and God.”

    Five years ago, Hurricane Irma swept through the region, causing extensive damage to his church. Repairs were still ongoing when Ian hit. The church fared much better this time.

    In the end, “it’s just a building,” da Silva said. “The church is us.”

    ___

    Dell’Orto reported from Minneapolis.

    ___

    Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

    ___

    For more AP coverage of Hurricane Ian: apnews.com/hub/hurricanes

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  • Hurricane Ian shakes SW Florida’s faith but can’t destroy it

    Hurricane Ian shakes SW Florida’s faith but can’t destroy it

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    FORT MYERS, Fla. — In darkness and despair, there were flickers of light and hope, even for Jane Compton who lost her home and possessions to Hurricane Ian’s wrath. As the storm approached last week, she and her husband found sanctuary at their Baptist church, huddling with fellow parishioners through wind, rain and worry.

    They prayed for the gusts to subside and for God to keep them from harm as the hurricane made landfall last Wednesday. Floodwaters swept under the pews, driving the congregation to the pulpit and further testing their faith. The intensifying storm ripped the church’s steeple away, leaving a large gap in the roof. The parishioners shuddered.

    “Good Lord, please protect us,” Compton prayed, with her husband, Del, at her side.

    She compared the deluge to the biblical story Noah’s Ark, saying they had no idea when the water would stop rising. When it did, there were hallelujahs.

    With the storm now passed and its devastation abounding, churches across hard-hit Southwest Florida are providing a steadying force in the lives of those plunged into chaos and grief. Heartache, frustration and uncertainty now swirl in sanctuaries amid sermons about perseverance and holding on to one’s faith.

    “We believe this was a blessing in disguise,” said the Rev. Robert Kasten, the Comptons’ pastor at Southwest Baptist Church, a congregation of several hundred in one of the most devastated neighborhoods of Fort Myers.

    Also being tested are many of the nearly quarter million Catholics in the Diocese of Venice, which encompasses 10 counties from just south of Tampa Bay to the Everglades that bore the brunt of the hurricane. Bishop Frank Dewane has been visiting as many of the diocese’s five dozen parishes and 15 schools as possible.

    “A lot of people just wanted to talk about, ‘Why is there this much suffering?’” Dewane said of parishioners he met as he celebrated weekend Mass in a church in an inundated North Port neighborhood and in the parish hall of a storm-damaged Sarasota church. “We have to go on; we’re a people of hope.”

    Priests walked a fine line between holding Mass to provide comfort and not endangering older parishioners in areas with widespread lack of running water and electricity and flooded roadways. Dewane said one rescued man had kept asking about his wife, not realizing she had drowned in the storm.

    Around Kasten’s church, nearby mobile home parks where many of his parishioners lived became submerged. About a fourth of his congregation suffered major damage to their dwellings, with many like the Comptons losing nearly everything. The church’s sanctuary has become temporary quarters for nearly a dozen of the newly homeless.

    Most were handling things well, until the realities of tragedy hit.

    “When they saw pictures, they just burst into tears,” Kasten said.

    “Just the shock of knowing and seeing what you knew happened, it overwhelmed them. But they are just praising the Lord how he protected us, kept us safe,” he said.

    Barbara Wasko, a retiree who is now sleeping on a lounge chair in the sanctuary, said she has faith the community will rebuild.

    “We will get by,” she said. “We will make it.”

    Hurricane Ian’s fury — 150 mph (241 kph) winds and deluges of water — killed dozens of people and stranded countless in what for many communities has been their worst calamity in generations.

    Rhonda Mitchell, who lives near the Baptist church, said all she had left was her faith in God.

    “We don’t know what He is going to do,” she said, her belongings splayed to dry outside her mobile home as an empty U-Haul truck waited to be loaded.

    “I just lost my whole life,” she said, beginning to sob. “I’m still here but I just lost everything I own. … I’m just trying to figure things out.”

    At badly damaged Catholic churches and schools, reconstruction work is already underway. But Dewane said his priority is to “meet people where they are” and ensure the Catholic community can help overall relief efforts.

