With anticipatory excitement, we sat huddled at the end of the driveway – Eva, my husband Mark, and me. It was summer, it was near dark and we were sitting in fold-up metal and plastic-webbed chairs, almost in the street. …
Mr. Irrelevant
Anyone who spends time with me eventually learns that I love football. I don’t like football. I love it. One of my favorite things about football is the NFL draft. For football players, the draft is the culmination of years…
Are you opening — or closing — your children’s hearts?
There are only two ways to raise your children: you either shut them down or you open them up. If you shut them down you raise them in a zero-sum world of winners and losers. You teach them that the…
Looking for our fathers
Somewhere I read of a young man who in a fit of rage killed his father. That night when everyone was asleep in the jail, the jailer heard the boy sobbing: “I want my Father. I want my Father.” Almost…
How to interpret the Scriptures
A church member will sometimes ask how I go about interpreting the scriptures. I am tempted to answer, “On the run,” since I preach and teach several times each week. Thinking more about the question, here are some guidelines. First,…
Remembering Will Campbell, a spiritual brother
Some years ago, songwriter and poet Mickey Newbury sat down to pen a song about Cortelia Clark. With the background full of sounds of distant trains and despair dripping from the trees, he led with this verse . . ….
Time to count our blessings
My ministry “day job” is to give leadership to my church fellowship’s national disaster response. In this role with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, I interact with our churches, other churches and faith-groups, NGO’s and voluntary organizations active in disasters. I…
Thais of the heart
A Catholic nun and a Baptist minister walked into a Thai restaurant. They sat down and ordered Pad Thai. Over noodles and conversation they discovered that, long ago and some 500 miles away, they were connected to the same roots. …
Good news for exiles
My morning routine is pretty standard. After my alarm goes off, I hop in the shower, fix some breakfast, and head to work. Sometimes I find a few minutes to read my Bible and pray, but even then, I have…
There is life after the storm
In 1994 I was serving at the First Baptist Church of Williams near Jacksonville, Ala. when a tornado touched down on Palm Sunday near Ragland and cut a trail to Rome, Ga., demolishing hundreds of homes, destroying five church campuses,…
Fifty years from now
What might it mean to be a Baptist Christian at the mid-point of the 21st century? I’m hesitant to try and answer such a question. In my experience, actual developments over time usually take unanticipated forms. If someone 50 years…
Learning to love a thermostat God
By Alan Bean “Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world?” This question was originally scrawled in the margin of an Alabama newspaper by an exasperated Martin Luther King Jr. The…