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Ordination: I was ordained to the Gospel ministry by a Southern Baptist congregation in 1980, but you won’t hear me have a lot to say about ordination. I believe in it, but in a minimalist kind of way. I don’t believe in titles. (Not calling someone Father or Reverend seems like a can’t-miss teaching of […]

Over at Frank Turk’s blog, he has something of a motto up on the sidebar. It’s a phrase his pastor offered in a comment thread sometime in the past. Here it is: The Gospel is the solution to culture.
I’ve often wanted to riff on this statement. While I’m pretty sure how Frank and his pastor […]

How about a little thought experiment? No hidden agenda; just a way to explore the contention that certain things make all the difference.
Imagine for a moment 12 Baptist churches (that may be enough for some of you right there) in my own little Appalachian corner of the world, southeast Kentucky. These 12 churches are scattered […]

***Big Time Humor Alert*** Today, the Internet Monk Web Site ™ brings a special gift of proverbial, anecdotal and Zen-like wisdom as a gift for those angry young (and not so young) men who are burning down churches to make room for coffee shops.
Put on some punk rock, light the incense sticks and turn down […]

Irony alert!! Overheard at a popular theoblog recently.
Oh those slippery emerging types. Right when you think you have them defined, they go squirming across the room, claiming you’ve misunderstood them.
You know who is just as bad? The “missionals.” One minute it’s Tim Keller. The next it’s Brian Mclaren. You can’t tell one person or another […]

Denise and I were traveling to an unfamiliar church last night, and even with perfectly good directions and plenty of time, we got lost. So I stopped at McDonald’s and asked for help.
Asking for directions at McDonald’s for a large downtown “First Baptist” church probably wasn’t a great idea anyway. One guy didn’t speak English. […]

Today in chapel, one of my co-workers told his life story. That’s pretty common at our ministry, but this was anything but common.
Doc [not his real name] came to us about three years ago, along with his new bride. Middle-aged and a recent Bible college graduate, looking for a beginning in ministry. Of course, one […]

Where I live, there’s a remarkable amount of visible unity among Christians. I’d like to describe it for you, at least as I’ve seen and experienced it.
I live in one of the poorest regions of the United States. Two counties near to us are in the federal government’s list of the ten poorest counties in […]

In the aftermath of reading Alastair’s “The Denominational Church,” A discussion took over my group blog, “The Boar’s Head Tavern,” for most of two days. That discussion, prompted by Jack’s use of the metaphor of a “map” for the various confessions and theologies that distinguish various denominations and traditions, was one of the best all-time […]

Lynn (fictional) wrote me a letter with complaints about her pastor.
Lynn,
It was good to hear from you. It sounds as if your new home and John’s new job are just right for your family. We all miss you, but this will be a good chapter in your life together. Hopefully, we’ll see you at homecoming […]

UPDATE: 4:37 p.m. As good as promised….even with the out.
Tomorrow is opening day in Cincinnati, in case you didn’t know. So here’s a baseball post.
Sometime tomorrow afternoon, I’m going to tear up at a baseball game. It’s a certainty.
I’m going to tear up because of a moment that is going to happen in Great American […]

The Spencer family poets are busy. Here’s an amazing Holy Week poem by Denise.
Clay continues to show that he is becoming a fine poet with these two outstanding poems.

This post is an odd soup. Call it one part “Second Half of Life,” for just getting old and pathetic; one part “In The Study,” for the sermon idea I’ll get out of it; and one part “Parable, Metaphor and Illustration” for what you can do with it. Laugh at me, with me, and then […]

I love my Shakespeare, and I love relating what I teach to my students to the Gospel. Those of you who haven’t read Shakespeare will have to excuse me for indulging my passion for The Bard.
My AP English IV students just finished reading Shakespeare’s, “The Tempest.” The last few years, this play has risen in […]

When I was a child and a teenager, I stuttered. For several years, quite badly. Those who know me will notice that I can still get into some stuttering patterns when I’m nervous or stressed, but for the most part, my stuttering left me around age 15 when I started preaching regularly.
There are different kinds […]