Honestly, it’s difficult to imagine challenges to the Church’s teachings on sexual ethics could get worse. Amid religious revisionists’ efforts to turn gender into self-expression and marriage into free-for-all groupings, now we face the impact of devalued sex.   The Washington Post ran a fascinating op-ed by Mark Regnerus on September 5 that examines just how... Continue Reading

Questions are a powerful teaching method, especially when teaching a hostile crowd (like unbelievers). Questions stimulate critical thinking. Asking good questions makes the audience hungry to find the answers. If you want to preach like Jesus, ask a lot of questions. Do not reveal the answer immediately. Help your audience use their own brains.  ... Continue Reading

Failure of churches to have a clear purpose. Even the best of churches can only do so many things well. Once a church has no clear and defining purpose, it has no reason to start or discontinue a program or ministry. That issue then leads to the next two reasons.   Many churches have become... Continue Reading

Many of us can imagine what pioneer mission work looks like, but strengthening ongoing church work may be harder to picture. It doesn’t mean encouraging missionaries to hold on to the reins of leadership in a church long after capable local leaders have emerged. That has been done, and the fruit is generally quite poor.... Continue Reading

Puritanism is widely regarded as a post-reformation movement, working out the ideals of the Protestant Reformation, and is the subject of intense scholarly interest because of its significance as a movement of reform in doctrine and practice, and the profound legacy it left on America’s religious, political, and intellectual landscapes, as well as its appropriation... Continue Reading

In a disaster, churches don’t just hold bake sales to raise money or collect clothes to send to victims; faith-based organizations are integral partners in state and federal disaster relief efforts. They have specific roles and a sophisticated communication and coordination network to make sure their efforts don’t overlap or get in each others’ way.... Continue Reading

For example, as reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer, a University of Pennsylvania professor studied 11 churches and one synagogue and concluded that the average economic worth of each to its Philadelphia neighborhood was over $4 million a year. Even more so, the non-financial benefits are priceless, as I was reminded during a recent weekend.  ... Continue Reading

The conclusion I draw is that some people were reading the question as I did as being about justification, while many others were seeing it as merely about salvation. What it makes clear is that a large group of evangelicals gave the wrong answer based on what they thought the question was asking. Unfortunately, it’s impossible... Continue Reading

As evangelicals, we take the Bible as our authority. And when we look at the Bible, we find that, actually, the second most common command is to sing. It wouldn’t come up that often if it weren’t extremely important to God. Yet when Kristyn and I started studying this, we realized we couldn’t find good... Continue Reading

Sadly, abuse can and does happen in homes and churches, places where we intuitively believe we should be able to trust people. Only by embracing the message that “nowhere is safe” can we hope to protect people from abuse. The steps we’ve outlined are about churches’ increasingly becoming places where abuse is confronted and the... Continue Reading