Sharayah Colter

NASHVILLE (BP) -- True Love Waits morphed from a nameless concept in coffee break conversations into a movement that, beginning in February 1993, steadily spread to teenagers across the country.

GRAPEVINE, Texas (BP) -- For retired Southern Baptist worker Marty Koehn, Dec. 30, 2002, was a fairly normal morning in Yemen -- until she heard an "extremely urgent and atrociously loud" knock at the door of her home.       Koehn recalls being frustrated by the interruption.

FORT WORTH, Texas (BP) -- In light of the increasing prevalence of pornography and erotica such as the bestselling "50 Shades of Grey," Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary hosted a closed-door women-only panel discussion of the issue and its devastating effect on marriages and ministries.

FORT WORTH, Texas (BP) -- In light of the increasing prevalence of pornography and erotica such as the bestselling "50 Shades of Grey," Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary hosted a closed-door women-only panel discussion of the issue and its devastating effect on marriages and ministries.

FORT WORTH, Texas (BP) -- There have been books, conferences and websites for youth ministry.       Now, there's an app for that.       Richard Ross, professor of student ministry at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, has launched a new app ...

FORT WORTH, Texas (BP) -- There have been books, conferences and websites for youth ministry.       Now, there's an app for that.       Richard Ross, professor of student ministry at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, has launched a new app ...

FORT WORTH, Texas (BP) -- Type "Dead Sea Scrolls" into the search bar and Google presents 29 pages of images related to the ancient documents. Stick the 1998 animated film "The Prince of Egypt" into the DVD player and DreamWorks presents its rendition of Bible times in the Near East. [QUOTE@right@200=In The Exhibit: -- Murals of Dead Sea region -- Artifacts such as coins, pottery and sandals -- Replica Wailing Wall -- Authentic Bedouin tent -- Tent from Qumran dig site -- Scroll stylus and ink well -- Replica of Cave 4 -- Dead Sea Scroll fragments and other manuscripts -- Dead Sea Scrolls film -- iScroll kiosks -- Portion of St. John's Bible -- Early Bibles and texts -- Gift shop -- Interactive dig site]For many Christians, the eastern lands where God spoke to Abraham, where God led the Israelites to freedom, and where Jesus was born, lived, died and rose again may just as well exist only in the events' respective time periods. Hindered by vacation time, finances, or other responsibilities, millions of people cannot visit the desert surrounding the Dead Sea. For some, Google and DreamWorks may offer the closest access they may ever have to the lands the patriarchs crisscrossed by sandaled foot. Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary hopes to change that reality and give more people than ever a chance to see manuscripts that reveal the faithful transmission of the biblical texts over thousands of years through its Dead Sea Scrolls & the Bible exhibition, which will run from July 2012 to January 2013. Organizers expect to see more than 400,000 people visit the exhibit during its six-month run at the seminary's MacGorman Chapel and Performing Arts Center. Weston Fields, guest curator for the Dead Sea Scrolls & the Bible exhibition and executive director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation, said that while the ancient scroll fragments do not "prove" the Bible is true, they prove, more or less, that the Bible Christians use today, including 66 books from Genesis to Revelation, is the Bible God intended Christians to have, even thousands of years after He first inspired its writing. "What I try to get people to understand is, there is a prior question to the 'Is the Bible true?' question, and that is, 'Is what we have the Bible?'" Fields said. ...

TEKAX, Yucatan, Mexico (BP) -- No runway lights guide the plane from the night sky to the tarmac. Armed policía greet passengers as they snake their way through a line in customs and immigration. Baywatch plays over the airwaves like it is 1990. Along the roadside, discarded Coke bottles get picked up, dusted off and reused by passersby.

HOUSTON (BP) -- In a cinderblock room with a concrete floor and metal bunk bed, no phones or computers ping or ding with text or Tweet alerts. For those serving time in prison, the onward march of technology could just as well be a lifetime sentence or two away. Instead, amid the unmuffled clang of heavy metal doors and the routine spontaneity of pat-downs and shake-downs, letter writing thrives as it did in the first century. Stephen Presley, who is teaching an inaugural biblical interpretation class at a maximum-security prison near Houston, says the inmates' familiarity with letter writing has given them a unique perspective on the epistles that comprise a large portion of the New Testament. "They, in a very real and a very sincere way, understood what it would have been like for the early Christians to start to receive letters from Paul," Presley said. "I think that [for] those of us who live in a world that's dominated by email and controlled by other forms of technology, sometimes it's hard for us to understand the genre of letter writing -- the genre of the epistles. "But for those who live in this world [behind bars], it was so easy for them to comprehend and to almost identify with the early church in the way they would have felt receiving these letters from Paul and how they would have treated the letter, perhaps, even in ways we don't, in terms of reading it from start to finish, reading it closely and observing every word." Presley, assistant professor of biblical interpretation at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary's Havard campus in Houston, said he had not anticipated the connection inmates in a new seminary extension at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's Darrington Unit would find with the apostle's epistles until he saw the realization spark in their eyes as he began to discuss the letters the apostle wrote to the first-century churches. "Their faces lit up ... [when] they felt a sense of connection to the way that the early church communicated in ways that those of us who live in the free world don't understand or don't necessarily appreciate," Presley said. The similarities appear uncanny. Even down to the greeting, the inmates' letters and the letters from Paul, which he, too, often wrote from prison, seem to almost mirror one another. "Within the prison itself, they have a standard greeting," Presley said in comparing the inmates' letters to Paul's, which follow a recognizable Pauline pattern. "Their standard greeting in the prison system is, 'I pray this letter finds you in good health and in high spirits.' It was interesting; none of them had actually talked about it, but they sort of all had taken on this standard format for letter writing."

FORT WORTH, Texas (BP) -- A tiny hand seemed to wave at everyone in the room on a small TV screen inside a watermelon-slice-shaped window. ...