News service honors longtime editor. Associated Baptist Press presented its inaugural Greg Warner Lifetime Achievement Award in Religious Journalism to the longtime executive editor of the independent news service, forced by health issues to step down last year. The award will honor journalists whose body of work over the years has contributed in significant ways to the understanding of religion in America, ABP Executive Director David Wilkinson announced. Warner was the first permanent employee of the news service, formed in 1990 as an independent voice in Baptist journalism in response to the firing of two top editors of the Southern Baptist Convention’s news service, Baptist Press. Diagnosed with degenerative-disc disease and failed-back syndrome, Warner underwent the first of more than a dozen back surgeries in 1986. After his fourth lumbar spinal fusion in 2008, at age 53, he informed board members he would begin a 90-day sick leave and transition into permanent disability.
Baptist Youth event site determined. Singapore will be the site of the Baptist Youth World Conference in 2013, organizers of the once-every-five-years event have announced. The ethnically and religiously diverse city-state was selected because of its convenient Southeast Asian location and relatively easy visa-application process, said Emmett Dunn, who coordinates the conference. Dunn is director of the youth department of the Baptist World Alliance, the worldwide organization that sponsors the event. Leaders of the Singapore Baptist Convention—which includes about 30 congregations and 7,000 members—also believe the youth conference will enhance the status of Baptists in their country. The last Baptist Youth World Conference, held in Leipzig, Germany, in 2008, attracted about 6,300 youth from 88 countries. The Singapore conference will be the 16th since the first was held, in Czechoslovakia, in 1931.
Scholarship named for Shreveport teen. The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Louisiana has named a scholarship fund for women in ministry after a member of a Shreveport youth group who died this summer following a church-bus accident. The Louisiana CBF launched the Maggie Lee Henson Scholarship for Women in Ministry at the sixth annual Stagg-Tolbert Forum for Biblical Studies at Broadmoor Baptist Church in Baton Rouge. Reid Doster, coordinator of the state CBF group, said the scholarship will be for young women pursuing theological education and vocational Christian ministry.
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