Last week my husband and I had dinner with a couple we hadn’t seen in two years. We spent the evening catching up, having heated debate and laughing loudly. At one point the wife leaned over to me and whispered,…
TRENDING: Family on mission
As discussed recently, Mike Breen’s “State of the Evangelical Union” forecasts discipleship entering the center of evangelical focus. That conversation puts identifying ourselves around tribal customs or doctrinal distinctives in the rearview mirror. It also reorients worship gatherings and the…
VITAL SIGNS: Is your church a Corvette?
One effect of growing up in 20th century America is that I love cars. Early on, I got the fever. Played with them as a kid, worked on them, collected them, admired them, dreamed of them. I’ve owned around 25…
OPINION: Drawing boundaries
A story is told in my family about my grandfather, a lover of old time gospel music and, in an era before paid music ministers, the song leader at his rural North Carolina Baptist church. Music was such an important…
OPINION: A pope by any other name
March 13, 2013 — a day for the history books. Anytime a pope is elected it’s historic, but this is history of histories. We have a Latin American pope. And where was I when I found out the announcement? Sucking…
OPINION: Struggling with prayers at governmental meetings
A few weeks ago, I read with great interest Robert Dilday’s article in the Religious Herald regarding prayer at official government meetings in Rowan County, N.C. By happenstance, the very next week I was to give the invocation before the…
LETTER: No room for compromise
I write in response to the Religious Herald’s article entitled “Razor thin margin” in the March 25 issue. It is absolutely appalling to see how far we have slipped as Christians and Baptists. To place church autonomy above allegiance to…
LETTER: An open letter to Ginter Park Baptist Church
Dear Pastor Mandy England Cole, I am a member of McLean Baptist Church in McLean, Va. I am writing you as one Baptist to another and not as a representative of my congregation. That having been established, I have been…
OPINION: The lens of life
As we draw near to the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, my mind is drawn to Paul’s magnificent exclamation near the end of his first letter to a group of Jesus followers in the…
OPINION: Finding victory in a response, not a vote
Under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from December 1955 to December 1956, black residents of Montgomery, Ala., staged a modern marvel. Creating an intricate system of pick-up points and drop-off points, the African Americans of Montgomery staged…
LEADERSHIP LINK: Church members who never belong to the church
Have you noticed that some people join your church and eventually become leaders while others join and eventually drop out? It is easy to assume that people in the latter group just weren’t that interested in spiritual things. Perhaps this…
OPINION: A both/and solution to the contraceptive coverage question
Jonathan Waits unfairly criticizes me and the Baptist Joint Committee for not vigorously opposing what he considers to be religious liberty violations in connection with the implementation of the new health care law. Let me set the record straight. The…