By Mark Wingfield Baptist missiologist Bill O’Brien has been named the first executive director of Gaston Christian Center, a new mission and ministry center in north Dallas which aims to create a collective of faith-based agencies and churches to serve…
Ice bucket do-gooders
By Mark Wingfield Americans have heated up the Internet with the Ice Bucket Challenge in the last two weeks. Unless you’ve just flown in from the Arctic, you know exactly what I’m talking about: The social-media-fueled fundraising phenomenon that’s benefitting…
Owning up to our flaws
By Mark Wingfield “The devil made me do it.” Years ago, the comedian Flip Wilson made a name for himself with a ’70s-era shtick in which this was his sassy answer to every misdeed his character committed. For folks of…
Build and tear down
By Mark Wingfield The church building is grand and beautiful, representative of the kind of early 20th-century architecture prevalent among prominent Baptist churches with resources. A recent restoration has brought the shine back to this gem of a worship space,…
Will you be known when you die?
By Mark Wingfield Years ago, there was a national ad campaign aimed at helping Americans understand the importance of going to church. One of my favorite ads in the series showed pallbearers carrying a casket in the front door of…
Will you be known when you die?
Years ago, there was a national ad campaign aimed at helping Americans understand the importance of going to church. One of my favorite ads in the series showed pallbearers carrying a casket in the front door of a church. The…
If you had a million dollars …
What would you do if you had a million dollars? That’s a fun “what if” game most of us like to play, pondering all the good we could do, all the fun we might have, all the contributions we could…
The new independent Baptist churches
By Mark Wingfield In the dialogue about “ex-SBC” folks that’s been transpiring on this site in recent weeks, a false assumption seeps in from time to time: That all “ex” Southern Baptists are now affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship….
How can ex-SBCers move forward if they’re not even ‘ex’?
By Mark Wingfield In three recent commentaries, ABPnews/Herald columnist David Gushee has wisely challenged us to consider how we might shape our identity more positively than simply being “ex” members of the Southern Baptist Convention. I’d like to expand the…
What Norman Rockwell and Blanche DuBois have in common
By Mark Wingfield Say the name “Norman Rockwell,” and immediately iconic images of vintage Americana spring to mind. His paintings of Boy Scouts of America and for the covers of the Saturday Evening Post all portray a vision of American…
Norman Rockwell and Blanche Dubois
Say the name “Norman Rockwell,” and immediately iconic images of vintage Americana spring to mind. His paintings for Boy Scouts of America and for the covers of the Saturday Evening Post all portray a vision of American life that we…
Atrocious saints
“A democratic autocrat. An urbane savage. An atrocious saint.” That’s how biographer James Patton described Andrew Jackson, seventh president of the United States of America. In seeking to write the first scholarly biography of the native Tennessean, Parton felt like…