Page 1051 – Christianity Today (2025)

When blues guitarist B. B. King died last week, the web lit up with tributes, and San Francisco jazz station KCSM devoted all of that day’s programming to selections from King’s vast repertoire.

Such a response is all the more striking, given the blues’ obscurity on modern radio. I’ve been a fan of the blues for nearly two decades, but at most it usually garners a one-hour radio program here, a weekly program there—usually on jazz stations (which face a struggle of their own). The Bay Area, where I live, has relatively plentiful blues airtime, with two separate stations devoting a combined six hours a week to the form. But it’s rare, perhaps impossible, to find radio stations dedicated to the blues, outside of those on satellite or the Internet.

Both jazz and the blues are distinctly American musical forms “rooted in the African-American experience.” While jazz encompasses incredible rhythmic and harmonic complexity—which can sometimes make for a more cerebral listening experience—the blues have a simpler structure and earthy emotionalism. And as King remarked during one of his three career appearances at the White House, the blues have a particular capacity to express suffering and anger.

I first discovered jazz in my teens, through a love affair with big band music and the discovery I could use burgeoning piano skills in the high school jazz band. It took me longer to appreciate the blues, though, probably because I hadn’t lived enough life yet.

By grad school, I’d begun listening to some of the classic rock musicians who owed a debt to B.B. King—Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, in particular. I liked them most for the catchy rhythms and danceable grooves a local musician would recreate at the pub where I graded papers. I didn’t care much about the lyrics.

Then I moved to New York, and within a few years, I experienced my own blues, when I realized I might not achieve my lifelong dream of marriage… or a sex life… after all. Around the same time, I passed the leanest two years of my adult life, scraping by on $50 a week for food and transit. Though I minded chastity more than my relative poverty, it was a difficult season. Many a day I wrestled with God about why my life was going so differently from my plan for things.

Around that time, I discovered an independent radio station with an Internet stream, which played an hour of blues each night at 8. It might be a lonely Friday night when I still had work to do and couldn’t afford to go out anyway, but the blues always gave me an uplift, sometimes even a low-key party. Unlike many of the other songs I listened to in those years, the blues offered encouragement not through denial of suffering, but despite it.

In one song, King sings: “I've got a good mind to give up living / And go shopping instead / To pick up me a tombstone / And be pronounced dead.”And yet he’s singing, with life-affirming passion. No matter how bad life may get, the blues musician always finds a way to wrest something beautiful from deep pain.

In interviews and public appearances, King sometimes contrasted the blues with the gospel music alongside which it emerged. While the blues may be more secular, I’ve found their deeply redemptive bent profoundly nourishing to my faith. As a Christian, I know that the gospel provides a real and enduring hope, no matter what. But sometimes I’ve needed the blues to help bring my heart in line. As my nearly a dozen of his CDs attest, B.B. King has been a big part of that.

Just over a year ago, King returned to the Bay Area for one of his final concerts here. The first time I’d seen him live, at a winery, he talked almost more than played—prompting some in the crowd to get rude. But maybe that show was a fluke.

The man I’d heard on so many recordings was a peerless guitar player, with an instantly recognizable sound, no matter what guitar he played. (Guitar World writer Alan Paul says King’s distinctive sound came from his use of vibrato, a finger technique more commonly used by violinists.) And he sang with a supple, passionate voice few could match.

I decided to give King another chance and bought the ticket. The next night, as I watched King’s assistants help the then-88-year-old to his chair on stage, unexpected tears swelled in a sudden rush of deep affection.

Here was the man who’d helped me through so many low times, who’d brought me such joy on so many occasions. And even though he could play only 60- or 70-minute sets toward the end, here he was playing another tour, more than 20 years past the age when most people hope to retire.

With 15 Grammy awards and a chain of clubs around the country, he certainly didn’t need the money. But King played from love, for the music and for people. (As I learned from the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of his death, King’s thousands of concerts included several for those in prison.) He kept sharing that love up until just a few months before his death.

I don’t know if B.B. King shared my faith, but he helped deepen it. It would be a great joy to someday thank him in person for how generously he shared his gifts while on earth.

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CT is hosting a Twitter chat with Jon Acuff on Tuesday, May 19 at 10 p.m. eastern, 9 central. Tweet your questions using the hashtag #AskAcuff and follow @CTmagazine for his responses.

If you want a sense of Jon Acuff’s career path, look no further than the titles of his three best-selling books. Quitter, Start, and Do Over hint at the Nashville writer’s surprise resignation from financial guru Dave Ramsey’s team. Now the man behind the website Stuff Christians Like is using his platform to dispense business advice infused with Christian wisdom.

From a cubicle he dreamed of escaping, Acuff watched Stuff Christians Like develop a devoted following with its spot-on satire about modest side hugs and worship leaders who wear deep V-neck tees. Seven years later, he’s a nationally known author and speaker, giving readers practical steps to pursue right now the dreams they’d put off for “someday.”

A smiley guy with a slight faux-hawk, the 39-year-old former ad copywriter hasn’t left his comic roots. With a quarter million followers, his Twitter feed alternates between inspiration (“Beware the temptation to ask money for things it simply can’t give you: an identity, a purpose, a sense of internal worth”) and random one-liners (“The number of Cheetos I can eat in one sitting is exactly equal to the number of Cheetos that are within arm’s reach”).

Do Over: Rescue Monday, Reinvent Your Work, and Never Get Stuck, released last month by Portfolio, is Acuff’s first book with a mainstream publisher. The same Penguin imprint is responsible for titles by marketing innovator Seth Godin and former Apple “chief evangelist” Guy Kawasaki. Godin himself called Acuff’s Do Over “the best career book ever written.”

Acuff is among a number of Christian leaders mixing professional development principles with discipleship and vocation. Former Thomas Nelson publisher Michael Hyatt, leadership coach Jenni Catron, Blue Like Jazz author Donald Miller, writer Jeff Goins, and others instruct devotees on how to set goals, market oneself, build healthy teams, network, and steward time efficiently.

“There was some hesitance to use business thinking,” said Matt Perman, former director of strategy at Desiring God and author of What’s Best Next. “However, we started learning from it because we saw a lot of it was speaking truthfully.” Conferences such as Bill Hybels’s Global Leadership Summit and Brad Lomenick’s Catalyst were among the first large-scale settings to introduce such principles to evangelical leaders, said Perman.

