Articles for tag: Joe Boyd

My Thoughts on Paris

By Joe Boyd I was in New York City for business meetings the Friday night of the attacks in Paris. After returning home, my wife and I began to discuss things. I wasn”t a very good conversationalist. (She”s used to that.) I was tired from a long week at work. I was also, like so many, confused about the state of the world and afraid that things would escalate. She asked me to write what I was thinking, suggesting it might help people process. (Maybe she just wanted me to process.) I quickly jotted my thoughts down in my personal

October 29, 2015

Apologetics & Worldview

Choosing the Best Story

By Joe Boyd The world is a dangerous place. Issues like extremist terrorism, systemic racism, and constant political backbiting seem insurmountable. As a Christian, I believe there is a way through God to a better future. But how? Where is that way? And how do I walk in it? I”ve come to believe that the kingdom (the Way of Jesus) comes in only one form: story. The problems I see associated with the world today all boil down to the big stories, the metanarratives we all live within. For many people, the biggest story they live inside is their personal

September 19, 2015

Why Are We So Nasty on Social Media?

By Joe Boyd The world has changed. We have the entire canon of human knowledge at our fingertips inside the tiny computers we carry. We call them phones, but rarely use them for such an antiquated concept as talking to someone. They are our portal to anyone and anything at anytime. We use them to be “social,” but rarely civil. I”m not a social media hater. I like it. I”ve been blogging for more than 12 years. I was an early adopter of both Facebook and Twitter. But I must admit I am weary of how hateful the general tone

August 1, 2015

Why We Loved ‘Jurassic World’

By Joe Boyd Is Jurassic World the best movie ever made? Subjectively and artistically, probably not. But objectively, by at least one very important Hollywood standard, it is indeed the best movie ever made. A few weeks back, Jurassic World, the massive reboot of the popular 1990″s Jurassic Park series, set the all-time record for opening weekend box office with a whopping $524 million worldwide. It beat the domestic record of The Avengers set in 2012 and the international record of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 set in 2011. In this monthly series, we take a glance

July 23, 2015

Church & Ministry Leadership Development

Ryan Phipps’s Thought Leaders

We asked 35 Christian leaders, “Who is the influencer with the biggest impact on your life and ministry?” Most of these leaders listed severalÂ influential thinkers, writers, innovators, and leaders more of us should get to know. This response is fromÂ Ryan Phipps, lead pastor of Forefront Manhattan in New York City. ________ I know my Bible. I know how to articulate what I believe. Where I find myself forever lacking, however, in a melting pot of all things like New York City, is how “to understand, rather than to be understood.” I take the time to learn from people who “understand”

July 14, 2015

Church Leadership

Follow the Leader

By Mark A. Taylor Where would you be without the leaders in your life? How would you have faltered or failed? Where would you have wandered? What do you know and value that wouldn”t be in your heart and mind without the ones who have influenced you most? Without those leaders, there would have been others. Someone influences each of us. None of us blazes his path alone without some sort of guide showing the way. And none of us makes a turn in the path””a life-altering decision for good or bad””without some stimulus outside ourselves. Testimonies from 35 leaders

July 13, 2015

Church & Ministry Leadership Development

Laura Buffington’s Thought Leaders

We asked 35 Christian leaders, “Who is the influencer with the biggest impact on your life and ministry?” Most of these leaders listed severalÂ influential thinkers, writers, innovators, and leaders more of us should get to know. This response is from Laura Buffington, teaching pastor with SouthBrook Christian Church, Miamisburg, Ohio. ________ Wendell Berry: His poetry, stories, and essays on knowing our place and living in place reshape the world for me every time I read him. Christena Cleveland: Her work on loving through differences is truthful and painful in all the correct ways. Lee Magness: I”m indebted to many teachers

July 3, 2015

Church & Ministry Church Leadership Pastoral Transitions & Succession

Dave’s Gone–Now What?

By Joe Boyd Popular culture shows us who we are. It”s a mirror that reflects what we are becoming. So what do we make of Fallon”s rise in the wake of Letterman”s departure? Regardless of how we feel about it, popular culture is a dynamic force that shapes the lives of most Americans. Music, sports, and entertainment are power players that inform the worldview of millions of people both inside and outside the church. It”s simply the reality of the world we live in. The job of the Christian, in my opinion, is to know the culture while understanding that

October 28, 2014

Church Leadership

How to Succeed at Influencing Culture

By Mark A. Taylor How do you measure the success of your ministry? Joe Boyd and Rich Gorman and I talked about that for almost an hour last week in Christian Standard”s monthly Beyond the Standard online interview program, all while trying to address our assigned topic, “Church and Culture.” “The hardest thing about vocational ministry,” Boyd said, “is you never really know if you”ve done a good job or not.” Boyd doesn”t believe numbers alone can tell the story. He spoke about the ministry of Jesus who preached to the thousands but soon had only a dozen followers. And

