Tag: Ministry
Social justice has truly become the name of the game. Young evangelicals want to be about something, want to do something, want to make a difference…Of course, there are many good things about this activist spirit. The resurgence of care for the poor, broken and marginalized is certainly a virtue. In part, this movement toward action is a […]
As a a pastor I regularly interact with people in desperate situations, even now I agonize over a homeless family with two small children who have no where to go. They come with their stories of impossibility, tragedy, and poverty and on a shoe-string of hope ask for help. Sometimes we can help, sometimes there […]
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 […]
I suppose I have been trying to tackle some of the evangelical jargon that has actually enslaved us to an anemic spirituality (most recently “it’s not a religion, it’s a relationship”). Being raised in and inculcated with these phrases I only know them as an insider. I didn’t always think these phrases were odd except […]
“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 […]