Southern Baptists

Video game enthusiasts will soon be able to say they are strengthening their faith via the Xbox when the first complete Bible application for the popular gaming console launches next month.

B&H Publishing Group, a division of LifeWay Christian Resources, will release the “Bible Navigator X” for the Xbox 360 in early December. The Bible application will be downloadable through the “Indie Games” channel of Xbox.com.

"This application will bring the Bible into people’s living rooms and onto their televisions in a completely new and innovative way," said Aaron Linne, B&H Publishing Group’s executive producer of digital marketing, in a statement Tuesday. “The Xbox isn’t just secular entertainment anymore. We can use technology that other people developed to study Scriptures through a new medium.” more >>

A Southern Baptist leader who is part of a task force that was recently set up to move the denomination toward a missional resurgence has been hard at work dispelling myths about the panel's work.

The latest rumor Dr. Daniel Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, threw out was: "The Great Commission Resurgence is actually a grand Calvinist plot to infiltrate the Southern Baptist Convention and gain control or at least greater influence in the Convention."

"This may be my favorite of all the myths. The wild imaginations that have produced it are a wonder to behold," he wrote on his website. more >>

Prominent Southern Baptist theologian R. Albert Mohler, Jr., implored young seminary students to save the denomination.

"It is very important that your generation redeem what has been lost, strengthen the things that remain," he said Friday at the close of a four-day conference on "Southern Baptists, Evangelicals, and the Future of Denominationalism."

His address at Union University in Jackson, Tenn., comes as the Southern Baptist Convention – the largest Protestant denomination in the country – has been experiencing decline in baptisms and membership in recent years and as cultural Christianity is quickly dying. more >>

There is a future for denominationalism, affirmed one Southern Baptist missiologist. But Christians should not assume that denominations are necessary for the mission of God.

Ed Stetzer, president of LifeWay Research, addressed fellow Baptists Tuesday giving his thoughts on Protestant sects that have taken a verbal beating over the last few decades.

"Right now a lot of people are asking questions about the viability and the efficacy of denominations," he said before his talk at the "Southern Baptists, Evangelicals and the Future of Denominationalism" conference at Union University. "People have been swinging away at denominations like a low-hanging piñata on Cinco de Mayo." more >>

Southern Baptists are at a crossroads, says one prominent leader, and the path they choose to take next could lead to either growth or death.

Pondering the future of the Southern Baptist Convention and its identity in the 21st century, Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., delivered a wake-up call to a denomination that had once been the General Motors of church groups but may now be on its way to bankruptcy.

"If the SBC is indeed in some way analogous to General Motors, the warning is we can find ourselves – if we are trapped in the organizational logic of the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s – in a similar crisis," Mohler said in an address Wednesday to seminary students, faculty and staff. more >>