There's nothing like an annual state convention meeting to stir up Baptists! The Tennessee Baptist Convention met in annual session in Memphis, Tennessee. Insofar as I can discern, the messengers spent most of the time debating and settling a handful of matters.

They voted to affirm belief in the 2000 Baptist Faith & Message, effectively declaring it to be the required creed for any who wish to p ...

As N.T. Wright puts it, "temptation always takes as its starting point something which is in itself good." To put it another way, temptation takes some part of what God has made (and what God makes is good) and attempts to bend it in an ungodly direction.

Examples abound. God built rest and recreation into his plan for creation, but we tend to take the gift and convert it into self-indulgence. W ...

It's the time of year when all kinds of lists are released to the public. Today's fare includes a list of the safest cities in the United States. Hundreds of cities are ranked in order of the safest to the least safe, supposdly on the basis of FBI data. Murfreesboro ranked #166, coming in as the safest city in Tennessee.

No doubt, chambers of commerce all around the nation are scrambling to celebrate or ...

Recently I reread Kathleen Norris' book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. Like all good books, it spoke me to me in new ways on second reading.

For example, Norris cites a woman who knows how things work in that part of the world. The woman tells her the truth about winter wheat. She says, "Well, you seed it in September. And it comes up right away. Then i ...

Most of us know what it is like to give up on church. We may do so for many reasons. Boredom, competing interests, hurt feelings, honest questions about faith, conflict with other church members, and the like spring readily to mind. I suspect, though, that the gap between the church's stated aspirations and it's actual, daily life is the major factor.

Following yesterday's sermon (10-08-06), some of you asked me to post the outline of the self-test I discussed. The sermon drew upon Luke 11:37-54. Based on the text, I proposed a self-test we might take in order to discern if we are building lives of which God would approve. The seven elements of the self-test are as follows.

1. Am I facing and dealing with the ungodly stuff inside myse ...

Christianity is not defined in terms of "liberal" or "conservative." Still, many us fall into the trap of trying to do so.

Two conversations illustrate the point. In the first instance, a young man took me aside during a gathering and posed a quesiton: "Are you a liberal or a conservative?" I did not know whether he had religion, politics, genorosity versus miserliness, or so ...

After watching the UT Volunteers fall yet once again to the Florida Gators, a question popped into my mind: What if Christians felt as passionately about the church as they feel about their favorite college football teams?

Giving certainly would go up! True college football fans shell out big bucks for tickets, transportation, lodging, meals, team clothing and the like. Donors give huge sums of money to e ...

On September 11, 2001 a staff member popped into my office and said, "Someone has just crashed a plane into the World Trade Center." The church staff gathered around a television set and watched, first in disbelief then in mounting horror, as the drama of 9/11 unfolded.

By mid-day, we shifted gears. After all, we were a ministerial staff, and our first priority was to prepare to help church memb ...

Psalm 24:1 reads: "The earth is the Lord's and all that is it, the world and those who live in it." Taken to heart, the statement might just transform the way we live.

Take the well-known problem of what a series of public service commercials once called "Tennessee Trash." No, the commercials did not have to do with Baptists and their strange ways! They focused on litter, all those sod ...