In the year 1612, British Baptist/dissenter Thomas Helwys published A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity, the first English call for universal religious freedom. Addressed to King James I, it began: “Hear, O King, and despise not the counsel…
America 2021: Got church and steeple but where are the people?
Growing up in Texas during the Southern Baptist Iron Age, I learned this bit of gospel doggerel somewhere between Sunday School, Vacation Bible School or Romper Room (Google it) and the hand-signals that accompanied it: Here is the church, Here…
Holy Week 2021: Justice, gospel and cups of cold water
On Good Friday, April 12, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Birmingham, Ala., for leading an “unlawful” protest in the city. That same day, a group of eight clergymen including five bishops (Catholic, Episcopal, Methodist), a Presbyterian, a…
Voting rights and the people who died for them: Jonathan Daniels et al.
A March 11 article in the Washington Post began with these two paragraphs: “The GOP’s national push to enact hundreds of new election restrictions could strain every available method of voting for tens of millions of Americans, potentially amounting to…
Evangelicals are in trouble: Reclaiming ‘Oberlinism” could bring some redemption
Evangelicals are in trouble in the land of the free and the home of the Trump golden statue, that 6-foot sculpture that debuted at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando. Watching the iconic ministrations surrounding it, I wondered…
‘Hour of decision’? Evangelicalism in a post-church, post-Trump era
In 1950, evangelist Billy Graham initiated a radio program called the “Hour of Decision,” an audio vehicle for dispensing the call to conversion on the airwaves of America and the world. Actually, it was only a 30-minute broadcast, but what…
‘While there is still time’: American churches, violence and conspiracy theories
In his classic book Night, the late Boston University professor Elie Wiesel described how the first warnings of what became the Holocaust found their way into his family’s village of Sighet, Transylvania, in 1942. The messenger was an “outsider” called…
Insurrection postscript: The church’s one foundation isn’t the USA
On Jan. 6, as our family watched in real time, thousands of insurrectionists took over the U.S. Capitol, and the words of two 17th century Colonial Americans raced across my memory. Governor John Winthrop, arriving at Massachusetts Bay on the…
Broken churches, broken nation: Will evangelicals ‘recalculate’ or rebel?
On Dec. 7, 1941, the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was attacked by the Empire of Japan, an event that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called “a day of infamy.” On Jan. 6, 2021, the land of the free…
Facing life’s realities at Christmas: Listening to Rachel
It was Christmas Eve in the small New England church where I preached my first-ever Advent sermon, Dec. 24, 1971 — the first of four years I served as the congregation’s pastor while studying at Boston University. The First Community…
A Bonhoeffer Moment finale: ‘What Christianity really is’
A research paper recently submitted in my Introduction to Christian History course at the School of Divinity, Wake Forest University, begins with these words: It has become an unavoidable reality that the American Christian church is dying slowly. For many,…
Bonhoeffer Moment No. 5: Finding a ‘will for the future’
Reflecting on the long-term impact of the Bubonic Plague (1346-1353) sweeping across Europe and ravaging his native Florence, the poet Petrarch wrote: “O happy posterity, who will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon our testimony as a…