Tag: Church
“What do you do?”“I am a pastor.”Onboard an airplane or waiting in line at the local coffee shop the response is met with little fan-fair. The profession simply does not have the same cache or intrigue as say…“I am a doctor” or “I am a writer.”We pastors find ourselves in a professional culture. It is […]
In light of “The Future of Protestantism” and other discussions surrounding ecumenicism and the visible unity of the church I’d like to ask a few questions and take a stab at a few suggestions (for the sake of conversation): Was it Christ’s intent, from the beginning to have one monolithic visible institution we call the […]
According to my previous post, my developing conviction about young adults and the church is that the church is not presenting youth with a compelling vision for the Christian life. In other words, the church isn’t failing because a lack of any discrete “young adult ministry,” its failure is more systemic than anything else. Leaving […]
I had an extended conversation today regarding the ever-troubling topic of young adults and the apparent dissonance between the church and the cliff its young adults seem to walk off annually. This conversation seems to have consumed large parts of my ministry in the church, beginning as a fresh 19 year old intern hearing the […]
The 1973 science fiction film Soylent Green depicts a chilling dystopian future in which humans, amongst other things, consume a product called soylent green. This small green wafer marketed as a “high energy” product is actually the processed remains of humans. Humans consuming other humans as what we might call “human resources.” It has found […]
“Whatever else anything is it ought to begin by being personal” –Meg Ryan You’ve Got Mail Though evangelicals have been engrained with the belief that Christianity isn’t a religion but rather a relationship we seem to have lost our bearings. I would certainly not be the first to notice the consumerist tendencies within American evangelical […]
Suffer me a brief history lesson. North American evangelicalism can be traced through three waves of revivalist development. Wave 1: Jonathan Edwards + George Whitefield + the Tennent Bros – mid-eighteenth century. This Calvinistic revival laid the groundwork for the other waves to come, perhaps most convincingly through the preaching of George Whitefield. Whitefield’s remarkable charisma, […]
The term evangelical is about as slippery as a wet bar of soap in a hot shower.Try to define an evangelical… I dare you. The moment you do some self-identified evangelical will invariably take offense at the boundary you drew which excluded them (ahh… we are such an inclusive bunch aren’t we?).The necessary consequent of […]