A Southern Baptist pastor’s kid, Acuff infuses his advice with his go-getter attitude. He tells readers they don’t have to settle for a job they dread and offers practical steps to find passion in their daily work. His taglines include “Punch Fear in the Face” and “Build a Better Monday.” He wants people to actually enjoy their jobs, for the sake of themselves, their employers, and their witness in the world of business.

In Do Over, Acuff addresses people who feel stuck in their jobs—up to 70 percent of US workers, according to recent Gallup polls. It’s a message inspired by his own experience leaving Ramsey’s team, a position he once called his “dream job.”

Learning to Hustle

After getting a journalism degree from Samford University, Acuff spent more than a decade in advertising while blogging on the side. After Stuff Christians Like landed him a book deal and speaking gigs, he became a touring speaker with Ramsey, best known among US churchgoers for his Financial Peace University curriculum.

In 2010, Acuff moved his family—wife Jenny and daughters L. E. and McRae—from their home outside Atlanta to join Ramsey’s Nashville company, the Lampo Group. Its 400 employees produce Ramsey’s radio show, publish training materials, and host live events. Lampo released Quitter in 2011 and Start in 2013, reaching The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times bestseller lists.

Acuff held sold-out workshops to drive home the books’ messages; he and Ramsey kicked off the tour for Start in Times Square with a giant bus branded with the book’s logo.

It was Ramsey, Acuff said, who taught him how to hustle (a favorite Acuff word) and get more done in a day than he thought possible. “Hustle is doing the things you don’t enjoy sometimes to earn the right to do the things you love,” he wrote in Quitter.

Then, in September 2013, Acuff announced he was leaving Lampo. He said there was no instance of “moral failure” on his part, no rift with Ramsey. Nor was there a bigger, better opportunity waiting.

‘Every career goes through a do-over, and a do-over isn’t a bad thing. I believe we are wired for resets.’ ~Jon Acuff

“I had just attended the Start conference a week or two earlier, so to hear this was a shock,” said Randy Langley, one of the 11,000 members of Acuff’s closed Facebook group about starting books, projects, and business ventures. “But as I observed him, I have seen the decision was made by someone who is doing exactly what he teaches.”

Ramsey’s team said they didn’t see it coming. “This takes us as much by surprise as it does you,” read a message posted on the Ramsey site immediately following the news. Acuff’s speaker bio, personal site, and Stuff Christians Like—all hosted by Lampo—generated the same message. Acuff launched a new site (Acuff.me) and later resumed control of Stuff ChristiansLike.net. Ramsey still owns JonAcuff.com, which lists Acuff’s three books for sale.

Lampo has repeatedly declined to speak with CT about Acuff’s departure, citing a policy against commenting on former employees. Acuff said he has not spoken to Ramsey since he left.

“Everyone on the outside was saying, ‘Hey, this must be the worst thing ever,’” Acuff said. “Jenny and I were feeling the opposite. Every career goes through a do-over, and a do-over isn’t a bad thing. I believe we are wired for resets.”

At one point in his career, Acuff says, he had gone through eight jobs in eight years. Some people would consider that a problem. Not Acuff. “Jenny pointed out, ‘You’ve never stayed at a job longer than 3 years. Why did you think this would be 40?’ ” Acuff told CT. “‘God didn’t wire you that way. He wired you with this heart of adventure and change.’”

What’s Next

Acuff continues to update Stuff Christians Like, though far less regularly than in its first three years. In those days, he added 1,000 entries to the list, including “Giving your kid a biblical name” and “Arguing about whether Chick-fil-A or In-N-Out will be served in heaven.”

“It started out as this humorous take on how we do life in the Christian world, but then it became serious and really compelling,” said Matthew Paul Turner, who runs the site Jesus Needs New PR. “I don’t think people realize how difficult it is to be funny consistently and never use the f-word and never tell a sex joke….It’s not like Jon just sits down and it flows. He’s tactical. He’s a planner.”

Acuff considers comedy a craft, looking to Jon Stewart and Louis CK, as well as Christians such as John Crist, Sammy Rhodes, and Tripp and Tyler, for ideas. But his family remains his biggest source of inspiration for his humor—and his love for the church.

“My brother Bennett is the funniest in the family. I might be third,” said Acuff. As a kid, “Jon was always saying something humorous or insightful. He was quick-witted,” said Mark Acuff, Jon’s father, who now pastors a nondenominational church in North Carolina.

Jon’s father began a church in Massachusetts in the 1980s—something he said was unheard of at the time. “That really influenced my sense to do brave, counterintuitive stuff,” said Acuff.

Acuff has coined terms like Jesus juke—when well-meaning Christians take a lighthearted topic and suddenly make it about the Lord—as well as booty, God, booty, the way believers struggle to integrate faith in their daily lives. But the last thing he’s trying to do is bash the church, friends said.

“Jon has such a great way of celebrating the mess that is the church that we’re a part of, in a way that’s constructive,” said Tim Schraeder, a social media strategist.

A self-diagnosed “What’s next?” addict, the frenetic Acuff continues to blog, write, and dispense advice on everything from designing book covers to networking to facing rejection. Self-publishing, Kickstarter campaigns, and other web resources make Acuff’s message seem doable for any self-starter.

“Reaching awesome used to be primarily a postmidlife accomplishment…. The path to awesome was decades long and there was little you could do to shorten it,” wrote Acuff in Start. “The Internet, and especially social media, has changed that.”

Between book deadlines (he’s writing his second for Penguin), webinars, and YouTube videos, Acuff also consults with organizations and tours with the family ministry Orange.

“An hour with Jon around the creative table usually generates more ideas than our team would typically put on a storyboard in a day,” said Reggie Joiner, Orange’s CEO and one of the founding pastors of Acuff’s former church, North Point Community in Alpharetta, Georgia.

Working at the intersection of business and faith lets Acuff—who now attends the Franklin campus of the nondenominational Cross Point Church—reach secular readers. “The books I write are on business shelves,” he said. “I love the idea of [a reader noticing], ‘When you talk about character or empathy, there’s something different.’ ”

And when it comes to a gospel witness, it might just be Acuff’s can-do message that stands out in a culture of negative headlines and loud opinions. “Anyone can be cynical,” he wrote recently. “Hope takes courage.”

