First Place 4 Health is a Christian weight-loss program that began as a ministry at Houston’s First Baptist Church and now has groups in 12,000 congregations nationwide. The website has a search engine that allows a state-by-state search of existing groups and meetings. Vicki Heath is national director.

Bill McKinney was president of the Pacific School of Religion at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif. for fourteen years before he retired in 2010. He is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and a religion sociologist who is an expert on American Protestantism.

Faith and Fitness is an online lifestyle magazine that focuses on Christianity and fitness. Brad Bloom is publisher.

Church Health Center was founded by a United Methodist doctor seeking to fulfill the Christian obligation to care for the poor by providing health care. Among its programs is On the Move in Congregations, a six-week program of Scripture, meditations and health tips designed for individual congregations to use to improve their health and fitness. The communications […]

ChurchFitness.com helps churches establish and build fitness ministries. It provides equipment and training programs.

John L. Jackson Jr. is the Richard Perry University Professor of Communication, Africana Studies and Anthropology in the Standing Faculty of the Annenberg School for Communication and the Standing Faculty of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. He has researched the beliefs and practices of Black Hebrews.

Read a Sept. 17, 2005, New York Times article about the spread of Christian and Jewish yoga.

Read an October 1989 letter to the bishops of the Catholic Church on the subject of Christian meditation written by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. In it, Ratzinger addresses yoga.

Read an article about the tensions between secular sports clubs and fitness centers that must pay taxes and their church counterparts (and sometimes competitors) that are tax-exempt.