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6 days ago | 
thegospelcoalition.org | Joe Carter
On May 8, 2025, the Catholic Church announced the election of a new pope. American-born Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost is now Pope Leo XIV, the head of the Catholic Church and spiritual leader to more than a billion Catholics worldwide. He’ll wield significant influence as the 267th pontiff, guiding Roman Catholic teaching and engaging with global issues. But why should evangelicals care about the new pope?
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1 week ago | 
thegospelcoalition.org | Joe Carter
In the United States, around 3.3 percent of adolescents identify as transgender, and a futher 2.2 percent question whether they might be.
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1 week ago | 
thegospelcoalition.org | Joe Carter
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) will gather in Dallas, Texas, with ancillary events beginning Sunday, June 8, 2025, and the two business sessions that constitute the official Annual Meeting scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday, June 10–11, 2025, at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center. The SBC is the largest Baptist denomination in the world and the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, with a little less than 47,000 cooperating churches and around 13 million members.
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2 weeks ago | 
theaquilareport.com | Joe Carter
At its core, this legislation attacks the biblical understanding that humans are created male and female in God’s image (Gen. 1:27). It seeks to replace parental authority—established by God—with state authority that enforces a worldview fundamentally at odds with Christian anthropology. First, they targeted a baker. Now, they’re targeting parents.
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2 weeks ago | 
thegospelcoalition.org | Joe Carter
“When will American Christianity finally hit rock bottom?”Many church leaders have had that question on their minds as they’ve watched affiliation trends for the past decade. Now, according to Pew Research Center’s recently released Religious Landscape Study, there may be reason for cautious hope. After years of seemingly relentless decline, Christianity’s downward spiral appears to be slowing.
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4 weeks ago | 
thedissenter.substack.com | Joe Carter
Colorado, ever the progressive petri dish of experimental governance, has once again declared its disdain for Christian convictions—this time by officially categorizing biblical parenting as a form of abuse. House Bill 25-1312, which I wrote about earlier this month, cynically dubbed the "Kelly Loving Act," slithers under the guise of compassion while weaponizing the state against parents who won’t cosign their child’s gender confusion.
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4 weeks ago | 
thegospelcoalition.org | Joe Carter
First, they targeted a baker. Now, they’re targeting parents. Colorado’s anti-Christian trajectory became apparent in 2012, when Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips declined to create a wedding cake celebrating a same-sex ceremony.
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1 month ago | 
theaquilareport.com | Joe Carter
Marriage vows don’t function as rigid laws that condemn us when we fall short. Instead, they can be channels of grace that direct us back to God’s purposes. They remind us that just as God’s love for us isn’t based on our performance, our commitment to our spouse shouldn’t depend on his or her perfection. When we fail—and we will—our vows point us back to the cross, where we find both forgiveness and power to persist. One profound privilege of pastoral ministry is officiating weddings.
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1 month ago | 
thegospelcoalition.org | Joe Carter
The text messages and emails began arriving in clusters last month, all with a similar message: “Please pray for me; I’ve been laid off.”I pastor a church near Washington, D.C., where government jobs typically insulate us from economic downturns. Recent policy changes, though, have triggered widespread layoffs among federal employees and contractors, affecting nearly everyone in our congregation.
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2 months ago | 
thegospelcoalition.org | Joe Carter
One profound privilege of pastoral ministry is officiating weddings. It’s always an honor to be asked by a couple to perform their ceremony and help shape one of the most significant moments of their lives. Yet there are five words I dread hearing: “We wrote our own vows.”A primary problem with these self-written vows is that they are rarely vows. A vow, properly understood, is a solemn promise of future action—a binding commitment to specific behaviors and obligations.