Kate Shellnutt is CT associate editor of Her.meneutics.

John “Jack” Templeton Jr., who took over the foundation that his wealthy investor father created in 1987, died on Saturday, May 16, at his home in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. He was 75.

The cause of death was cancer, according to a family member. Templeton died two days before the Templeton Foundation awarded the $1.7 million Templeton Prize in London on Monday to Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arche, an international ministry to people with disabilities. The family withheld announcement of the death until after the award ceremony.

In 1995, Templeton retired as chief of pediatric surgery at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. He then took on the role of chairman and president of the Templeton Foundation. His father, Sir John Marks Templeton, was one of the world’s most successful investors who began his career during the depression-era 1930s. In 1954, Sir John Marks Templeton created the family of Templeton mutual funds; in 1992, he sold the funds to the Franklin Group and used the proceeds to fund the foundation.

The foundation supports research that connects science and religious faith. It explains: “[P]rimary funding areas include science and the big questions, character and virtue development, individual freedom and free enterprise, genetics, exceptional cognitive talent and genius, and the Templeton Prize. Recent grants have explored topics such as gratitude, beneficial purpose, exoplanets, and religious liberty.”

Jack Templeton’s lifelong career in medicine, specializing in treatment of conjoined twins, deeply shaped his worldview. “I’ll always see him as a doctor,” says his daughter, Jennifer Templeton Simpson, in comments on the foundation’s website. “And though he no longer practices, his being a doctor influences everything—the way he views things, the way he handles problems, the way he asks a lot of questions before he says anything. He’s basically an investigative person—one who never gives up when he doesn’t have the answer.”

John Schott, a foundation trustee, physician, and medical school classmate of Templeton, said in Templeton’s online bio, “Jack never lost his compassion, never objectified the patient. You have to make life and death decisions within a short period of time and often without enough information. That’s why medicine is a calling, and not just a job. And Jack’s seeking nature, his interest in purpose, his grappling with the Big Questions—all made him a superb doctor and now make him the best possible head of the Foundation.”

Like his father, Templeton was active in the Presbyterian church, but the two differed theologically. The elder Templeton had a reputation for being a universalist. But his son was evangelical and a member of the Presbyterian Church in America. In 2005, CT wrote about their relationship and the foundation in “The $1 Billion Handoff.”

The annual Templeton Prize is one of the foundation’s most renowned features. In 1973, the first prize was awarded with the intention to recognize “a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works.” Past recipients include Billy Graham, Chuck Colson, the Dalai Lama, and Mother Teresa.

It is the largest single prize of its kind. The amount is adjusted annually so that it exceeds the Nobel Prize. In March, Vanier was named this year’s laureate for his work creating group homes worldwide where people with and without intellectual disabilities live and work together.

As of 2013, the foundation had assets of $3.34 billion. Grants and charitable activity totaled $966 million from 1987 to 2013. The average size of a grant is $1 million. The foundation is also an active publisher with 216 titles to its credit and two award-winning magazines.

During his tenure, Templeton in 2010 guided the foundation to refocus its philanthropy around five areas:

• Science and the big questions.
• Character development.
• Freedom and free enterprise.
• Exceptional cognitive talent and genius.
• Genetics.

Within the scientific community, a few leaders criticized the foundation’s underlying prospect of harmonizing science and religion. Peter Woit, a Columbia University physicist, wrote on his blog about foundation leaders: “They unambiguously are devoted to trying to bring science and religion together, and that’s my main problem with them. Their encouragement of religion seems to be of a very ecumenical nature, not pushing especially the evangelical Christianity of Templeton Jr.”

In 2010, Politics magazine (now known as Campaign and Elections) named Templeton as one of the most influential Republicans in Pennsylvania. He was a durable supporter of politically conservative causes. According to one news report, Templeton and his wife contributed $1 million to the campaign to defeat gay marriage in California.

According to a media release:

He was the recipient of numerous awards including the National Courage of Belief Award from the American Jewish Committee in 2010, the Heroes of Liberty Award (jointly with his wife) from the National Liberty Museum in 2006, and honorary doctorate degrees from Buena Vista University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Alvernia College. He was a member of Proclamation Presbyterian Church in Bryn Mawr since its founding in 1989…. Templeton Jr. is survived by his wife, Pina, who retired from Children’s Hospital in 1999, their daughters Heather Dill and Jennifer Simpson, sons-in-law Jeff Dill and Scott Simpson, six grandchildren, a brother, Christopher, and a brother-in-law, Gail Zimmerman. His sister, Anne Zimmerman, died in 2004.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Jack Templeton as a billionaire. We apologize for the error.

“To imagine none can teach you but those who are themselves saved from sin, is a very great and dangerous mistake. Give not place to it for a moment.” – John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection

There is sometimes an instinct within Christian leadership that downplays business thinking. After all, the church has a different purpose than a business, so why should it operate like one? A few leaders go as far as saying that “business thinking is ruining the church.”

Increasingly, though, we see Christian leaders and organizations opening up to the insights of the business world: leadership development, teamwork, productivity, people management, and more. Willow Creek’s Global Leadership Summit, Catalyst, and other training grounds for church leaders apply such principles with great effectiveness. Christian authors and speakers like Jon Acuff bring these principles directly into their work.

That’s what I sought to do when I was on the leadership team of a major evangelical ministry, and it’s what I seek to do in my books, including What’s Best Next. I have found it essential for Christians leaders to seek out and learn from secular business thinkers. Using a biblical framework, we become better leaders, and better Christians, when we do.

One of the best-kept secrets is that much of the strongest business thinking lines up with a biblical worldview. We see this in two of the most significant trends in business thinking: an emphasis on purpose and on service.

Putting Purpose over Profit

Business is often maligned for sacrificing people at the altar of profit. As the stereotype goes, if you want to succeed, you need to make profit your ultimate aim and be willing to step on people.

Sure, many businesses operate this way. But today’s most popular and successful business thinkers advise the opposite. In his landmark book Built to Last, business consultant Jim Collins makes the case that companies that put profit ahead of their desire to serve people and contribute to society actually make less in the long run.

