I must have been in the third or fourth grade when Mama said to me, “When people want prayer in the schools, they are assuming the person who is praying has the same beliefs they do.” And then she added,…
Your church’s purpose is not to make you happy
Your church’s purpose is not to make you happy. Your church’s purpose is to help you become like Jesus. Expect the former and live disappointed. Expect the latter and live with deep satisfaction and significance. This conversation has happened enough…
We’re not ready for Advent, but it’s coming anyway
The arrival of Advent this year may be more important than it ever has been before. The definition of the word itself should make this reality clear: the “arrival of a notable person, thing or event.” We often speak in…
A prescription for the 2020 Thanksgiving blues
“This will be the first time in 76 years I haven’t spent Thanksgiving with family,” my friend lamented. Not quite teary eyed, but obviously dismayed, she told me that her Thanksgiving would be spent at home with her husband. “For…
Thank God for scientists who know how to create vaccines
Every day I thank God for men and women in the sciences who see the COVID-19 virus as the challenge of a generation and are doing all they can to find both a vaccine and a treatment. I believe the…
This year, I’m thankful because I do not understand
As is the tradition in most Romanian churches at Thanksgiving, people gather to thank God for their blessings. While the testimonies follow a common pattern — words of thanksgiving and stories about God’s work in their lives — what makes…
Six ideas for decolonizing Thanksgiving
Baptists in the United States have had a complicated relationship with Indigenous people since Roger Williams fled Salem, Mass., and found shelter with the Wampanoags. In his pre-Baptist days in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Williams had gotten himself in trouble,…
Searching for gratitude amid the chaos, calamity and confusion of 2020
Thinking about Thanksgiving from the sinkhole otherwise known as 2020 seems at once harder and easier than it has in years past. Unless you got married or had a baby or backed into a positive life-transforming event, you’ll probably agree…
Let’s be honest about spiritual discernment in churches
For many years, I have been a fierce proponent of churches using spiritual discernment as they navigate their futures. In hundreds of settings, across multiple denominations (and no denominations), in city/urban/suburban/rural locations, across all aspects of the theological spectrum, I…
Seven ways to embrace a reality-based religion
In these days of “alternative facts,” pronouncements that “truth is relative,” where science is disregarded as just another opinion, and where we are taught to distrust any news except the news on “my” channel, let’s consider what a reality-based religion…
No more airtime, Mr. President!
I watch the news on television every day, more than once a day. In the past several months of election rancor, I often watched or listened all day. In that period of all-day news, I sometimes neglected the more weighty…
Nine chapters that summarize how I got from there to here
When we became the co-pastors of Park Road Baptist Church in 2000, we were introduced to the Park Road Clergy, an informal fellowship of six churches within about a mile of our office. For 20 years, six pastors have met…