So, I’m on twitter now. My life just needed more social commentary, and my more-conservative-than-not Facebook news feed just wasn’t cutting it. Fortunately, Twitter remains the cool social enclave for many of the more-left-than-central folks, which has allowed me to follow some very interesting thinkers. It has been fascinating to watch debates and dialogues evolve around various issues pertaining to politics and religion. Occasionally, there are pictures of puppies, and I am most thankful for...
Whelp, I guess this is now a travel blog. For the holidays, my wife and I traveled to Istanbul to spend time with my family. Neither of us had been to Turkey before, so every prior conception of this place was about to be challenged. I kept joking that my only frame of reference was the iconic picture of the Hagia Sophia in the afternoon, and thus, Istanbul was dusty, arid, and perpetually bathed in...
I just came back from a week-long missions vision trip in the Philippines. It was a whirlwind of a trip, traveling to a new place everyday, but it was a great time of encouragement and eating, meeting and worshipping with other believers from different places. While the Philippines has recently been in the news, due to the terrorist activity in the southern Philippines, we went to the northern part of the Philippines, which is relatively safe. My...
In light of everything that is happening today in our nation regarding area of immigration, I wanted to write about how as Christians, we need to respond to these issues and see what God’s heart looks like towards the foreigner and sojourner. Instead of just being ethnocentric as Americans, and seeing America First!, our core identity is rooted in our identity in Christ, far more than our national identity. We are part of God’s family,...
Tabbernee, William, ed. Early Christianity in Contexts: An Exploration Across Cultures and Continents Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2014. 475 pages + 127 pages bibliography and indices. Hardcover. Retail: $42.99. In Early Christianity in Contexts, editor William Tabbernee provides an overview of early Christian history that focuses on the various locations and cultural contexts within which Christianity developed. The book, which is the cumulative product of eighteen contributors, brings contextual particularity to the study of...
The global missions landscape is far different today than it was fifty years ago. Transportation has become steadily more efficient and cheaper over the past five decades which has set up off a migration bloom all across the globe. This migration bloom has led to large-scale movement of the world’s unreached people groups (UPG’s) into countries with large evangelical populations. While we bemoan the difficulty of gaining access to some of these peoples, our eyes...
During my spring break I was able to go on a trip to India with my officemate Chris Brewer and his dad Gary. We began our trip in Imphal, which is the capital of the state of Manipur in the northeast (we weren’t far from the border of Burma). When we arrived it happened to be the start of the nation-wide color festival Holi so we saw people all over town with various smatterings of...
A few weeks ago my wife and I were officially appointed as missionaries for a sending agency based out of Orlando Florida. For many, being accepted by a mission agency represents an important milestone on the path to the mission field. In our case, this moment was exciting but it was not the most significant event on the path to the mission field. That designation belongs to my home church in Parker Colorado, where I...
Almost two years ago, I married a citizen of the Russian Federation; a daughter of Lenin’s dream for the Russian people—the Soviet Union. Upon learning that I would be living in Russia for an extended period, my knee-jerk reaction was to find an English speaking, Reformed congregation that resembled mine in the states. To be sure, several Protestant churches have reestablished a presence in Russia (many are Lutheran, after the traditions of their Scandinavian neighbors,...
During April 2009, Presbyterian pastor Tullian Tchividjian released a book entitled Unfashionable. The book was met with strong acclaim from a number of prominent Christians including J.I. Packer, Don Carson, Ravi Zacharias and surprisingly, Michael Horton. Perhaps the books greatest endorsement came from the pen of Tim Keller who wrote the book’s forward. Yet somewhere in the blogosphere, a wise man by the name of Tim Challies had a different take. At one point Tchividijian’s...
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