One of the pieces of advice that I received from a seasoned pastor when I was first beginning ministry was, “Don’t befriend the people in your church. They will most certainly hurt you.” I assumed his words were the result…
Before I had my own email address (remember the good old days?), I warned in one of my Windows on the World that the internet would make pornography pervasive. Now we are living a depraved new world, in which sexually…
Without in any way wishing to take away from the ongoing conversation about the dire need for the church in North America to focus on attaining unity among ethnic diversity by means of the Gospel, I have long felt the…
Scott Manetsch, Calvin’s Company of Pastors, Oxford University Press, 2013. 428 pp. HB: $75 PB: $30 Of all the books that I have read in preparation for ministry none have been able to claim the title of personal favorite, until…
I see that my friends over at Mortification of Spin are taking a hiatus from having a go at conferences and big tent para-church ministries for the next week but thankfully continuing their obsession with critiquing complementarians. If you know of an…
I have been following the concerns raised over at the Mortification of Spin with respect to imbalances in the practice and teaching of biblical complementarianism (I think particularly of some of Aimee Byrd’s posts – here and here). I have long…
One of the most important things we will do at Second Presbyterian Church is disciple our children to a living, personal faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. We live in a society that assumes that when children grow up they…
God’s people need to be prayed for. They need to led in prayer. They need to be taught how to pray. We all believe that prayer is important. Nevertheless, working our convictions about prayer into our practice of ministry is…
Karl Marx didn’t write all that much about religion, but what little he did was radical, programmatic, and rather clever. Here is almost his entire commentary on the meaning of religion as a cultural phenomenon: “religion is the sigh of…
Griffith John was a contemporary of Hudson Taylor in China. One of theses two men is well known all over the globe–and has been an inspiration to the Christian church ever since–while the other has been all but forgotten. Griffith was brought…
