One of the challenges facing the Western church is that the percentage of young people with no faith (“nones”) is growing. In fact, it may be as high as 30% in the United States. For a variety of reasons, the trend is that fewer members of younger generations find organized religion compelling, and Christianity in…
A few months ago I had the privilege of preaching and teaching at Springdale First UMC. While I was there, I sat down with the Rev. Dr. Andrew Thompson to talk about the Holy Spirit, the charismatic movement, and the work that God is doing in the global church today. Andrew is a good friend,…
Protestants aren’t very good at dealing with difficult social/ethical issues. Roman Catholics, while they have their own problems, are much better at this. Why? They have an extensive body of theological and ethical teaching produced for the church and adopted by the church. In my own Methodist world, we have nothing really like this. We…
I’ve been trying to write an essay on Christian unity for an ecumenical volume on this topic. I’m supposed to write from my own Methodist perspective. Since I’m a Protestant, I’ve had to think about unity apart from specific ecclesiastical communions (i.e., denominations). Part of what I’ve been kicking around in my head is the…
Rev. Dennis Sanders was kind enough to invite me onto his podcast recently to talk about liberalism. The invitation came as a result of a piece I wrote in Firebrand called “On Liberalisms (They just don’t make ’em like they used to).” I wrote this piece because I’m increasingly concerned about the decline of public…
My sermon for Easter Sunday, 2022
I see this more and more often. Faith is no longer something we share among a community of believers, but a possession in the hands of an individual who will shape it to his or her liking. Perhaps this is the religious outworking of “liquid modernity,” a culture in which structures change so quickly that…
Bill Arnold, Maxie Dunnam, and I sit down for a conversation about the significance of Christian belief.
Recently I had the privilege of speaking with Odell Horne of the North Georgia Annual Conference and Dr. Daniel Castelo of Duke Divinity School on the nature of the God we worship as Christians. The conversation was a program for the United Methodist Men in that conference. Both of these conversation partners have very keen…
As 2020 came to a close, I thought to myself, “I’ll be glad to get past this year.” Much of the world had been in lockdown. COVID-19 was in full force. People were dying, especially the elderly and immuno-compromised. We had no vaccine. Our top medical experts seemed unclear about the nature of this virus…
This year for the first time I assigned the Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible (Zondervan, 2019, eds. Craig S. Keener and John H. Walton) for my New Testament class. I’ve been extremely pleased with it, and I even use it for my devotional reading at home. Why do I like it so much? The answer is…
For those of you who knew, loved, and/or admired Billy Abraham, here is a video tribute that was shown at the reception after his funeral:
In October of this year I had the privilege of traveling to Nairobi, Kenya, with a small group from Springdale First UMC (Springdale, Arkansas) and Stillwater UMC (Dayton, Ohio). Our work was with the Huruma Tent of Prayer in Mathare, the third largest slum in Africa. The focus of the trip was the provision of…
I was very concerned reading an article on The Upheaval by N. S. Lyons called “There Is No Liberal West.” Lyons holds that no Western country is any longer committed to principles of liberalism. He summarizes these principles as follows: that individuals possess universal and inalienable natural rights; that “liberty of conscience is every man’s…
Justus Hunter and I just read through the Apostolic Fathers with our Doctor of Ministry students. While reading, I was struck with the prevalence of “two ways” theology in these writings. It is most plainly stated in the opening line of the Diadache: “There are two ways: one of life and one of death. And…
