The Southern Baptist Convention said Thursday that apart from being a member of a church adhering to denominational standards, there is no barrier to a woman becoming the face of America’s largest Protestant denomination.

“Other than being a member of a church that cooperates with the Convention, I am aware of no SBC constitution or bylaw statement that would prohibit the election of a woman as SBC president,” Roger ‘Sing’ Oldham, vice president for convention communications and relations, told The Christian Post in a statement Thursday.

The declaration from the SBC comes as leading conservative voice for civil rights and pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, Dwight McKissic, suggested on Saturday that electing a woman to the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention like prominent evangelical founder of Living Proof Ministries, Beth Moore, could go a long way in healing the wounds of sexism in the denomination where women constitute 51 percent of the population.

McKissic said promoting a woman like Moore would send a well-needed message to Southern Baptist women.

“To elect Beth Moore…

As Presbyterian minister Bobby Griffith sees it, legalizing medical marijuana in Oklahoma could help arthritis sufferers with chronic pain and veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.

The 41-year-old husband and father has a personal reason, too, for supporting State Question 788 — a pro-marijuana initiative that the Bible Belt state’s voters will decide June 26.

“For myself, I would be interested in a prescription for it to see if it works better than my anxiety and depression medications,” said Griffith, co-pastor of a Presbyterian church near downtown Oklahoma City and a member of the national group Clergy for a New Drug Policy.

As Griffith characterizes it, the Oklahoma ballot measure’s potential to improve health outcomes and reduce dependence on addictive opioid painkillers makes it a “moral issue.”

Religious opponents counter that backing the issue would be immoral. Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., an ordained Southern Baptist pastor, blasts the ballot measure as a “recreational marijuana vote disguised as medical marijuana.”

“The moral issue to me is really a family issue,” Lankford, who directed a Baptist youth camp before his 2010 election to Congress, told Religion News Service.

“The best thing for our state is not to get more parents and grandparents to smoke marijuana,” added the senator, who filmed a commercial urging…

A US missionary kidnapped in Niger in October 2016 is alive, according to the West African nation’s president.

Jeff Woodke, who worked for Jeunesse en Mission Entraide et Developpement (JEMED), a branch of the US-based Youth With a Mission, was abducted by unknown assailants late in the evening of Friday 14 October, 2016, from the town of Abalak in northern Niger.

For 20 months, there has been no news of Woodke, but on Monday, 4 June, President Mahamadou Issoufou told TV channel France24 that both he and a German aid worker kidnapped in April this year are alive.

“We have some news; we know they’re alive,” the president said. “We continue to create the conditions for their release. Perhaps the contacts that are underway will help to achieve that goal.”

It is the first proof of life since the kidnapping of the two Western citizens in the Sahel country.

Little had been known, or at least divulged, about Woodke’s condition or location, other than that his captors were tracked to neighbouring Mali by Nigerien authorities. No group has publicly claimed responsibility.

Last July, a coalition of jihadist groups active in the Sahel region (Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimeen, also known as the Group to Support Islam and Muslims), affiliated to Al-Qaeda, released a video showing six foreign hostages, including three missionaries, but not Jeff Woodke.

The…

J.D. Greear preaches an uncompromising faith in a straightforward, unapologetic fast-clip monologue.

“Is it possible to be a lukewarm Christian?” he asked his listeners on a recent Sunday morning at The Summit, his North Carolina megachurch.

Standing onstage in gray jeans, a polo shirt and a scruffy stubble, he likens halfhearted Christians to lukewarm coffee. Hot is good, so is cold, he said. But lukewarm coffee makes you want to spit it out.

“There’s no middle ground,” he implores. “You’re either committed to the mission and living all in for Jesus, or you’re not.”

Greear’s sermons draw crowds of nearly 11,000, including an enviable number of college students and young adults, to hear a bracing Christian message he calls a mixture of truth and grace: Sin is real. There’s no salvation outside of faith in Jesus. God’s grace is amazing, but may not last.

It’s the same kind of unvarnished evangelical message he now hopes to parlay into what may be his new role, as president of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant group.

Southern Baptists meeting in Dallas June 12-13 will pick their next president, and the 45-year-old Greear is widely expected to win. (Ken Hemphill, 70, a former seminary president, has also allowed his name to be placed in the running.)

If he does, Greear will become the youngest SBC leader in nearly…