The Son of God took on flesh and was born in a manger. One of the worst things that can happen to us is that the good news of Christmas Day becomes routine. Maybe this happens because we’ve allowed our daily pace and to-do lists to drown out our sense of wonder. Perhaps trials and […]
When I met Dan Coleman a few years ago, he was a church planter with a vision for reaching the state of Maine for Jesus but he didn’t have a lot of resources. Maine can be a lonely place for a church planter. There are only a handful of Southern Baptist churches, encompassing fewer than […]
When I pastored Highview Baptist in Louisville, my friend David Melber and his wife, Tera, started a “Considering Adoption” class for couples in our church. It ran for five weeks and became so popular that we offered it twice each year. Not everyone who took the class ultimately decided to adopt, but the class became […]
Southern Baptists planted 985 new churches in 2014 — a 5 percent increase over 2013 church starts. This is very good news as we work toward diminishing the church-to-population deficit that steadily grew larger over the last century in the United States and Canada. It is also good because new churches, on average, reach people […]
We have a huge task as we take on the challenge of lostness in North America. For decades our population has been growing more ethnically diverse, but Southern Baptists have stayed far too white. While our urban areas have been growing — 82 percent of the population now lives in cities or their suburbs — […]