Conversely, the companies that prioritize their mission, saying things like, “We are ultimately in business to make a contribution; profit matters, but it’s not the goal,” are the ones who fare better financially. How? This approach creates trust and goodwill with customers, building the company’s brand in a positive way.

Further, because their aim is to truly benefit people, not just make a sale and run, these companies create better products. They’re the ones people want to do business with and buy from, often promoting them enthusiastically through word of mouth (the best form of marketing).

On the other hand, companies that put making money ahead of their mission typically end up cutting corners and ticking off their customers.

Serving Others

Tim Sanders, former Yahoo executive and author of Love is the Killer App, writes that the greatest trend in business is “the downfall of the barracudas, sharks, and piranhas and the ascendency of nice, smart people.”

The best business thinkers agree with him: Loving others at work is actually good business strategy. Sanders doesn’t advocate doing so out of ulterior motives for advancing yourself. Rather, he argues that you should do it because it is the right thing to do.

I think this philosophy is an incredible thing. It shows that there is no fundamental tension between doing well and doing good. We are most effective in the business world by seeking to serve people and be generous.

In many ways, business leaders have recognized this for years. It’s the perspective behind books like How to Win Friends and Influence People, and even Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, said, “The best managers have a generosity of spirit.” More recently, Wharton School business professor Adam Grant has argued very well for this perspective in his book Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success.

The Internet has made this philosophy even more integral to good business. Stingy, selfish people have no place to hide. When people do business harshly and carelessly, word spreads fast. Conversely, when they’re generous and helpful to work with, we hear about that, too.

I’m excited about this trend because many people tend to think that business is an exception to Jesus’ command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” I want to say: no, it is not an exception at all. Jesus meant that command to apply in business as well as personal life, and it turns out to be good for business as well as the right thing to do (see Prov. 11:24-26).

Four Reasons Good Business Thinking Belongs in the Church

These trends are just the beginning of the kind of robust, people-oriented philosophies being taught by the best secular business thinkers. Far beyond superficial tactics and manipulation, their approaches rely on principles of character and service. They relate to the work we do in Christian organizations to build community, share the gospel, and minister effectively.

1. Learning from business thinking enables us to give God the glory he deserves for being the ultimate source of the truth in it.

If we ignore secular business teachings as a resource for the church, we miss out on an opportunity to recognize God’s truth within them. As Christians who believe all truth is God’s truth, we can point to God as the source and give him the glory he deserves. Engaging with business thinking gives us the opportunity to flesh out the biblical foundations behind such popular and effective messages, so that God can be honored.

2. Engaging with good business thinking can lead people to Christ.

Showing how the principles behind good business thinking have their ultimate roots in God is a form of what I would call “cultural apologetics.” By showing secular thinkers that their best thinking is in line with what the Scriptures have always taught, it can give them a further reason to consider the claims of Christ.

3. Learning from business thinking shows respect to non-Christians.

When we take interest in and consider the teachings of thinkers outside the church, it shows that we value them and their work. This is a form of loving our neighbor. It’s also a lesson in humility—acknowledging we don’t have everything all figured out. We have things to learn.

Recognizing this, in turn, has further evangelistic implications that reinforce the previous point. The world is much more likely to consider what we have to say as Christians if they know, see, and feel that we respect them.

4. Understanding business thinking leads us to become more effective in our organizations.

God has so set up the world that Christians don’t know everything simply by talking among themselves. Instead he also blesses non-Christians with important truths through common grace. We can’t know everything we need to run our organizations well if we ignore the messages taught by top business leaders. (In some cases, we have a lot to learn. Has there ever been a situation in your church where you’ve said to yourself, “There’s got to be a better way to do this?” Often, business thinking has the answer.)

Moses was “instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” (Acts 7:22). Likewise, God gave Daniel “learning and skill in all literature and wisdom,” so that he excelled beyond all the others in the king’s court (Dan. 1:17, 20). God’s best servants have always learned from and understood the best of secular thinking. It is part of how God equips us to fulfill his call on our lives.

But What About…?

For the skeptics, it’s important to clarify: Learning from business thinking does not mean churches adopt everything done in the business world. (For example, I don’t agree with the “pastor as CEO” model.) Still, there remain certain universal principles that apply, namely because in both business and the church we are dealing with people.

Those who object to business thinking in the church typically recall the kinds of businesses that see people as consumers to be used rather than people to be served. That’s not good strategy for the business world, and that’s not the approach we intend to apply to ministry, either.

But, as we’ve seen, there is another kind of business thinking—the good kind, which embraces the principles we saw above and is built on the character ethic. It’s important to see the distinction. This is what we hope to learn from.

Where to Start

For Christians and leaders wondering: Where should we start? I’d recommend four of the best business thinkers of our era—who, interestingly, are also most in line with biblical principles. You could read any title by these leaders, but here are my suggestions:

• Built to Last by Jim Collins
• The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni
• Principle-Centered Leadership by Stephen Covey
• First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham

When we read and learn from business thinkers, we should do so from within a biblical perspective. Our understanding starts with the Bible. We evaluate business thinking in light of what the Scriptures tell us is true about people, the nature of leadership, and our task in the world. The more such books we read, the more equipped we will be to understand God’s glory, see our own blind spots, and better advance the Gospel.

Matt Perman is former senior director of strategy at Desiring God and the author of What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done. He is a frequent speaker on the topics of leadership and productivity from a God-centered perspective and also consults with businesses and non-profits. He blogs at www.whatsbestnext.com.

A feud over theology has led an unusual ecumenical project in a small Arizona town.

Eight churches—including Baptist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and non-denominational congregations—in Fountain Hills have teamed up for a campaign of public banners and sermons aimed at the theology of a nearby Methodist church.

The sermon series—“Progressive Christianity: Fact or Fiction?”—was launched with an op-ed and half-page advertisement in the local newspaper, and promoted with banners at the eight churches involved.

One described it as a “landmark series” and an “unprecedented step” that “demonstrate[s] in a very real way the unity of the 'body of Christ' in Fountain Hills.” Another stated, “Imagine Baptists united with Lutherans working side-by-side with Presbyterians, all while holding the raised hands of charismatics.”

