I've been critical of my denomination, The Southern Baptist Convention, for engaging the public square in a way that is overly partisan and reactive. Christians can engage politics in a way that is constructive, thoughtful, and promotes the common good. This week, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) of the SBC made me proud to be...

The following article is was originally published in USA Today.

What's in a name? As Shakespeare has it, a rose by any other name smells the same. But in the case of America's largest Protestant denomination, changing the name could change everything.

A week ago, Southern Baptist Convention President Bryant Wright told his organization's...

Early tomorrow, I will be leaving Atlanta for Louisville, home of the famous baseball bat, which bears the city's name. The large Kentucky metropolis is also host to this year's Southern Baptist Convention, an event that promises to have people swinging a few clubs of their own. The SBC annual convention is always a great place to watch old...

FACT: The Southern Baptist Convention is an archaic denominational dinosaur with a bloated bureaucratic infrastructure on the fast track to irrelevance. Whew. I said it. The decline of the SBC has been signaled again and again by the work of individuals like Ed Stetzer who speak with the authority of rigorous research. It can no longer be...

A new effort to revitalize and unite Southern Baptists is underway called The Great Commission Resurgence. It is being spearheaded by several Southern Baptist leaders, including SBC President Johnny Hunt and Daniel Akin, President of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Following Southeastern Seminary's 20/20 Conference, which featured Mark Driscoll among others, Baptist Press (BP) released a one-sided article resurrecting old controversies and blindsiding interviewees who didn't know they were going to be quoted in this piece. Southeastern responded to the BP article with a statement on their blog:

I still remember the drill. The music started, and the lights dimmed. I peered around the solemn room as I floated in a sea of bowed heads. The call went out from the minister who was running the event and like a mad scientist summoning his robot army to life, people around me shot up and headed for the stage. There they found a "True Love...

Earlier this year, I was somewhat dismayed by the decision of LifeWay Christian Resources to pull Gospel Today from the shelves of their stores nationwide because its cover story featured five women pastors. Today, the AJC ran a story entitled "Georgia Baptists take aim at women-led churches" that had a similar theme but a much more ridiculous...

I hate labels. Evangelical, emergent, emergING, post-modern, conservative -- each of these has become so nebulous and subjective that they have little meaning left in them. Unfortunately, no matter how much we loathe them, contemporary language is so saturated with labels that they are really inescapable. Therefore, we need to understand what...

I have always thought of myself as a slower gazelle. You know the one? He always gets devoured on the Discovery Channel because he can’t run as fast as the older ones or he forgets to watch for predators as he slumps to drink. Yeah, that’s me.

But please don’t pity me. I am not like a water buffalo or pygmy or something; even a slower...