NC Baptists Help Residents with No Power, Theological Schools Adapt to Change & AL Pastor Grateful for Help

First Baptist Church of Pinehurst, North Carolina is providing help days after someone attacked the Moore County public power grid and put more than 100,000 people in the dark.

The church, where power was restored Sunday night, is hosting one of two Baptist State Convention of North Carolina Disaster Relief stations with feeding, shower and laundry units, said Tom Beam, North Carolina Baptists disaster relief coordinator. A second relief center is operating from First Baptist Church of Aberdeen, despite the lack of electricity there.

North Carolina Baptist volunteers plan to prepare 3,000 hot meals Dec. 6 and Dec. 7 for distribution at three pickup locations in cooperation with the American Red Cross, Beam said.

Most of the 30 or so churches in the Sandhills Baptist Association serving Moore County are without electricity, but many set up generators and offered free hotdogs and hamburgers after the outage, Beam said. Public schools and many businesses are closed.
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Professional degrees are gaining traction at theological schools across the United States and Canada, while the traditional ministerial degree—the Master of Divinity—is faltering, according to new data.

But Chris Meinzer, senior director and chief operation officer of The Association of Theological Schools, noted overall enrollment at ATS schools has remained stable and the Master of Divinity degree isn’t dying.

Instead, he said, the Master of Arts degree is appealing to more students—an observation echoed by Todd Still, dean of Baylor University’s Truett Theological Seminary.

The Association of Theological Schools, an umbrella organization with more than 270 member schools, reported an uptick in Doctor of Ministry and other professional doctoral programs designed to enhance a minister’s practical skills.
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Pastor Jamie Lay said he thought the weather had finally calmed down enough for him to go to bed in the early morning hours of Nov. 30 in Tibbie, Alabama.

That when a warning sounded on his phone and his family took shelter in a bathroom.

Lay, pastor of Howardtown Baptist Church in Tibbie, had weathered eight tornados in the past, and he was about to meet his ninth.

They and their home survived, the church…located across the street…did not. He thanks the many volunteers who have helped them as they begin to recover from the crisis.

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