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,…
The complexity of short-term missions
By Blake Hart Lately I’ve had the privilege to be part of great discussions about how to improve our current short-term mission praxis. Many of us know that something is wrong with the way we do short-term work, and thankfully…
Missing the point over the border crisis
By Mike Greer On its web site The Minutemen Project says it is once again recruiting volunteers to guard the U.S.-Mexico border from “illegal immigration,” claiming the government has failed to do its job. Jim Gilchrist (strangely, his name means…
‘Snowpiercer’ offers distorted image of how God works
By Michael Parnell There have been some great movies set on trains. Joining that list is Snowpiercer, a movie like Titanic without the love story. Set 17 years in the future, a compound called CW-7 has been set loose in…
In church on Saturday
By Gary Cook In Sue Monk Kidd’s remarkable book, The Invention of Wings, a fictional account of real people caught up in the 19th-century drama of slavery and the abolitionist movement, there is an encounter between Sarah Grimke, who became…
Dialogue — or monologue?
By Luke Smith The term dialogue seems like a totally reasonable request. Who after all is not willing to listen to the heartfelt convictions of another? We come from different places. We have different experiences. We think about complex issues…
Blessing the stressed out
By Eileen Campbell-Reed This week a new poll reports, “One in every four Americans say they had a great deal of stress in the previous month.” National Public Radio, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Harvard School of Public Health…
Still challenged by wealth and poverty
By Russell Waldrop Jesus’ disciples have always struggled with the harshness of his teachings on wealth and poverty. Some have rejected them as a “social gospel;” others have upheld them for that very reason. A few have lived them out…
What do we stand for?
By Adam McDuffie Recently, I was walking back from lunch and saw a trickle of people walking along the street. They had clearly just left a demonstration of some sort, which I now know to have been the March for…
Navel gazing
By George Bullard All my life I have loved attending denominational celebration events and conventions. I love least the formal meetings. I love most the networking. I love seeing my friends in ministry and meeting new friends in ministry. It…
What’s in a name?
By John Carroll Hugh Hollowell, pastor to the homeless of Raleigh, N.C., through the scrappy and brilliant ministry Love Wins, told me a story once that I haven’t been able to shake. He has a good friend who is quite…
Reckoning with the children on our doorstep
By Alan Bean What do we do with the unaccompanied children, some say as many as 100,000, who have surrendered to American border officials in the last few months? Barack Obama speaks of a humanitarian crisis but thinks fast-track deportation…