A personal game-within-a-game I play when watching basketball games is to guess in the split second between the time when a player shoots a jump shot and it comes down in or near the basket whether or not they felt…
Transforming together: What CBFNC’s General Assembly taught me
Recently I attended the Cooperative Baptist Church of North Carolina’s General Assembly. I was honored to receive the Randall and Lou Lolley Scholarship for my theological education at Duke Divinity School. But I couldn’t help but feel more than just…
Lessons from the church bus
As a youth minister I have spent countless hours driving our church bus, Big Rhonda. She and I have a love hate relationship that started with a six hour drive back from a mission trip in July with no AC….
The night Dean Smith came to the RA banquet
By Bill Wilson RA — shorthand for Royal Ambassadors. It was a weekly group for grade-school boys that sought to blend scouting-type activities with a call to missions. Lawndale Baptist church in Greensboro, N.C., where I grew up in the…
Spring forward! Are churches talking chronos or kairos?
We did it again. In almost all locations throughout North America we performed our annual spring ritual. We set our clocks forward one hour over this past weekend. We know to spring forward — and eight months from now to fall…
10 ways to increase value of and engagement in church participation, part 2
It seems so sad that church has become a place to go rather than an experience to have each day of life. Too often the routines of our church participation fuels disengagement more than deepening our engagement in the faith…
The day that Alice Cooper came to church
On President’s Day weekend, one of those long weekends when “School’s Out,” Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Damon Furnier, better known as Alice Cooper and his wife Sheryl, joined us for worship at First Baptist Pensacola, unannounced. In fact, there was…
Labeling moderates
A few days ago there was a news piece posted here reporting on an interview with Dr. Roger Olson in which he argued that what he sees as the leftward theological drift of some in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (no…
A progressive Baptist response to Roger Olson (and a word about heresy)
Roger Olson, a professor at Truett Theological Seminary and a blogger at Patheos Evangelical recently wrote a piece titled, A Word from a Founder to All My “Moderate Baptist” Friends. His basic argument is that the founder of the Cooperative…