It is the major purpose of law to provide justice for people who are experiencing injustice. A law is a good law if it intends a just outcome. A law is an effective law if it actually accomplishes more justice than it causes injustice. Immigration law is no exception to this general rule. We have […]
Why Good Trustees Don’t (And Shouldn’t) Blog About Their Business
I’m the one guy who contributes here who sits on the board at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. I’m the one guy who contributes here who has had nothing whatsoever to say about recent controversies at the seminary. At the end of this post, those two things will still be true. But I aspire someday to […]
The Perfect IMB President
Few jobs in the Southern Baptist Convention could be considered more demanding than leading the International Mission Board. To say the least, the post has grown somewhat since James Barnett Taylor took the helm in Richmond in 1845. Starting with him, every candidate for the job has been a compromise candidate in one way or […]
Something the Church Can Actually Learn from Politics
I’ll be uncharacteristically brief, here. While the whole universe is speculating about what lessons Republicans or Democrats ought to learn from Roy Moore’s loss in Alabama, I’d like to turn the conversation away from politics and ask what lessons we who are pastors and other church leaders can learn? Instead of a list, I’ll offer […]
What Became of Luther’s German Church (A Book Review of Philipp Jacob Spener, Pia Desideria)
Pia Desideria. By Philipp Jacob Spener. Leipzig: Karl Franz Köhler, 1841. 211 pages. Philipp Jacob Spener was a Lutheran parish minister in Frankfurt on the Main, Germany. He was born near Strasburg in 1635. Devout from childhood, Spener devoured Puritan classics and lived a careful and strict life. He pursued an extensive education culminating in […]
Blinded
“I KNEW it!” she crowed, as if she had found a discarded scrap of paper containing coded instructions from LBJ to Lee Harvey Oswald. She was, by all appearances, a lovely lady. Tall and slender, dressed beautifully, with a meticulously groomed head of white hair framing a face befitting that woman in your home town […]
Dear Jim
I imagine that you have some big milestones in mind, looking in life from the vantage point of a fourteen-year-old. There’s a date with the driver’s license people coming up early next year. Eventually, there are other dates—you know…DATES—on the horizon. College may seem like it is a long way away for you, but in […]
It’s World Emoji Day, and You Know What to Do
It is against the rules just to throw a post up here on SBC Voices without the blessing of the folks who run the place. Guess how much I’m going to let that restrain me? Someone on Twitter has declared this to be #WorldEmojiDay. Dave Miller’s LOVE for emoticons is widely known, and although an […]
Considering SBC Polity in Light of the Alt-Right Resolution
In May 2017, Pastor Dwight McKissic published to the Internet a proposed resolution in condemnation of the Alt-Right. At some time before the deadline mandated in the Southern Baptist Convention’s bylaws, Dwight submitted that resolution to the convention’s Committee on Resolutions. That committee can do one of three things with proposed resolutions. First, they can […]
More than a Business Meeting (But Not Less)
My children have been attending the SBC Annual Meeting since they were born. I have a picture (somewhere) of Jim, my oldest, holding up a ballot in Phoenix, AZ, in 2003—just four months after he was born. He has missed one year. This is his fourteenth SBC Annual Meeting to attend. My wife’s brother is […]
How FBC Farmersville Does Pastor Job Descriptions
Prelude It bothers me when churches adopt job descriptions for jobs already described in the Bible when those job descriptions demonstrate less dependence upon those biblical materials than upon corporate leadership models. That idea was in mind when I led FBC Farmersville several years ago to revise our pastoral job descriptions in a more exegetical […]
Recovering the Heart of Southern Baptist Church Life
I spent Mothers Day with my Mom. It was a great chance to spend some time with her, and we’re both at the ages to know that those chances are a finite set. Talking with Mom these days involves a lot of reminiscing about the past. We talked about my childhood (none of those stories […]