It’s the latest salvo in a months-long war of words over theology in the town of about 23,000, located about half an hour outside of Phoenix. Fountain Hills has approximately 15 Protestant churches.

At issue: the topic of “Progressive Christianity,” taught at The Fountains, a United Methodist church. That church’s pastor, David Felten, is known for supporting LGBT rights and progressive theology.

Felten’s views—which include rejecting doctrines like the Virgin Birth—and his participation in a visit to a local mosque have become the topic of fierce debate in the local newspaper.

Don Lawrence, pastor of Christ’s Church of Fountain Hills, accused Felten of rejecting traditional Christian belief and of being intolerant.

“Although he has the right to believe or disbelieve what he will about the Virgin Mary, does his ‘tolerance’ allow him to throw stones at others simply because they believe differently than he?” he wrote to the Fountain Hills Times. “His hypocrisy is clear for all to see.”

Tony Pierce, pastor of First Baptist Church of Fountain Hills, accused Felten of promoting heresy.

“The progressives are at it again, and for a small fee you can join the primary proponent of this apostate religious movement to get answers,” he wrote in a letter to the editor.

The new sermon series doesn’t mention The Fountains by name, but does seem aimed at Felten’s congregation. It’s made headlines for the public nature of the dispute between churches.

Felten told a local television station that his church offers an alternative to "fundamentalist" Christianity and is the only progressive church in town. Church leaders noted in a blog post that the publicity around the sermon campaign has helped their cause.

“Our strategy is to not be defensive or argumentative, but to keep articulating the positive attributes of Progressive Christianity and always err on the side of grace as we move ahead,” they wrote.

Bill Good, pastor of Fountain Hills Presbyterian Church, said those who promote a progressive form of Christianity are undermining the Christian faith.

"There are some half-truths and untruths coming out and that are not helpful to folks that are trying to find their way to Jesus Christ,” he told Fox 10 in Phoenix.

Rick Ponzo, pastor of Calvary Fountain Hills, wrote on his church blog, “Since the enemy does not have the ability to keep Christians out of heaven, the next best thing is to render them useless on earth, keeping them from sharing the truth with others. Progressive Christianity is one of the tools the enemy uses to achieve that goal.”

Pastors involved in the sermon series see it as an act of Christian unity to promote the gospel.

“Other pastors or churches will not be denigrated; the goal is to simply illuminate the truth of the gospel message and let it do what only it can do,” says a message on the Fountain Hills Presbyterian website.

United Methodists and other mainline Protestants are split between those who identify as “born-again” or evangelical and those who do not.

Just under half (45%) of Methodists would describe themselves as born-again or evangelical, according to new data from the Pew Research Center. A similar number of Presbyterians (42%) also say they are evangelical, along with a third (33%) of Lutherans.

By contrast, three quarters (75%) of Baptists and non-denominational Christians (78%) consider themselves evangelicals.

CT has regularly noted how mainline Protestants have increasingly split over theology, including Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Episcopalians.

Editor's Note: This post has been updated, with a clarified comment from Felten to Fox 10 in Phoenix.

In my early days of preaching, I made some embarrassing mistakes. In one sermon I kept referring to immature Christians as "spiritual midgets." It's shocking to me now that I would say something so insensitive. During post-sermon feedback, my team asked me some questions:

"What if there had been real midgets there? Or, if someone is related to or knows a midget, how would that make them feel?"

I had been trying to create a vivid mental picture of stunted spiritual development, to frame a holy disgust at a lack of progress. But did I ever fail at my attempt! I kept thinking about how this issue would have been avoided.One way is getting feedback before the sermon is preached. The whole church suffers if one person alone prepares a sermon. Because of this, I started submitting myself to their preemptive feedback.While preparing a sermon recently, I received some preemptive feedback from one of our leaders. He had many positive things to say, but one big critique. He said I did a good job applying the gospel message to Christians, but he felt my application to unbelievers was weak.

He pointed out that I needed to make sure I drove home the truth that people are sinners in need of a Savior. I was initially surprised to hear this feedback, but after reviewing my recorded sermon, he was absolutely right. I had underplayed the gospel message itself, but hadn't realized it. I corrected it, and that Sunday, three people indicated their desire to follow Jesus for the first time.

For another sermon I had developed an epic list of 12 excuses Christians make to avoid giving in the offering. One of our leaders strongly urged me to cut the list down to six because it was just too overwhelming. This was difficult to receive because I was proud of the comprehensiveness of my list, and I wanted to leave no stone unturned. But the more I reviewed my list and this leader’s feedback, I became aware of the need to make changes. My list lacked grace and I wasn't trusting the Holy Spirit to do the forming. I allowed myself to be convinced by the feedback, and I shortened the list. That Sunday we had several first time givers.

I never stop being amazed by the benefits of teamwork.

One aspect of this process I love is getting to the point in the sermon where I incorporate a preemptive change. If possible, I will glance at the leader who was responsible and catch a smile.

I see a sense of godly pride in their eyes and I become more aware of how that moment dignifies them, and how it makes us closer as leaders. It increases our confidence in each other and our openness as a team.

Since incorporating preemptive feedback, I have become more aware of changes I need to make before I submit the sermon to others. I’m also able to produce sermon rough drafts quicker. If one of my points feels undeveloped rather than laboring over it, I am confident that the team will help me develop it further, or encourage me to nix it. I can safely say there have been no downsides to adopting this practice. This process removes a lot of stress and last-minute scrambling, which my wife and kids particularly appreciate. More than anything, it blesses God’s people more.

My sermon process

Here is my current sermon preparation process. I hope it is helpful and gives you a few ideas of your own.

On Tuesdays I go somewhere without Wi-Fi and work solely on my sermon. I am usually working on a sermon at least three weeks ahead of time. My goal on Tuesdays is to finish my sermon notes completely. At the end of the day, I preach the sermon out loud and record myself. I send the audio of my rough sermon and the notes to the leadership team. By doing this a few weeks in advance, it gives the leaders enough time to listen and email feedback to me without the stress of a quick turnaround.

I take a few hours on Wednesday mornings to work on my sermon for the upcoming Sunday. I review any feedback I have received and I make it my goal to apply as much as I can. If I disagree strongly enough with anything, I'll attempt to talk with that person to make sure I understand their input. I listen to my own recording and simultaneously follow along with my sermon notes. I then practice this new version without recording it, but I do time it. I don't usually do anything else with the sermon until Sunday morning.

