William Thornton

I recall one of the moderate candidates, Winifred Moore, back in the day of the original Conservative Resurgence having a campaign that included airport stops with news interviews. The idea was, one supposes, to get on television news or in print. Moore was quite the avuncular preacher with homespun stories but rather unsuited for this […]

Seminary professors Malcolm Yarnell and Keith Whitfield wrote an article put here on February 16, 2019, Addressing Abuse in the SBC: A Proposal. Keith Whitfield is Professor of Systematic Theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Malcolm Yarnell is Research Professor of Theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. This is the only concrete proposal I have […]

Somewhere it is inscribed in stone, as if by the finger of God, that there must be SBC state conventions and that they must receive the lion’s share of Cooperative Program revenues. Such is not inscribed by the finger of the Almighty but by the finger of respected but not omnipotent denominational bureaucrats. Our venerable […]

I’m the guy who will actually bend over and pick up a penny in a parking lot. In a restaurant parking lot at the beach eagle-eye Plodder spotted a bill behind the car parked next to mine. Nope, not an old school Gospel tract fake currency, guaranteed to alienate restaurant servers who think they have […]

The average attendance at the main weekly worship service for a cooperating Southern Baptist church is around 100. LifeWay gave me a figure of 70 a few years ago along with a median size of 125. There are different ways to calculate it but, regardless of the method, the Southern Baptist Convention is a convention […]

I’m at a place where I am free to worship where I wish and I wished yesterday to worship at the church of a friend who is in a new pastorate nearby. The church is quite old and has quite a history, mostly not so good in recent decades. The building is new, courtesy of […]

And, he’s getting older. The Barna research on the aging of American pastors is getting a little old itself. The most recent was 2017. It was a typical state-of-the-church handwringer. Pastors are aging, as in the average age of a senior pastor is increasing (54 in that study). Really old pastors are increasing, 6% in […]

Voices readers sometimes complain about the articles here, generally along the lines of who Voices is for and against. Reader griped about Randy Adams not receiving positive print here. Dude, get educated, then gripe. Adams is one of the four SBC presidential candidates and I’ve written eight articles that feature Randy Adams in the title […]

Some of the SBC alphabet is under constant internal attack. The ERLC always has critics that are loud, dedicated, tireless, and often senseless. Witness the recent  Executive Committee ERLC Task Force report, generally characterized as a throwaway item, as in ‘no action needed,’ ‘no action taken.’ NAMB is a big, red bullseye target. Church planters […]

Ronnie Floyd threw a bunch of tables and graphics at us in his relaunch of the Vision 2025 message to the Executive Committee. You can view the message here. I’m picking a single item, the last one, number five from his list of five strategic actions: Increase annual giving through the Cooperative Program to surpass […]

The NAMB controversy concerns mainly smaller, non-south state conventions but the great consumer of Cooperative Program dollars are the large state conventions. If we are to engage in finger pointing over declining statistics, a popular game in the SBC if not a productive one, the fingers should point to the places where we’re spending the […]

A major issue in the SBC 2021 presidential election is the relationship between NAMB and state conventions, especially state conventions outside the south. One candidate, Randy Adams, has made NAMB his main platform as he campaigns for the highest elected SBC office. Charges of mismanagement, secrecy, top-down authority, rejection of historic patterns, partnerships, and principles, […]