The coming year promises to test our understanding of goodness. Followers of Christ—evangelical or otherwise—will not have to wait to practice goodness in this world. We will have the opportunity to do the honorable thing even before the end of this editorial.

We are smart people. We are sophisticated people. We’ve made so much progress. And we still can’t save ourselves. In answer to our clamoring for a savior, a child is born to us who is Christ the Lord.

Who’s responsible for the impression people have of your church? Is it visitors and guests who are responsible for what they think about you? Or is it the membership of the church who is responsible? An experience from everyday life provides an object lesson in taking responsibility.

In a Dec. 27 special edition on child sexual abuse, the Baptist Standard hopes to open the door to healing and restoration for victims and survivors and to help individuals, families and churches to become safer for the most vulnerable among us.

Life is like a flag at half-staff. Half-staff is a place of mourning, not a place of rest. From half-staff, the flag can go either up or down. Up is triumph. Down is a place of honor after a day well-served. Up is where we all want to be. Down at least means we’re tucked away safely out of the weather. Isn’t life like that?

If you can read this, be thankful. Someone taught you to read, which took time and patience. Now you can get ahead in life because you can read. Others are staying behind or falling behind because they can’t. But you can change that.

“There’s a lot of lessons to learn here, not just that the Left and the Right can still agree on some things, but also this: Americans can forgive one another,” Dan Crenshaw said.

My experience as a pastor and now as a budding steward of the Baptist Standard Publishing Company tells me we do not want an impartial media—or pastorate. We may like the idea of an impartial media, but our behavior says otherwise.

Of all the criteria available for choosing a political candidate, what factors determine the person for whom you will vote?

It’s a longstanding tradition among churchgoers to sit in the same place in the sanctuary Sunday after Sunday. If attending church services in an old enough building, then that place is a specific spot on a specific pew. Let’s talk about that.

I pray we will become so gripped by God’s righteous vocation that we cannot help but give up our self-interest in order to live as Christ in this life, opposing the forces of this world in the name of Christ so all may know the joy and life of eternity.

My concern is not with speaking truth to power—if that actually is what people like Jeffress and Graham are doing. My concern is with using worldly terms—the political designators “conservative” and “progressive”—to define who is and who is not a Christian.