Yesterday the Board of Trustees of SWBTS elected Dr. Adam W. Greenway as the ninth president of the seminary (See coverage in Baptist Press here). The reception of the news has been overwhelmingly positive both across the campus and across the convention. There have, however, been a few expressions of concern. I write today to […]
An Unreported Component of the Sexual Abuse Problem
By now most of you will have read The Houston Chronicle‘s second article on sexual abuse in the SBC. I believe that the reporting by The Chronicle, taken together with the responses by various Southern Baptists on this site and in other places, offers us a painful examination of a few undeniable facts: People who […]
A Few Comments about SWBTS’s Finances
I’m not supposed to speak about matters presently before the board of trustees, so I’m going to limit my remarks to a few observations about how being a trustee works and the nuts and bolts of how we relate to the Southern Baptists who have placed us into office. Some trustees are blabbermouths and some […]
Let’s Adopt the Baptist Faith & Message This Year
Let’s have a define-the-relationship talk. Let’s make 2019 the year that we make it official. Let’s bring the whole Southern Baptist family together in agreement around The Baptist Faith & Message. We’ve waited long enough. The BF&M has existed in its current revision for nineteen years this coming summer. It is not going away. It […]
Criticism and the SBC—Unsequenced, Unexpected Part (Different Author)
I’d just like to jump in alongside Dave’s series on criticizing the SBC and offer some niche thoughts, fresh and relevant, perhaps. I’d entitle this one: “How to express directly to trustees your criticism of their actions or to deliver to trustees your opinion about an unresolved matter presently before a board of trustees.” Before […]
Thanking God for Black Southern Baptists
Note: Throughout this essay I will use the term “Black Southern Baptists” anachronistically at times. Therefore, you should take it to mean “Black Baptists from the South” whenever you encounter it referring to Baptists living before 1845. In the first century of Christianity, nobody accomplished more in terms of spreading the gospel where people thought […]
A Non-Nativist Case for Strict Enforcement of Immigration Law
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 […]