I get up early on Sunday morning to go over my sermon again. I read over my notes and work hard at cutting things out. I do another full run through, and time myself. I try to highlight sections in my notes that I can sacrifice if time gets away from me. This helps me make better and faster decisions on stage.

At this point I have practiced my sermon three times, received and applied feedback from other leaders, and worked at getting the length down. This level of preparedness also helps me be less rigid and less tied to my notes, so I can still speak more from my heart, and follow the lead of the Spirit. Is the sermon perfect? No. But it's definitely better than it would have been if I did all of the preparation by myself. I have grown as a preacher thanks to my team and incorporating preemptive feedback.

Matt Sweetman is an author and pastor of Destination Church in Chicago, Illinois.

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Dan Price, the young CEO of Gravity Payments in Seattle, generated a boatload of publicity and controversy last month when he committed to pay every one of his 120 employees an annual salary of at least $70,000. Price said he was concerned that lower-paid employees were struggling to make ends meet.

In light of our country’s growing economic inequality, the 30-year-old Christian saw his own $1 million salary as part of the problem. To fund the raises for more than half the company’s workers, he cut his salary to $70,000, and decided the company could afford to reduce profits by as much as half.

In the week after the story first broke Price got emails from nearly 100 CEOs lauding his decision. But not everyone was so enthusiastic.

The New York Times ran a follow-up piece detailing some of the criticism directed toward the company. Naysayers from the business world say the move to “overpay” workers rather than trusting the market rate could do more harm than good. They suggest the new salaries could spur resentment from once higher-paid workers and hurt long-term productivity. Some critics lambasted the decision as socialism.

These criticisms from purported defenders of free-market capitalism—from business professors and economists to talk show host Rush Limbaugh— evidence egregiously flawed thinking about both capitalism and free markets. They’re also at odds with the wisdom of Scripture.

Despite the concerns over the pay shift as socialism, Gravity Payments has every intention of continuing to operate as a business selling a service and making a profit. In fact, as a result of the recent publicity, several new clients have signed on. Dan Price and his company are practicing simple, straightforward, for-profit capitalism, not socialism.

Price’s move violates an understanding of capitalism that would require company to pay no more than the lowest price at which the market would allow them to hire appropriate workers. (Wal-Mart, to pick a prominent example, clearly operates on such a conviction.)

Scripture, though, has a very different perspective. To start with, God frequently and emphatically condemns business people who take advantage of their workers, particularly through exploitive compensation.

In Malachi, the Lord warns he will come in judgment against “those who exploit workers,” listing it among the ways people show they do not fear him (3:5). In the New Testament, James 5:4 reads, “Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty.”

But God does more than condemn employers whose wages are exploitive. Through Moses and the Apostle Paul, he shows us the alternative. In 1 Corinthians 9:9-10, Paul provides a fascinating insight into something Moses wrote centuries earlier:

It is written in the Law of Moses: “Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.” Is it about oxen that God is concerned? Surely he says this for us, doesn’t he? Yes, this was written for us, because whoever plows and threshes should be able to do so in the hope of sharing in the harvest.

Paul makes the case for why he, like other apostles and ministers, appropriately deserves compensation for his work on behalf of the gospel. But for our purposes, it is how he makes his case that is so instructive. Paul says that it is God (not merely Moses) who commands that as oxen work to tread out a farmer’s grain they must be allowed to eat whatever supplemental grain they want. In other words, these working oxen would be allowed “bonus” feedings over and above the normal feedings (analogous to wages) provided by the farmer. Then Paul indicates that God’s real reason for this command is to instruct employers — employers of oxen, yes, but primarily of human workers — that all who help produce a harvest are meant to share in the rewards.

In fact, the real thrust of Paul’s argument is that God takes this shared-rewards principle so seriously that he extends it beyond the human workers (who plow and thresh)to the working animals whose labor helps contribute to the harvest. According to this principle, workers deserve not merely (market-dictated) wages, but an appropriate share in the rewards of business success — the harvest — they help create.

This is not just noble moral advice; it is also real-world business wisdom. Earlier this year, Southwest Airlines announced that its 2014 profit-sharing bonuses to employees topped a whopping $355 million — one-third of its total profits. Herb Kelleher, co-founder and longtime CEO of Southwest, was frequently asked how he justified such largesse. He had a ready answer: "We take great care of our people, they take great care of our customers, and our customers take great care of our shareholders.” This shared-rewards approach works so well for Southwest that for much of the company’s history its market cap has been greater than for all nine of its major competitors… combined.

Similarly, Costco pays its people nearly triple the compensation at Wal-Mart, including hefty profit-sharing bonuses. But instead of struggling to compete because of that higher cost structure, Costco dramatically outperforms Wal-Mart in virtually every bottom-line category of business performance:

• Costco turns its inventory 50 percent faster than Walmart, and compared with Walmart-owned Sam’s Club, enjoys 70 percent higher sales per square foot and double the level of sales per employee.
• Wal-Mart's revenue growth rate for the past year was 3.2 percent, and for the past 10 years was 8.5 percent. Costco’s comparison numbers are 7.1 percent and 9.9 percent.
• Over the past decade, Wal-Mart’s share price has almost doubled, while Costco’s share price has more than tripled.

Neither Herb Kelleher at Southwest, nor Jim Sinegal at Costco, ever thought that capitalism meant paying workers the smallest amount possible. They are way too smart for that. So is Dan Price.

Hopefully their examples may help more of their peers to smarten up as well. It’s high time American workers quit paying the price for the greedy shortsightedness of their bosses. After all, though God is slow to anger, he is also the ever-vigilant champion of all the exploited.

Tim Weinhold is Director of the Faith and Business Initiative at Eventide Funds, an award-winning, biblical-values-based Boston mutual fund.

