Barry E. Fields

Barry Fields recounts to an online skeptic that "there's more proof for the reliability, accuracy and veracity of the Bible than the works of Plato, Herodotus and Aristotle combined."

While nonconformity may have its appeal, Barry Fields envisions "a kind of conformity that looks less like dictionary definitions and more like calloused hands of a carpenter King ... who found His identity not by rebelling against the status quo but by transcending it."

Amid the urban/rural divide as seen in the Nov. 8 election, there's a place for fruitful, far-reaching ministry in country or county seat churches, Barry Fields writes. Of the roughly 50,000 churches and missions in the Southern Baptist Convention, the vast majority are in rural areas, he notes.