As the race for the White House heats up with Paul Ryan’s Republican VP nod, questions concerning corporate political involvement remain. Crucial to the debate around corporate political funding are two words: Citizens United. They refer to the landmark, 2010…
Fear and congregations that give in to it
How many times have you heard there are three kinds of people in this world? One memorable version of this is from the 1960s “spaghetti” western starring Clint Eastwood that referred to the good, the bad and the ugly. When…
Number crunching and list keeping
Every couple years I put on my accountant hat and crunch numbers. Not the tax-paying accountant hat I put every year by April 15 and sweat over numbers. My number-crunching-accountant hat is the one I put on when I start…
What churches can learn from the Olympics
As the Olympics got underway, the whole world seemed abuzz with excitement. Much of that excitement, though, quickly turned to complaints on the internet. Almost immediately the hashtag #NBCFail had cropped up on Twitter and became a trending topic. The source of…
Are there good reasons to start new congregations?
A quarter of a century ago I moved to South Carolina in response to the call of the largest Baptist body in that state. Baptists of various tribes in South Carolina lacked a commitment to starting new congregations. I was…
Our rhetorical Civil War
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” —Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, 1861 So it was then, March, 4, 1861, that Lincoln uttered these words to a struggling, soon-to-be-divided United States. We hear these words 151…