    That ranges from finding shelter for teachers whose homes were leveled even as many schools are re-opening this week to helping counsel elderly neighbors. The diocese is working with Catholic Charities to set up distribution centers for donations as well as supplies provided by FEMA.

    But many successful efforts are grassroots. When a group of nuns in small Wauchula, an inland town, lost power, they decided to just empty out their freezers of meat and other perishables, and invite the entire neighborhood for a barbeque. The fire blazing, hundreds of people lined up and started adding what they had in their own rapidly warming fridges.

    “We’re doing as well as we can,” Dewane said. “I think we can only be the Lord’s instruments.”

    The Rev. Charles Cannon, pastor at St. Hilary’s Episcopal Church, sermonized about the temporariness of the community’s losses. While much was lost, he said, not all is gone.

    “People think they have lost everything, but you haven’t lost everything if you haven’t lost yourself and the people you love,” Cannon said after Sunday services that were held outside amid the fallen boughs of once-majestic oaks.

    Cannon pointed out that the debris that left church grounds looking like an ugly, unearthly place can be cleaned.

    “Most of the work has been to get the people feeling safe again,” he said, “Almost everybody has been without power. All of them without water. Trying hard to get them feeling comfortable again.”

    Down the street, about 50 parishioners at the Assembly of God Bethlehem Ministry gathered to share in their hardships. They recounted how they had no electricity, no drinkable running water and, in many cases, were left with damaged homes.

    “But God has kept them safe,” said Victoria Araujo, a parishioner and occasional Sunday school teacher.

    “Some people lost a lot of things … We need to pray for the people who lost more than us,” said the Rev. Ailton da Silva, whose congregants are mostly immigrant families from Brazil.

    The storm has truly tested his community’s resiliency, he said, adding that “I think people will think about faith, family and God.”

    Five years ago, Hurricane Irma swept through the region, causing extensive damage to his church. Repairs were still ongoing when Ian hit. The church fared much better this time.

    In the end, “it’s just a building,” da Silva said. “The church is us.”

    ———

    Dell’Orto reported from Minneapolis.

    ———

    Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

    ———

    For more AP coverage of Hurricane Ian: apnews.com/hub/hurricanes

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  • Amid crises, rural roots anchor Southern Baptists’ president

    Amid crises, rural roots anchor Southern Baptists’ president

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    FARMERSVILLE, Texas — A sweating Bart Barber trekked across a pasture in search of Bully Graham, the would-be patriarch of the rural pastor’s fledgling cattle herd.

    With the temperature in the mid-90s, the 52-year-old Texan found the bull — whose nickname reflects his owner’s affection for the late Rev. Billy Graham — and 11 heifers cooling under a canopy of trees.

    “Hey, baby girl,” Barber said as he patted a favorite cow he dubbed Lottie Moon after the namesake of his denomination’s international missions offering.

    For nearly a quarter-century, Barber enjoyed relative obscurity as a minister in this town 50 miles northeast of Dallas. That changed in June as delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in Anaheim, California, chose Barber to lead the nation’s largest Protestant denomination at a time of major crisis.

    The previous month a scathing, 288-page investigative report hit the denomination’s 13.7 million members. It laid out the findings of an independent probe detailing how Southern Baptist leaders stonewalled and denigrated survivors of clergy sex abuse over two decades while seeking to protect their own reputations.

    In August, SBC leaders revealed that the Department of Justice was investigating several of its major entities, giving few details but indicating that the inquiry concerned the sex abuse allegations.

    Barber’s background as a trusted, small-town preacher — not to mention his folksy sense of humor — helps explain why fellow Baptists picked him.

    “In this moment where I think there’s a lot of widespread distrust of these big institutions, I think a lot of people find it refreshing that the one leading us is an everyday pastor,” said Daniel Darling, director of the Land Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.

    A staunch theological conservative, Barber touts biblical inerrancy, opposes women serving as pastors and supports abortion bans. In running for SBC president, he expressed a desire to be a peacemaker and a unifier.

