Archive for 'Articles'

Seth Godin in his book Tribes made a helpful comment about critics, which I will paraphrase: If your cause is just and worthy, lead the cause boldly. Just remember: you WILL be criticized. As Rick Warren puts it, the pioneers always get the arrows. So if your cause is just, give your critics something to [...]

Have you ever been to an Amish community? The first time I visited an Amish village it seemed as though I had stepped through a time portal into a world two centuries old. I watched people pass in a horse and buggy, observed white barns and quaint homes, and clothing that seemed to come from [...]

Would you say Christianity, at its heart, is a movement or an institution? I asked that question recently at a national conference of church leaders. I intended for my interrogative to be rhetorical, asking the hearers not to reply aloud. Without realizing it, these wonderful spiritual leaders of churches from across the eastern United States [...]

Student Ministry in the New Millennium When 1999 began, who would have thought that the last year of the second millennium A.D. would be remembered as the year martyrdom came to the American church? Who could have imagined that these martyrs would not be high profile, mature leaders, but young people? When Cassie Bernall and [...]

Ministry to Students in the New Millennium This article is taken from a lecture presented at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, NC, on May 1, 2002. The article summarizes the book, “Raising the Bar.” Interested in this resource? Click here for more information. In the eighteenth century God shook the American colonies in [...]

Just the other day I heard a commercial advertising a major concert with the Village People and Cool and the Gang. Although I lost interest in pop music years ago, I found myself releasing the steering wheel to my truck and begin forming the letters as the commercial played the 70s tune Y-M-C-A. Before I [...]

Why This Year is the Greatest to Share Christ in 20 CenturiesJourney back with me two centuries to the beginning of the nineteenth century. If the networks reported on events in that first decade, the evening news broadcasts would have concentrated not on Britain or the fledgling United States, but on Austria. By 1809, the [...]

The summer of 1996 I took avow never to serve again as pastor at a week-long youth camp. Not because I hate teenagers or camps – on the contrary, I love them. But at this particular camp, I ignored my age and physical shape (I should say lack of shape), and entered the mud volleyball [...]

Football has had an enduring affect on my life. Maybe it stems from the matching scars I have on both knees from surgical repairs brought about from my gridiron days. One thing is certain: every fall I experience a strange phenomenon. Down the street from our house is the local high school football field. About [...]

I’ll never forget the first time I went to England. My college choir went for a tour immediately after the spring semester. Dr. Gene Black, director of the A Cappella Choir at Samford University, gave his standard speech about being gracious in each home where we would be staying. In particular, he said to eat [...]