At the beginning of Sunday school, one of the four- and five-year-olds piped up to ask: “Miss Hannah, can we pray that my mommy won’t be mean to me anymore?”For the past year, I’ve been squeezing my knees under a two-and-a-half-foot-tall table every week to teach these little ones that Jesus loves them. We start by talking about the week and taking prayer requests, things like, “My finger has a boo-boo” or “Can we pray that I’ll get a rabbit for Christmas?” or “I want a baby brother.”Occasionally, the children come with greater burdens. That morning, it was a young boy who’d recently moved in with his great-aunt because the courts found his mother unfit. He was older than the others—already turned six—but spent kindergarten at four different schools and wasn’t ready to move to first grade.

His story isn’t the norm for our small church in southwest Virginia, but it isn’t remarkable either. My husband pastors the congregation, made up of low to middle income folks. We have teachers and cops and retirees, and a lot who just get by. We regularly pray for those who are unemployed, living in unusual domestic arrangements, or struggling with legal issues. For them, our church is one link of a very fragile chain of being.

America’s Opportunity Gap

In his New York Times bestseller, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, Robert Putnam lays out the larger backdrop for the kinds of things showing up on our church’s prayer list. The Harvard political scientist addresses whether the United States is truly a land of opportunity or if hidden barriers have created an “opportunity gap” in our country.

It’s a question that matters as we look at generational change: Is it likely that a child born in poverty in the US can work toward a better life, or will he become caught in a cycle of instability and brokenness?Putnam begins in the small Ohio city of Port Clinton, where he grew up in the 1950s. He remembers it as a place where rich and poor existed side-by-side, in the same schools, neighborhoods, and churches. Even his poorest peers had plenty of opportunities, with many going on to college and successful careers. Port Clinton looks different today, highly segregated along class lines. This divide, Putnam says, represents the key factor keeping the town’s poorest children from rising above their surroundings.

As evidenced by Putnam’s extensive research and first-person interviews in Our Kids, the same problem occurs in cities and towns across the country. For most poor children, the American Dream does not exist.Of course, the issue is more complicated than “class segregation,” with family instability, parenting and early childhood development, schooling, and the state of the surrounding community all contributing to this opportunity inequality. Surprisingly absent from the list are race and gender. Though these remain forms of inequality in the US, Putnam names class as the greatest dividing factor. Affluent African Americans have more in common with affluent whites than with working class African Americans; and the statistics remain consistent across racial lines.For me, though, the question of opportunity inequality extends beyond statistics, to the panic I feel when I pray with a six-year-old boy and wonder what kind of future he can hope to have. I feel a sense of helplessness when I consider what I can do about it as his Sunday school teacher and pastor’s wife.

Spiritual Inequality

For sociologists and public policy makers, Putnam’s book has been hailed as groundbreaking. Last week, President Obama and Putnam participated in a panel discussion as part of the “Overcoming Poverty” conference hosted by Georgetown University, aimed at motivating an evangelical and Catholic audience to work toward bridging the class divide in our country.

Putnam’s work has theological implications for church leaders. This focus on the opportunity gap relates directly to our desire for human flourishing and the Christian doctrine of imago Dei. Addressing income inequality is not about ensuring Americans can accrue wealth to enjoy a lifestyle devoid of responsibility (e.g. make it to the top of the ladder), but about giving poor children the chance to, in his words, “develop their God-given talents as fully as rich kids.” Their current lack of opportunity has nothing to do with ability or desire and everything to do with whether they have to repeat kindergarten because they don’t know the alphabet or go to school hungry each morning.Church leaders face a harder question, as well: Does the social “opportunity gap” predict a corresponding spiritual “opportunity gap”? Have our congregations become (as Putnam terms schools) echo chambers for broader societal inequality? Are we amplifying the gap instead of bridging it? If we are, then not only will poor children be unable to develop their God-given talents, it’s possible that they may never know the God who gave them those talents in the first place.According to Putnam, this is precisely what’s happening. Since the mid-1970s, weekly church attendance among lower income adults (already lower than their more affluent peers) dropped by a third, while it slipped only slightly among the upper class. “If you listen carefully,” Putnam writes, “hymns in American houses of worship are increasingly sung in upper-class accents.” For Putnam, this is an institutional concern: churches are part of a broader social network and have traditionally provided mentorship and financial aid in tough times. But for pastors and church leaders, the gap has another layer. It represents the children who are growing up without knowing God’s care for them.

The Local Church

If part of the problem is class segregation, then part of the solution might be found in forming geographically based faith communities: local churches that are actually local. Many American Christians choose a church to attend based on how comfortable a congregation feels to us, theologically and socially, and how it might help us grow in the faith. These instincts are natural, but the problem is we end up mirroring how class segregation happens in the rest of society. According to Putnam, it’s not that the wealthy and the poor don’t exist near each other; it’s that their lives simply never intersect. Like seeks out like. And those with resources and mobility can find whomever they prefer to be with.If we emphasize the local nature of the church, then we will associate with those within our geographic proximity regardless of background. With this mindset, if we target the upscale subdivision for evangelism, we must also target the trailer park that’s just a mile down the road in the other direction. If we are uniting around Christ and not class, we can unite with our neighbors whether they are “bond or free.” And the more this happens, the more the concerns of the poor become our concerns. Their children become “our children.”Furthermore, if the church focuses on its local context, it will ensure that evangelism and discipleship paradigms arise out of local needs, not social media trends or ministry fads. For example: some churches are finding Sunday school to be extraneous, so they’re shifting the responsibility of discipleship back to parents. On the other hand, in our situation, we’ve found Sunday school to be essential. For some of our children, this will be the only religious education they ever receive. So every Sunday, we are working to ensure that they have at least a rudimentary understanding of the Christian faith.Much of what our church has done has been instinctual, led by the Holy Spirit to fill needs when we see them. Like the time we rallied around a single mom to collect a down payment on a house so she could escape the instability of renting. Or the myriad times the church budget has paid electric and water bills, helping folks keep their self-respect in the process. But I also know that even this isn’t enough. While we work on the social opportunity gap we also want to keep on working on the spiritual opportunity gap in people’s lives.If we are committed to winning our communities for Christ, it will mean taking the good news to folks who are socially alienated from the church. It will require creative thinking and a willingness to do things outside of our comfort zone.

And it will require that even as we pray about boo-boos and rabbits and little brothers, we also pray and work to ensure that all children have the opportunity to know the love of their heavenly Father.

