by John Baker | Jun 23, 2009 | Opinion
The recent LG U.S. National Texting Championship in New York required contestants to send a text in 60 seconds while running on a treadmill, translate text-message abbreviations and text the alphabet while blindfolded.A 14-year-old Georgia girl, the youngest in the...
by John Baker | Feb 20, 2009 | Opinion
I’m pastor of the First Baptist Church of Columbia, a predominantly white, middle-class congregation in a college town in Missouri. We haven’t always been so white throughout our 185 years of continual ministry. We had a healthy percentage of black members in the...
by John Baker | Aug 13, 2008 | Opinion
I just made my eighth trip to Georgia in June to celebrate the wedding of Malkhaz Songulashvili, archbishop of the Evangelical Baptist Church of Georgia, and his beloved Ala Kavtaradze. I’ve gone to Georgia for nearly 10 years, and the First Baptist Church of...
by John Baker | Apr 6, 2006 | Opinion
Congregation Beth Shalom in Columbia, Mo., were renting space for their synagogue from the Hillel Center, the Jewish student ministry organization at the University of Missouri. The synagogue had grown in number, along with the size of our fair city, and they were out...
by John Baker | Dec 27, 2005 | Opinion
Our church has long sought to preach the gospel and put it into practice locally and around the world. Putting it into practice, which is the core of Christian ethics, has always been the harder part. We were looking for an overarching umbrella—or missional...
