It’s 12 am and you are preparing a sermon for tomorrow. It’s 4pm and you are preparing for community group that will take place in your living room in a few hours. You have reached an impasse. You could take the easy route and give that nicely packaged sermon or group discussion that you have memorized. You could also take the easy path and deliver that spiel that you know sounds nice, but you know...
This past week I had the opportunity to experience Hume Lake as a counselor. With nervous excitement, I made the almost 5 hour trip on a bus full of ecstatic kids aging from 4th grade to high school. I would be responsible for 11 high school guys who’s spiritual maturity ranged from agnostic to doubting christian. Some of them had grown up in church and had not yet made their faith their own, while others...
I became what some might call a Calvinist my junior year in High school. Going to a Dutch Reformed private school where I took a “Reformed Perspectives” class certainly aided this process. I had resisted of course. Coming from a Non-denominational Bible church, I had a gut reaction against such notions of predestination and all that depravity and sovereignty talk. However, the day came when my heart was changed and I suddenly found myself agreeing...
Now that school is out for summer (cue Alice Cooper) I’m back home working for my church as a youth ministry intern. As we began to plan for the summer and what we should teach on I recommended books like Colossians and Philippians. You know, something short and sweet that would be really encouraging. So when my youth pastor called me and told me we were going to be teaching through James this summer, I...
Fullerton, CA The downtown area of this small Los Angeles suburb is home to over a dozen bars ranging from Mexican cantinas, Irish pubs and average American bars. Every Friday and Saturday evening, the streets swell with college students, business executives, the poor, the rich, and everyone in between. These bars are filled with these people who are much more interested in just crazy cocktails, boozy beverages, or getting hammered drunk. No, these people in these...
Growing up my hometown was, and still is, very conservative. Most everyone identifies as a Christian and a Republican, and to me those two terms were nearly synonymous. I was taught that America was the greatest nation on the planet and that we were in fact a Christian nation, to suggest anything different would be tantamount to suggesting that bacon was not delicious, and only crazy people and liberals would suggest something like that. The...
Dear whoever you are church member, This past week you probably felt somewhat confused and hurt when I told you in no uncertain terms that I would not be able to commit to praying for you after you shared your struggles with me. Now, I did pray with you after we talked about your situation and that seemed to encourage you but I didn’t close our conversation by saying, “I’ll be praying for you this...
A few weeks ago my wife alerted me to the plight of Brittany Maynard. As a millennial who has a fairly strong disdain for technology and news media, I was proud that it took so long to discover the cultural flashpoint that this woman’s life had become. My wife further pointed me to a blog written by a Christian woman named Kara Tippetts. It was posted to the blog A Holy Experience. My wife was...
Horsley, Richard and Tom Thatcher John, Jesus, and the Renewal of Israel. Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 2013. 207 pages. Paperback. $20.00. In John, Jesus, and the Renewal of Israel, Thatcher and Horsley argue for a fresh reading of John’s Gospel. They contend that John presented Jesus as one whose ministry enacted Israel’s renewal in opposition to the Judean establishment and their Roman supporters. The larger goal of their work is to establish John as a valid source for Historical...
By now, most of us have been thoroughly inundated—thanks, largely in part, to ESPN’s wash-rinse-repeat approach of showing the elevator video—with coverage of the NFL’s domestic violence problem specifically as it relates to Ray Rice. The reaction against Rice was swift, virtually unanimous and severe. Understandably so. The reaction against the NFL could aptly be described with the same aforementioned adjectives. Yet when I thought about how people responded to the NFL, something seemed so off....
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