I've been thinking about the nature of the church. Doing so puts me in good Baptist company, for the truth of the matter is that the Baptist movement has been and is fueled by a passion for defining church. We tend to devote a great deal of time to matters such as how one enters the church, the ways in which love and power interact in the context of church, the course or courses of individual Christian discipleship in relation to the larger Body of Christ, and t ...

I've been preaching a series of sermons on the theme "How to Build a Christian Character." This past Sunday I focused on courage. In the course of sermon, I tried to paint a picture of what courage in action looks like when seen in Jesus. One of my church members asked me to post a summary of that portion of the sermon. You'll find it below.

When I look at Jesus I see what courage looks ...

Kathleen Norris book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography has taken its place among those volumes I read again and again. She writes well. More importantly, she nearly always says something worth saying, more often than not in the form of a brief story or a single well-crafted sentence.

Like many of us, Norris dares to hope that a church might be a community even as it nurtures the individua ...

A few weeks ago I read a story about a woman who was the classic "pack rat." She lived alone. Her house was filled with stuff. Tall stacks of papers, bags, clothes, pots and pans, and all the other kinds of things available for purchase took up nearly all the space in all the rooms. The woman moved through her house via narrow corridors that ran among the stacks.

Naturally, she paid a price. She ...

All of us have seen the ads posted on the backs of semi-trailers as they blow by us on the interstate. The ads, in one form or another, declare that the trucking company needs good drivers and is willing to pay well for each one it can find. Apparently, such drivers are valuable!

Can you imagine what the company means by "good driver?" I'll hazard a guess. No doubt they expect a driver to keep t ...

Recently, leaders from Baptist conventions and fellowships numbering some 20 million members announced a new, cooperative initative. Participants include the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, the National Baptist Convention, the Progressive Baptist Convention, American Baptist Churches USA plus several other bodies. A gathering of interested Baptists has been scheduled for January 30-February 1, 2008 at the World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia. If all goes as ...

Last night's bowl game between Florida and Ohio State determined the "mythical" national championship of college football. Ohio State entered the game as the runaway favorite. Most commentators thought Florida's only chance to win rested with their defense. If the game could be kept low-scoring, Florida might steal a victory.

As it turned out, both Florida's defense and offense arrived ready to ...

Jim Wallis once gave a baccalaureate address at Standford University. In the course of his speech, he said, "I now believe that the real battle, the big struggle of our times, is the fundamental choice between cynicism and hope. The choice between cynicism and hope is ultimately a spiritual choice..."

Wallis got it right.

Cynicism, it see ...

Historically, Baptists have prided themselves on being "People of the Book." By this we've usually meant to imply that we read the Bible, derive our beliefs from the Bible, and attempt to order our lives accordingly. I applaud the goal. It says something good about how seriously we hope to take the Bible. I am concerned, though, about the quality of our performance.

For example, how many of us a ...

Recently a friend of mine produced a blog entry asking what the church might look like fifty years from now. His excellent piece jogged my thinking a bit, and I want to try and bring some order to the results.

Let's start with a dose of reality: no one (least of all me!) can hope to predict accurately the look or shape of church life half a century from now. That's true even if we limit ourselves ...