Hannah Anderson is a freelance writer, blogger, and author of Made for More: An Invitation to Live Imago Dei. She lives with her husband and three children in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. You can connect with her at her blog sometimesalight.com, or on Twitter @sometimesalight.

[Photo source]

The US State Department relented and Sister Diana Momeka received a vistor's visa to speak out about religious persecution in the Middle East at a congressional hearing earlier this week.

"Uprooted and forcefully displaced, we have realized that ISIS’s plan is to evacuate the land of Christians and wipe the earth clean of any evidence that we ever existed," she said on Wednesday at a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "This is cultural and human genocide. The only Christians that remain in the Plains of Nineveh are those who are held as hostages."

Momeka said the first attack on her convent in Mosul occurred in 2009 when a bomb exploded there. Then, in the summer of 2014, ISIS invaded the entire Nineveh Plains, a strongly Christian enclave, where the nuns had relocated to Qaraqosh. She said 120,000 people fled the region into Kurdistan and one year later, many refugees still do not have adequate shelter.

But she said Iraqi Christians will not leave permanently. "There are many who say, 'Why don’t the Christians just leave Iraq and move to another country and be done with it?' To this question we would respond, 'Why should we leave our country—what have we done?' "

She called on Congress to support liberating northern Iraq from ISIS; aid in rebuilding of homes, schools, and churches; and assist Iraqi religious groups to resolve their differences through dialogue, not violence.

Another witness testified that in Syria's Duros-Europas area, ISIS has looted an historically signficant Christian house church, which dates to AD 235. The site contains one of the oldest known depictions of Jesus Christ. The area remains under ISIS control.

…..

[Originally posted April 30 as "Iraqi Christian Leader Denied US Visa"]

Religious freedom activists are calling on the US State Department to reverse its decision to deny a visa to an influential Iraqi Christian leader, Sister Diana Momeka, who planned to visit the US this spring to advocate for persecuted Christians in the Middle East.

Today, Johnnie Moore, co-chair of the 21 Martyrs Campaign, and Samuel Rodriquez, president of the NHCLC/CONEL, a large association of Hispanic Christians, issued the call after the organization's conference in Texas this week. Momeka was to be a member of a delegation of Iraqi religious leaders visiting Washington, DC.

“Sister Momeka is a gift to the world and a humanitarian whose work reminded me—when I met her in Iraq—of Mother Teresa,” said Moore, author of Defying ISIS and a key partner with the 21 Martyrs Campaign, created following the beheadings of 21 Coptic Christians in Libya earlier this year. "It is incomprehensible to me that the State Department would not be inviting Momeka on an official visit to the United States, as opposed to barring her from entry.”

Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute was also critical of the decision. In an online commentary, she wrote, “Earlier this week, we learned that every member of an Iraqi delegation of minority groups, including representatives of the Yazidi and Turkmen Shia religious communities, has been granted visas to come for official meetings in Washington—save one.

“The single delegate whose visitor visa was denied happens to be the group’s only Christian from Iraq. Sister Diana Momeka of the Dominican Sisters of Saint Catherine of Siena was informed on Tuesday by the US consulate in Erbil that her non-immigrant-visa application has been rejected.” Shea said the nun told her that her status as a displaced person was the reason she was given for the visa denial.

Chris Seiple, head of the Institute for Global Engagement, had hoped to assist Momeka during her US visit. Seiple posted on Facebook, “In the same week that the State Deptment says it will take the engagement of religious leaders seriously (as announced in its quadrennial review two days ago), it refuses a visa to a persecuted Christian nun who has fled ISIS, Sister Diana.”

Momeka was displaced from her home at the hands of ISIS. Some 50,000 other Christians from the Iraqi city of Qaraqosh were also forced to flee. The State Department typically does not comment publicly on individual visa applications. She has visited the United States before, including a trip to Chicago to deliver a commencement address at the Catholic Theological Union in 2012.

International Mission Board (IMB) trustees approved policy changes this week regarding baseline qualifications for IMB missionaries. There have been various misunderstandings communicated online and in social media about these policies, and these mistaken reports have given us the opportunity to provide necessary clarifications concerning what this policy change does and does not mean.

The driving force behind all these changes is to unify all Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) churches under the umbrella of the Baptist Faith and Message in order to send limitless missionary teams to unreached people and places for the glory of God, and I don’t want that to be misunderstood.

One issue that has particularly drawn attention is the practice of speaking in tongues and the use of a private prayer language. Up until this point, if a person had spoken in tongues or practiced a private prayer language, they were immediately disqualified from appointment as an IMB missionary. IMB trustees voted this week to remove that automatic disqualification.

Yet this was a vote that addressed issues of qualification for potential IMB missionaries in the church, not the practical work of actual IMB missionaries on the field.

That is a critical distinction, for over the course of appointing, training, and supervising missionaries, IMB addresses many significant theological, missiological, ecclesiological and practical issues, including the use of tongues or a private prayer language. Though these issues may not affect our base qualifications, they do affect our everyday work.

IMB’s long-held position remains that these practices cannot be normative in teaching or disruptive in practice. Through careful appointment, training and supervisory processes, IMB ensures that every missionary remains resolutely focused on making disciples and multiplying churches in ways that faithfully represent Southern Baptist theology, missiology, ecclesiology and practice. (See related FAQs and my earlier article.)

Let me reiterate that the purpose of these changes is to more intentionally unite IMB policies with Southern Baptist belief and practice as expressed in the statement of faith upon which over 40,000 Southern Baptist churches have agreed: the Baptist Faith and Message.

Moreover, any changes we make at IMB are not being considered and implemented simply for the sake of change. The reality of today’s lost world leads us to be unified and act with urgency in order to get the gospel to more people and places, all while remaining tightly tethered to Southern Baptist convictions.

As the international missions arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, I am convinced that we cannot settle for anything less than a streamlined approach focused on empowering limitless missionary teams to make disciples and multiply churches among unreached people and places for the glory of God.

I have been very encouraged from the spirit of unity among our trustees to the responses we have received from pastors and entity leaders across the SBC since making these decisions. I hope and pray that in the days ahead, the IMB will exalt Christ, mobilize Christians, equip the church, and facilitate church planting among unreached peoples in order that we might play our part in the eventual accomplishment of the Great Commission.

David Platt is president of the International Mission Board.