Category: Church
The Hollowness of the Mainline, Now and Then
Douglas J. Brouwer Chasing After Wind: A Pastor’s Life. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022. 238 pp. $22.00 It’s no secret that Western Christianity is in decline. And this is nowhere more evident than in the once venerable churches of the mainline....
Kites
I taught my sons to fly a kite the other day. It was a beautiful Sunday morning and the wind was just right for it. They are old enough to know how a kite should fly but not old enough...
Can I Get a Witness?: A Response to Tim Keller
In his recent essay, Tim Keller has entered his bit in a persistent dialogue regarding how Christians should speak in public. The players in this dialogue, including James Wood, Aaron Renn, and Simon Kennedy, are working to sort out how...
Holographic Spurgeons and AI Sermons
At a fête for one of evangelicalism’s largest online media outfits, a colleague shared how he asked GPT-3, a language AI, what the Bible says about transgenderism. The AI produced a cogent theological explanation with Biblical citations. A senior editor...
The Four Quadrants of Church Life in the Gray Zone
Any pastor of a church over 70 people[1] has to develop some kind of rhythm or strategy with which they encourage their church into greater fruitfulness in Christ. For better or ill, we’ve been calling these things ‘programs’ for some...
The Mega Church Born Again
I arrived in the Thessaloniki airport and passed by the customs office, its door casually propped open, and saw everything I had come to Greece to avoid: a framed reproduction of Warner Sallman’s blonde-haired, blue-eyed American Jesus, testimony to the...
Our Spiritual Malaise
“There are some people [that] tell us that they are tremendously interested in the gospel as a point of view, as a Christian philosophy…Christianity is to them a matter of tremendous interest and they believe and proclaim that if only...
Distrust’s Thicket and the Life of the PCA
In the fall of 1998, I added what was at the time a pertinent, hot off the press book to my college dorm bookshelf alongside classics like Lewis’s Mere Christianity and Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. The book, Francis Beckwith and...
Preventing Destructive Leadership: Some Reflections for Elders
We ought to be aware by now of the danger of destructive leaders. 2020 brought two important books addressing the issue, Chuck DeGroat’s When Narcissism Comes to the Church and Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer’s A Church Called Tov. Russell...
A Ride Worth Leaving: Escaping the Anxiety of the Modern Church
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. —Ecclesiastes 1:9 Imagine a windmill with its blade turning in the breeze. The blade of...