Erin Roach

BRANDON, Miss. (BP) -- Women & Work, a ministry launched this year with a panel at the Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting, seeks to fill a void in Baptist life for women who want to contribute to the Kingdom by working in ministry, working from home or working in the secular world. Courtney L. Moore, the ministry's founder, is a stay-at-home mother of three and pastor's wife in Brandon, Miss., and she explained that her personal journey is part of what led her to start Women & Work. She felt called to ministry in high school but didn't know many women in full-time ministry.

DALLAS (BP) -- Kie Bowman, pastor of Hyde Park Baptist Church in Austin, Texas, preached the convention sermon from Ezekiel 37, calling on Southern Baptists to ask God to breathe life into families, churches and the Southern Baptist Convention at the annual meeting in Dallas June 13. Bowman, this year's alternate convention sermon preacher, stepped in to give the meeting's keynote message after Paige Patterson, former president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, withdrew June 8.

DALLAS (BP) -- Personal finance speaker and author Dave Ramsey, addressing the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting June 12, urged pastors to lead people out of debt by teaching them what the Bible says about money. "When you stand up in front of your congregation, you're looking at a large number of people who do not have the ability to handle their money," Ramsey, CEO of Ramsey Solutions and author of "Financial Peace University," told messengers.

DENVER (BP) -- A Denver-area church plant, in only its third year, voted to quadruple its giving through the Cooperative Program, realizing the value of the missions-support system that has aided them -- and through which they can help reach the world for Christ. "It's one thing to plant a multiplying church in Denver. It's another thing to be a part of planting multiplying churches all over the country and world," Ben Mandrell, pastor of Storyline Fellowship in Arvada, told Baptist Press. "Through the Cooperative Program, we can be in a thousand places. Without it, we can only be in one place."

LAS VEGAS (BP) -- Las Vegas, Washington, D.C., and Denver were named America's loneliest cities in a recent study, but pastors in those cities are not surprised. They say the transient nature of modern life, along with selfishness and technology contribute to people feeling alone despite being surrounded by people. Various reports indicate a rise in the number of people who report feeling lonely, and in Great Britain earlier this year Prime Minister Theresa May appointed a minister for loneliness. CV Outreach, an organization urging churches to use technology to reach people far from God, conducted the study identifying ...

ALBANY, Ga. (BP) -- Evangelicals were introduced to a new level of faith-based filmmaking 15 years ago when brothers Alex and Stephen Kendrick released "Flywheel," a $20,000-budget film using church members as the cast and production crew to convey biblical truth. "We're just amazed at what the Lord's done with it," Alex Kendrick told Baptist Press. The brothers, who served on staff at Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Ga., went on to produce "Facing the Giants," "Fireproof," "Courageous" and "War Room."

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (BP) -- Alaska is "in dire need of committed pastors to serve Christ," said Rob Scott, who never lived outside North Carolina before attending Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky. Scott, who has been in a remote area of Alaska since 2009 as pastor of Dillingham Bible Fellowship, moved to the state because "it's a place that prefers function to form, and that's a fairly good description of me too. I am here because there are too few presently serving Christ in rural Alaska."

WASHINGTON (BP) -- National Religious Broadcasters is drawing attention to online censorship of Christian and conservative speech by tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google and Apple by launching a new initiative -- Internet Freedom Watch. NRB announced Thursday (Dec. 7) a new website -- InternetFreedomWatch.org -- for documenting cases of internet censorship, including Twitter's takedown of an ad by Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R.-Tenn., in October and Facebook removing former Gov. Mike Huckabee's post supporting Chick-fil-A in 2012.

NOXON, Mont. (BP) -- There was a petition circulating to remove violent brawler Jim Webley from town when God intervened and changed not just Webley's life but, years later, the course of a church and a Montana community. In his early 20s, Webley was working in the gold mines of Nevada, entrenched in a rough lifestyle of drugs and alcohol, and through weekly fighting he had "put some people in the hospital," he told Baptist Press. People just wanted him to leave town. One Sunday morning, Webley was driving his young daughter Sara to get milkshakes when they passed a little white Baptist church building in the Nevada community. "I absolutely never went to church down there, but I could feel God pulling me in that direction," Webley recounted. "He was telling me I needed to get into church."

PHILADELPHIA (BP) -- Though the Cooperative Program unites Southern Baptist churches in giving money for missions, it also helps believers acknowledge they need each other in the daunting task of reaching the nations for Christ, a church planter with an international background said. "We learn to cooperate more in missions giving, sending and partnering because of the Cooperative Program's unifying spirit, realizing that we need to be together because of the enormous demands of the mission field," Peter Yanes, a North American Mission Board church planting catalyst in Philadelphia, told Baptist Press.