Is the Cooperative Program Worthy of Sacrifice?

Yesterday, I mentioned that my friend Micah Fries has written a couple of very helpful articles about the Cooperative Program (CP). Today, Micah and I have published a co-authored article at Between the Times titled “Is the Cooperative Program Worthy of Sacrifice?” We’ve been planning this article since last September, and now seemed like the ideal time to publish it. I hope you’ll read...

Wise Words on the Cooperative Program

The Cooperative Program is the primary funding mechanism for almost all the good work that Southern Baptists do together. Unfortunately, the CP has been trending downward for many years and for a variety of reasons. In the past few weeks, my good friend Micah Fries has written two very helpful articles about the Cooperative Program. The first, cleverly titled “Do Not Give to the Cooperative Program,”...

Very Hopeful about the SBC’s Future

The good folks at Baptist Press have published a column by me titled “Very Hopeful about the SBC’s Future.” The BP essay is a light revision of a post I first published a week ago at this website and Between the Times titled “On the Future of the Southern Baptist Convention: A Graduation Meditation.” I hope you’ll go over to Baptist Press and give the column a quick read. In...

Searching Out the Sacred in US Political History

Darren Dochuk has written an insightful article for Perspectives on History titled “Searching Out the Sacred in US Political History.” In his article, he notes that seven years ago Yale historian Jon Butler called upon scholars to make religion central to understanding twentieth-century history. Dochuk, a political historian, recounts several recent works in his field that have highlighted the...

Whatever Happened to Christian History?

During my last couple of years in college, I became increasingly interested in American religious history. It seemed like a reasonable fit: I was intent on attending seminary and preparing for pastoral ministry, but was also a history major who loved studying the past. The more I read, the more I became particularly interested in a couple of areas: American evangelicalism and Baptist history. These interests...