Series: Columns

May 6, 2015

Christian Standard

In All Things Love

By Jim Tune There”s a scene in Mark Twain”s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn I will never forget. Huck Finn has helped hide Miss Watson”s runaway slave, Jim. But Huck was sure he was committing a grave sin in helping the fugitive. Huck had learned in Sunday school, “People that acts as I”d been acting . . . goes to everlasting fire.” Eventually Huck writes a note to Miss Watson as an act of repentance. Desperate to save his soul, he tells her where to find her runaway slave. Huck prays the “sinner”s prayer” and “gets saved.” Even though he

May 5, 2015

Mark A. Taylor

Age-old

By Mark A. Taylor Let me tell you about my new best friend, Bob. Bob”s the guy from the other end of the office who paused last week beside my cubicle, festooned with “Happy Birthday” banners and a big, red “65” in the middle of the display. Bob said, “Hey, wait a minute!” I looked up from my desk and smiled. “This isn”t real, right? This is a joke, right?” He was completely sincere. This fine man couldn”t believe I was celebrating the welcome-to-Medicare birthday. I”m not sure his reaction is due principally to the fact that he doesn”t wear

April 29, 2015

Christian Standard

You Can Help Nepal

By Jennifer Johnson Many mission agencies and international ministries are working to provide relief, support, and financial resources to those affected by Saturday”s devastating earthquake in Nepal. Central India Christian Mission, which has worked in Nepal the last 15 years, writes, “On a typical Saturday morning, many Nepalese churches meet for weekly worship services. On Saturday, April 25th, at 11:56 am when many Nepalese brothers and sisters in Christ were worshipping, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake occurred. It destroyed almost everything in the country. From Saturday until now, approximately 45 earthquakes have happened in the country. It has brought huge destruction.

April 29, 2015

Christian Standard

Human

By Jim Tune In C.S. Lewis”s book The Magician”s Nephew, readers meet an unsavory character named Uncle Andrew, who consistently displays an arrogance that causes him to distance himself from others, view them with contempt, and attempt to use them for his own purposes. Near the end of the book, when Uncle Andrew encounters things he can”t fathom or explain (like talking animals) he descends into insanity. Aslan and the other animals are speaking to him in plain English, but he can”t understand a word. All he hears are roars and growls, and he is terrified. Finally, he loses his

April 28, 2015

Mark A. Taylor

Listening to Lead

By Mark A. Taylor Maybe you”ve seen this happen at your company. The business has been sold. The new bosses arrive, and they”re very confident they know how to run the show. If they didn”t think they could do it better than the last guys they wouldn”t have forked over all that money to buy the operation. So they wade in with firm goals and bold plans to take the business forward. In the process, these new managers announce “new ideas” with the explanation, “This has never been tried here before.” But even though the long-timers watching from the shadows

April 24, 2015

Christian Standard

Super-size Your Volunteer Base

By Eddie Lowen In August 2014, our church raised up 700-plus brand-new volunteers and commissioned our entire volunteer force for a new era of volunteer ministry. Below are excerpts of the talk I delivered at Volunteer Bootcamp 2014. Readers are welcome to adapt and use it. When Marshall Faulk played college football at San Diego State, he entered training camp as the team”s fifth-string tailback, eventually working his way up to second-string. Early one game, the starting tailback was injured, so the coach gave Faulk the nod. The rest is football history. In the remaining three and one-half quarters, Faulk

April 22, 2015

Christian Standard

World on Trial

By Jim Tune Henri Nouwen tells about a doctor in Paraguay who spoke out against the oppressive tyranny of the government. The local police took revenge against him by arresting his teenage son and torturing the boy to death. It was a brutal and senseless murder. The boy”s courageous father responded with the most powerful protest imaginable. At the funeral, the father did not have his son”s body cleaned up and embalmed. Instead, he displayed it as he found it in the jail: naked, scarred, twisted, with open wounds from the beatings and burns from cigarette butts. All the villagers

April 21, 2015

Mark A. Taylor

Heartfelt Leadership

By Mark A. Taylor When you go to a conference for church leaders, you expect to come home with a folder full of methods, strategies, and tactics for growing your church. This is especially true when a megachurch minister is the keynote speaker. What secrets does he know about growing a church? What”s working in today”s culture? What approaches are guaranteed to bring success? What techniques have been most effective where he serves? But when Aaron Brockett kicked off the Intentional Church Conference at First Christian Church, Decatur, Illinois, last week, he didn”t talk about methods at all. Or numbers.

April 16, 2015

Christian Standard

Musical Theatre Degree Added

By Jennifer Johnson Although Rochester (MI) College comes from a noninstrumental church of Christ tradition, the school has developed strong programs in music, music education, and theatre. Now the school has created a new major in music theatre””one of the only “4Cs” schools to do so. “We discovered a growing number of students in this part of the country were interested in pursuing this major, and local schools” programs were maxed out and turning people away,” says Dr. Catherine Parker, associate professor of theatre. “We had been talking about it for a few years and were only missing a dance

April 15, 2015

Christian Standard

Attracted to the Mystery, Amazed by the Beauty

By Jim Tune It was just another busy lunch hour in the food court. Then a young woman with a cell phone pressed to her ear stood up and began to sing “hallelujah.” While shoppers were trying to figure out what was going on, the first singer was joined by a man who, moments earlier, had been eating his Arby”s sandwich. Then a mall custodian joined the chorus. Suddenly all 80 voices of the Chorus Niagara were performing a magnificent rendition of George Frederic Handel”s masterpiece, the “Hallelujah Chorus.” The shoppers in the food court at Seaway Mall November 13,

