Category: Church
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Let me tell you the story of a church. Not a megachurch, but not small either. Across two services on a given Sunday, 400-600 folks in the pews. Nothing fancy about the church. You’ve never heard of it. But a...
Vocational Singleness is a Gospel Cornerstone
Having begun the work of bringing his kingdom on earth, Christ promised to redeem all of creation. He promised fullness of life to those who would follow him and blessing to their neighbors. Yet many believers offer timid testimonies about...
My AI Spiritual Director
After years working as a doctor in a hospital, a friend shared the most frustrating part of her job: patients whose online, amateur medical research weighs more heavily in their decision making than her professional opinion. She ended with a...
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...