William Thornton

…and the poorer schools get no top level recruits; the smaller churches lose solid members. And ain’t we got fun, so the song goes. Well, no we ain’t got much fun if our team has little chance to win against one of the SEC rich powerhouses and, worse, it’s no fun at all for the […]

In their latest article on abuse in the SBC the Houston Chronicle and their reporters John Tedesco and Robert Downen do a good job drilling down into details that are seldom touched on by secular reporters. Southern Baptist Convention claims no control over local churches. But new rules, lawsuit may test that argument  [You might […]

With one month to go on the Executive Committee’s fiscal year, it’s good to see that the national CP receipts are running about one million ahead of the same period last year. That’s only about one half of one percent but up is up. This is the national portion of the CP. It remains to […]

I get, brethren and sistren, that my day has passed. No one preaches sermons with three points and a poem anymore but literature and poetry are a pretty good source of material for sermons. Way back in the day, I had a set of Spurgeon’s sermons and would occasionally sally forth into them and, um, […]

Best Labor Day sermon: “How to be a Christian at Work” by Adrian Rogers. Four point outline: Don’t Brag, Don’t Sag, Don’t Lag, Don’t Nag. Best rhyming, alliterative outline ever. Nah, I don’t recall the text. You can start with the title and outline and then find a text, huh? You’ve got 364 days to […]

The preferred solution to any problem in the SBC, our 174 year-old convention of churches, is to create a high-profile national conference, program, or plan. In a way, that is the best solution available, since of the 47,456 SBC churches counted in the latest statistical report, every single one of them is an autonomous, independent […]

Compiled from very high, executive level seminary leaders: “We’ve agreed to drop the old gold standard ministerial training degree for a host of good reasons. It’s a Gospel issue and we wanted to be out in front of the churches and the convention on this.” “We’ve decided to replace the MDiv with a cutting edge, […]

The average church percentage of undesignated gifts to the Cooperative Program is well under five percent, headed towards four and a half soon. Averages have limited value and don’t measure some important things, like the fact that a good number of churches give very high percentages, above ten, more than double the average. These churches, […]

When men, mostly clergy, start opining on sex abuse in churches, almost always the discussion goes in a straight line to false accusations, presumably because we have all had friends or colleagues who were supposedly falsely accused and they suffered because of it. This flips the matter on it’s head and presumes the low single […]

Let’s start with “woke.” Stumble across this and you can guarantee that you’re in a conversation beyond reclamation. Used by hipster wannabe crotchety old codgers blogging in their basements or some Twitter idiot who thinks he’s an enfant terrible. I’ll update my opinion on this to note that one on the SBCV team has explained […]

I knew I would be in for some interesting, and probably fruitless, conversations when a deacon strolled into church one Sunday morning with a hefty book under his arm. It wasn’t God’s Holy Word, large print with a thick, full grain leather cover. “Ah, Ayn Rand,” I said, “that depressing objectivist with a dystopian vision […]

Some years ago when I arrived at a new pastorate, I was handed a health care “bill” by the financial secretary. She didn’t know what it was and left it to me to figure out. Seems my predecessor made some kind of arrangement with one of the lay members to enroll the member in a […]