Mission

Love Your Neighborhood as Yourself

At the turn of each new year, our whole church gathers together for Sunday School for several weeks. It’s a chance to touch special topics that the pastoral staff and elders want everyone to hear about. One of those is the set of outreach ministries we have to the...

Mount Calvary Baptist Church in WORLD Magazine

My home church has been featured in WORLD Magazine for its outreach efforts, especially its Released Time classes. Dozens of Mount Calvary people are actively and frequently involved in the lives of needy kids, teens, and adults, and I am so eager to see what the Lord...

Have Another Tilt at It

Nathan Wilson summarizes a position he obviously doesn't take: People are raped in this world, and rape is evil. Because evil exists, there must be no God. But then he shows where that position ends up: Because there is no God—no authoritative standard over...

Shelby Steele: Affirmative Action Doesn’t Solve the Real Problem

Challenging insight on race from public intellectual Shelby Steele in the Washington Post: Affirmative action has always been more about the restoration of legitimacy to American institutions than the uplift of blacks and other minorities. For 30 years after its...

Losing the Gospel

Recently I spoke to a man from the depressed neighborhoods surrounding my church, a man who, sadly, had utterly no understanding of the gospel—and a man who recently became a baptized member at the nearest Southern Baptist Church. Many leaders of the SBC have been...

Terrorism and Evangelism

Here's another little helpful and challenging quote I read in Total Church. At present the military and economic might of Western nations is struggling to counter the threat of international terrorism. It is proving difficult to defeat an enemy made up of local cells...

“You Are Now Entering the Mission Field”

I found this little excerpt from Total Church to be a challenging source of wisdom. May God help me to apply these insights. I'm not sure I have good answers to all these questions. We sometimes ask people to imagine they are part of a church-planting team in a...

Missions and Money

A thought-provoking article excerpted on the blog of a missionary I respect and love.

The End for Which God Created the World

What is the biggest purpose of God, the Father's business in the world about which we must be about? It's the glory of God. God's glory is the ultimate purpose or end of all creation—and it should be our ultimate end in every act (cf. a book recommended by my pastor...

Tim Keller MP3s

A friend e-mailed after my post yesterday recommending Tim Keller's The Reason for God . He suggested I provide a link to Keller MP3s on the Internet. I have not listened to even the majority of these recently collected Keller resources, but if you want to start...

Literacy Rates and the King James Version

Literacy in the U.S. is embarrassingly low. Nearly 50% of the adult US population reads at a 7th grade level or lower. Nearly 25% has reading proficiency so low they cannot read instructions on medication bottles, the manual that comes with a piece of machinery, or a...