October 7, 2014

Creating, Not Attacking, the Culture

By Mark A. Taylor We were visiting the beautiful Cloisters museum and gardens in New York City and browsing through its remarkable displays of 5,000 works of medieval art. Most of the paintings, sculpture, and stained-glass windows depicted Christian images, and I found myself wondering, “Centuries from now what great art from the West will the world find as a Christian witness?” Several writers at our site this monthÂ are trying to answer that question. And all of our “Christians and culture” articles appearing hereÂ present a challenge to positive culture-shaping initiatives, some of them in ways far removed from the arts.

October 3, 2014

What Have We Done and Where Are We Going?

By Joe Boyd I am asked often to speak or write about church and culture. So much now that those two words seem to go together in a very natural way when I say them. I wonder what we really mean, though, when we talk about the church relating to culture.Â Many of us who have worked to figure this out over the last two or three decades have moved beyond those early discussions about worship style and seeker sensitivity. I am blessed to be able to speak at a variety of churches in America and there is, without a

October 2, 2014

John”s Gospel””Coming Soon to a Theater Near You

By Jennifer Johnson Many lifelong believers find it difficult to have a fresh perspective on the Bible”s stories, and many seekers and skeptics have never heard them. Joe Boyd”s “The Bible Experiment,” live theatrical retellings of the Bible”s great stories, is designed to reach both groups. Boyd launched the project in April with two shows of the Gospel of John in Cincinnati. More than 1,000 people attended. “The goal was just to tell the story as best we could without leaving anything out and without an agenda,” says Boyd, who served in ministry roles at churches in Las Vegas and

October 2, 2014

The Greatest Story, Retold

By Jennifer Johnson There are many things I love about living in Philadelphia””the history, the proximity to New York, the water ice (look it up). But this month I”m wishing I still lived in Cincinnati . . . or Orange County, CaliforniaÂ . . . or even Nashville so I could get to a show or three of Joe Boyd”s Gospel of John and his retelling of both Old and New Testament stories next year. I also wish I could take everyone I know, both my friends who have been Christians forever and the ones who think the rest of us

June 17, 2014

Mission & Evangelism

Really Something!

By Mark A. Taylor Joe Boyd says the Bible came alive to him when he was just 8 years old. The Sunday school lesson of the day was about Jacob and Esau and how Esau, famished from a day in “the open country,” gave up his birthright for a bowl of Jacob”s stew (Genesis 25:29-34). “Our teacher told us that story,” Boyd remembers, “and then she pulled out a thermos, unscrewed the cap, and poured each of us a serving of lentil stew in a paper cup. “I”d never tasked lentil stew before, and it was good! It dawned on

March 14, 2014

Culture & Public Square Reconciliation

Which Do You Perceive as the Bigger Danger? . . .

By Darrel Rowland Which do you perceive as the bigger danger: Christian churches and churches of Christ being overly exclusive and thus missing out on opportunities for real service and growth available by greater interaction with other Christian groups, . . . or brotherhood churches losing their scriptural distinctive, especially on baptism and weekly observance of the Lord”s Supper, by interacting with other Christian groups? Bob Russell, Retired minister, Louisville, Kentucky Twenty-five years ago I would have answered that the greater danger was that we were too exclusive””we isolated ourselves too much. Today I think the greater danger is we

March 13, 2014

Culture & Public Square Reconciliation

The Christians Only Challenge

By Darrel Rowland Most of us love this old Restoration Movement slogan: “We are not the only Christians, but Christians only.” But Christian leaders from across the country contacted by CHRISTIAN STANDARD all wrestle with big-picture questions about what overarching principles flow from the adage. Most generally agree with Bob Russell, retired senior minister of Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, about what to do when invited to attend or speak at an event outside the immediate fellowship. “I will go anywhere as long as I”m not restricted in what I can say or my presence doesn”t leave the impression

March 30, 2013

Discipleship & Spiritual Formation

The Alternative Story

By Joe Boyd I want to change the world. I”m obviously not alone. Protestors,Â politicians, pastors, parents, and beauty pageant contestants””we all love to talk about changing the world. Just stick a microphone in front of one of us andÂ we”ll gladly poetically drone about change and hope and the power of possibility. Except for a few fringe extremists, everyone I know genuinely desires world peace. We want to see the hungry fed, the endangered children saved, and the abandoned elderly dignified. It isn”t too hard for us to imagine a better world without slave traders, child abusers, and hatemongers. We want

October 29, 2010