    The SBC faces multiple challenges. Rank-and-file Baptists have demonstrated a strong commitment to implementing sex abuse reforms, but the final outcome remains unclear. The denomination also has a problem with falling membership, which has slid 16% from its 2006 peak.

    Nathan Finn, a church historian and provost of North Greenville University in South Carolina, agreed that Barber’s small-town appeal is a big part of why Baptists turned to him.

    “Though he is a well-educated church historian and an expert on SBC history and polity, Bart is not an elitist,” Finn said via email. “He gives the impression that he would rather be working on his farm than hobnobbing with denominational leaders.”

    After recently appointing an abuse task force that will make recommendations at next year’s annual meeting in New Orleans, Barber said identifying solutions to the problem is his top priority.

    Barber grew up in a Southern Baptist family in Lake City, Arkansas. Baptized just before his sixth birthday, he felt God calling him to ministry at age 11 and preached his first sermon at 15.

    His late father, Jim, ran the home office for an Arkansas congressman, a Democrat named Bill Alexander. His stay-at-home mother, Carolyn, now 77, taught him to read by the time he entered kindergarten.

    Often his dad would bring politicians by the house, he recalled, and his mom would make chicken pot pie or smothered steak with mashed potatoes and gravy.

    “Here we were in very small-town Arkansas — not a lot of money, not a lot of fame or anything like that — and a gubernatorial candidate would stop by the house,” Barber said.

    He attended Baptist-affiliated Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where he met his future wife, Tracy, in a campus ministry. They have two children: Jim, 19, and Sarah, 16.

    He also earned a master’s in divinity and a doctorate in church history from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He pastored in Mill Creek, Oklahoma, and Royse City, Texas, before moving to Farmersville in 1999.

    “He has the heart of a pastor. He is someone who really cares about folks,” Tracy Barber said of her husband of 30 years. “The people in our church are our family.”

    Steve Speir, 74, is a 42-year member of First Baptist Church of Farmersville, which averages Sunday attendance of about 320. His wife, Linda, plays the church organ.

    Barber is “very organized,” Speir said. “He won’t keep anything hidden. Our entire church has full disclosure on all financial matters.”

    Another longtime member, Donna Armstrong, 75, said: “We never doubt whether he’s biblically based or loves the Lord.”

    On a recent Sunday, Barber got up at 4:30 a.m., attended a deacons meeting at 7 and preached at 8:30 and 11. After a nap, he drove to Dallas and flew to Nashville, Tennessee, for meetings at the Southern Baptist Convention headquarters.

    “It is stressful. It is time-consuming. I do enjoy it,” Barber said of his new job.

    Back home later in the week, he rose before the sun on Saturday to help his daughter load a 1,000-pound heifer named Iris into a cattle trailer. They drove a half-hour to a livestock show.

    There, Barber greeted special-needs children who came to see the animals, used clippers to help Sarah shave Iris and periodically shoveled manure into a garbage can.

    He also enjoyed a friendly chat with rancher Joni Brewer about her miniature Hereford cows. Brewer attends a Southern Baptist church, but she had no clue about Barber’s role with the SBC.

    “I live out in the country,” she said, “so you don’t always see all of those things.”

    But James Callagher, who knows Barber through 4-H Club activities, described his friend as perfect for the job.

    “The thing that sticks out to me is just authenticity,” said Callagher, who is Catholic. “He lives his faith, and as Christians we have a lot of common ground.”

    In addition to such in-person contacts, Barber maintains an active Twitter presence. Just in the last week, he posted pictures of his cows, debated biblical qualifications for church leaders and shared SBC plans for Hurricane Ian relief.

    Barber and his family live in a church-owned parsonage, but last year they bought 107 acres of land where they’re raising their Santa Gertrudis beef cattle.

    In a recent sermon, Barber joked that a boyhood job chopping cotton and hoeing soybeans was what inspired him to go into ministry. Asked on the drive back from the livestock show if he’s now enjoying life as a farm owner, Barber smiled.

    “Not only that, but I’m surviving everything else because of how I’m enjoying it,” he said. “It’s a great source of tranquility for me.”

    ———

    Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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