Barnabas File

I just finished reading An Ordinary Man, the autobiography of Paul Rusesabagina. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, Rusesabagina is the focus of the movie Hotel Rwanda , the story of how one hotel manager saved over 1200 people during the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. During 100 days, over one million people were killed in politically-motivated ethnic violence. Yes, that’s 1,000,000 people. Rusesabagina does not spare any details in describing the brutality and insanity of this genocide. The book is not only Rusesabagina’s life story, it is a brief history of the country of Rwanda, a discourse on good in the face of evil, and a political critique of those who allowed it to happen—Rwandans, the United Nations, the United States, and various European countries. This is a chilling and ultimately frustrating story, but it is a book that is hard to put down. We are left asking, “How could this have happened?’ We are also left with the message that it could happen again. An interesting t...

I continue to struggle with finding a good adjective to describe what kind of Baptist I am. It would be nice to have a brief, short-hand way to communicate what my commitments are. "Liberal" is not a bad term if one uses the dictionary meaning ("marked by generosity and openhandedness") but it has been used so much in a pejorative sense that I hesitate to embrace it. Many of us like to call ourselves "moderate" Baptists, but this tends to bring to mind the "lukewarm" church at Laodicea that the narrator wants to "spit out of his mouth"! I like the term "progressive," especially as it is defined by Fisher Humphreys in his book The Way We Were --informed, committed to women in ministry, concerned about the world's needs. Of course, at least one national Baptist convention has made this a part of its name, so the use of the term may be a bit confusing. Some have drawn the distinction between "conventional" and...

Someone once told me., "Planting new churches is not rocket science." Probably not, but that doesn't mean that it is easy. Perhaps church planting is closer to an art, something like planting an ornamental garden! The organization which I serve has blisters, sore muscles, and thorns to prove it. We have learned a great deal about starting new churches, in large part by making mistakes. We have had more failures than successes. I can tell you a lot of things one ought NOT to do in starting a new church, but I cannot guarantee that if you simply avoid these errors that you will succeed. We continue to try and to learn in the process. One thing I am learning is that the "high tech/high touch" principle is significant in starting a new church. The idea comes from John Naisbit's book Megatrends . Naisbit explained that in the emerging world people want to utilize technology to do their work and communicate, but they also desire healthy relationships. How does ...