Southern Baptist campaign; and halal food

Southern Baptists are far from their ambitious baptism goal, reports Anne Pessala in Thursday’s RNS report: A Southern Baptist Convention campaign to baptize 1 million believers in a single year has reached less than 2 percent of its goal as it approaches its halfway point. Officials from the country’s largest Protestant denomination say they are […]

Southern Baptists are far from their ambitious baptism goal, reports Anne Pessala in Thursday’s RNS report: A Southern Baptist Convention campaign to baptize 1 million believers in a single year has reached less than 2 percent of its goal as it approaches its halfway point. Officials from the country’s largest Protestant denomination say they are unconcerned with the slow start because many Southern Baptist churches wait to report baptisms until the end of the year. But at least one academic authority on Baptists says the numbers may reveal a more fundamental problem: an unwillingness to modernize evangelism techniques since the denomination’s fast-growing period decades ago. The program, called the “‘Everyone Can’ Kingdom Challenge,” officially started on Oct. 1, 2005, the beginning of the denomination’s administrative year. The program’s Web site lists only 1,555 baptisms from 141 churches as of Thursday (Mar. 13).

Mariam Jukaku writes that the Muslim market for halal food is booming, bringing with it confusion about what is legitimately considered halal: Tapping into a growing Muslim-American population, the market for food products lawful to eat under Islamic regulations has boomed, with some industry leaders predicting billions of dollars in U.S. sales. But different interpretations of what Muslims consider “halal” has led to confusion, misunderstanding and even fraud, prompting some states to step in with their own regulations.

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