Ronald V. Huggins

Our denomination is Shrinking! Our churches are closing in unprecedented numbers ! Our numbers of baptisms are falling! Giving to the Cooperative Program is down! When the question is asked of SBC leadership:  Whose fault is it?  Where does the problem lie?  Too often the automatic answer comes back: "With the people in the pews. The members of the churches. If THEY would only get THEIR act together and do A, B, or C, things would turn around overnight and we'd have a revival!" Sometimes one gets the impression that when there's a problem, Southern Baptist leaders just don't DO self-reflection. They don't have to. They already know whose to blame and they are ready at the drop of a hat to tell you. Thom Rainer is a Southern Baptist. He says he based these fifteen points on a poll. Rainer usually bases what he says on polls and yet amazingly the results always seem to support the thesis he's wanting to promote, which ...

Just came across this : Love Israel is dead!  (Well, since last year). When you joined the Love Family you were first given a biblical name, and then, when you proved your spiritually bonafides, a virtue name. Everybody took the last name Israel. The big boss was Love Israel ("...the greatest of these is love" 1 Cor 13:13). As I recall they didn't use money. Unsurprisingly the group eventually went down in a blaze of scandal in the early 1980s. In the early 1970s a considerable group of Love Family members came and stayed at the Rainbow House Commune in Yakima, Washington.  Unlike us, they were very regimented (up at dawn, yoga and chanting out in front of the house at 6 AM--I can't say on the "front lawn" because there was only dirt out there--then breakfast and off to work all day in the orchards, no sloughing off!). The women embraced the womanly role completely, took over our filthy kitchen, cleaned it all up spic span, and in no time flat ou...

A note connected with the digital edition of the  Oxford English Dictionary  (= OED ) reads of its entry on “Homophobia”:  "This entry has not been fully updated (first published 1993)." The "correction" introduced here is so minor that it is hardly worth making, but since I came across it I decided to go ahead and share it. The word Homophobia , in its current application to homosexuals, did not appear until the late 1960s (See the  OED ’s second entry definition). Its contemporary sense is somewhat unnatural if it is assumed the derivation of the word is from  homo  (man) and  phobia  (fear), which would not imply the fear of homosexuals but simply fear of man/men/humanity. In fact the currently used noun “homophobia,” though having the same form, has a separate derivation, since the homo- there means  same  not  man . So the first and second entries in the  OED  are actually two d...