April 14, 2015

Mark A. Taylor

Finding Our Place, Claiming Our Heritage

By Mark A. Taylor Talk to Mike Baker and you”ll discover a guy who”s serious about his work while not taking himself too seriously at all. In fact, in our latest episode of Beyond the Standard, Baker used the word unfortunate to describe the “celebrity culture” in today”s church climate. “There are a lot of great preachers and leaders in churches of 150 and 200 who in their part of the world are really doing great things for God and for his kingdom,” he said. “But they”re just not ever going to get the accolades” that often come to leaders

April 9, 2015

Christian Standard

Single Minded

By Jennifer Johnson It doesn”t surprise me that Mark Thornton is single. Not because he isn”t great””in fact, this God-loving, hard-working guy will be a catch for the right mission-minded girl. (Ladies, I have his number.) But because he”s chosen to live and work in the inner city, I guessed he was unmarried even before our phone interview confirmed it. “I”m a single guy with no kids, so I don”t mind living with sex offenders all around me,” he said during that conversation. “But I understand when people move out or don”t want to minister here.” I do, too, but

April 9, 2015

Christian Standard

Meeting at Jacob”s Well

By Jennifer Johnson When Mark Thornton gets an idea, get out of the way””or move to Lincoln, NE, and join the cause. “Seven years ago I was working at a homeless shelter here,” he says. “It was one of several places I”d served, and it just seemed like if we did this work as neighbors in the community instead of as outside agencies, it would be more effective. So I quit my job, moved downtown, and started something out of the house.” That “something” is Jacob”s Well, a multifaceted ministry that develops friendships and meets physical and spiritual needs for

April 8, 2015

Christian Standard

Measure Up?

By Jim Tune In church circles, we talk about the three B”s: budgets, butts, and buildings. I get it. These are standard ways of determining success in most ministries because they are tangible and easy to measure. I”d like to suggest some additional metrics we might apply to our effectiveness. Let me pose them as a series of questions: “¢ Are people”s gifts and talents being drawn out of them and used to extend grace and encouragement to others? “¢ Are we pursuing justice and standing on the side of the oppressed? “¢ Are we increasingly willing to give a

April 7, 2015

Mark A. Taylor

A Middle Ground in the Religious Freedom Debate

By Mark A. Taylor Does any Christian, in the name of religious freedom, really want the right to refuse service to a gay or lesbian? I doubt it. Christian restaurant owners, gas station operators, and Wal-Mart managers have been doing business with gays and lesbians for years, without a problem. The issue isn”t service“”whether I”ll fix a grilled cheese sandwich for a hungry gay guy or sell a dress to a lesbian she”ll wear at her wedding. The issue is endorsement. No one does a morality check before someone enters his business. Every day Christians do business with adulterers, fornicators,

April 1, 2015

Christian Standard

Preaching from the Bible and the Heart

By Jim Tune Many debate the level of vulnerability preachers should exercise from the pulpit. If you share too much, you risk sounding self-absorbed. If you never share any personal stories, you may appear inauthentic or aloof. My experience is that most audiences embrace people who are willing to share their story, particularly those parts that reveal the preacher as an imperfect person, with whom others can identify. To be clear, I”m not suggesting this as an “approach” to preaching. Nor should it be considered a public speaking “method.” If vulnerability in the pulpit is contrived, a perceptive congregation will

March 31, 2015

Mark A. Taylor

Resurrection Promise, Hope in Our Pain

By Mark A. Taylor Some preachers choose Mary as the subject for a Christmas sermon, but I”m guessing we”ve never heard an Easter sermon about the mother of Jesus. There”s good reason for this, I suppose, because Scripture barely mentions her in one crucifixion account, and omits her by name altogether in the resurrection stories. But the certain fact that she was there when Jesus died (John 19:25-27) is enough for painters and storytellers and moviemakers to include her, watching and weeping, in their crucifixion portrayals. The Scripture doesn”t describe her anguish or her tears, but we have no trouble

March 30, 2015

Christian Standard

God”s Heart, God”s Servants, a Growing Church

By LeRoy Lawson Life on Mission: God”s People Finding God”s Heart for the World Tim Harlow Pastors.com, 2014 Timeless: Devotions Based on the Sermons of Floyd Strater Kim Hamilton Self published, 2014 (available at amazon.com & lulu.com) No More Dragons: Get Free from Broken Dreams, Lost Hope, Bad Religion, and Other Monsters Jim Burgen Nashville: Nelson Books, 2014 The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Future of Christianity Trilogy) Philip Jenkins New York: Oxford University Press, 2011 The 2014 North American Christian Convention was a profitable one for me. In addition to Ian DiOrio”s Trivial Pursuits, which I reviewed in last month”s column,

March 25, 2015

Christian Standard

I Can”t Change the World

By Jim Tune Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the needs of the world. I think the small part I play won”t make a difference. Mother Teresa nips this doubt in the bud, saying, “If you can”t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.” We can talk about love, preach sermons about love, quote Scriptures about love, and long to love. Still, I think the bottom line is something like this: The best way to learn the ways of love is to live it, try it, do it, and risk it””enter into another person”s life and let someone into ours.

March 24, 2015

Mark A. Taylor

Bookin” It

By Mark A. Taylor I remember a conversation 30 years or more ago about book publishing by writers in the Christian church and church of Christ. “Evangelical publishers won”t publish books by Christian church writers,” a Standard Publishing salesman said. “And if Standard Publishing publishes books by Christian church writers, Christian bookstores won”t sell them.” I don”t know if that was true then, but I can promise you it”s not true today. Last year we published essays about book writing by Mark Atteberry, Arron Chambers, Dave Ferguson, Anne Milam, Daniel Overdorf, and Jamie Snyder. Each of them is a leader among Restoration Movement churches.

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