A Great New Study for Your Church

My friend Shane Stanford has written a new book called Journeywise: Redeeming the Broken and Winding Roads we Travel. It’s a study of the Beatitudes and their meaning for the Christian life. Here’s part of the description taken from the website: To be JourneyWise is to discover and live out the simple yet powerful truths…

Hard Questions and Protestant Churches: We Can Do Better

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…

On Sin in the Church

The recent Roman Catholic sexual abuse scandal brings to mind a question I have heard many people ask over the years: If Christians believe what they claim to believe, why do all of these scandals keep taking place? The Church and Moral Failings To be perfectly clear, Roman Catholics certainly aren’t the only Christians who…

The Real Lives of Real Pastors

A recent CNN headline proclaims: This televangelist is asking his followers to buy him a $54 million private jet The televangelist in question is Jesse Duplantis, leader of Jesse Duplantis Ministries out of Louisiana. He apparently owns three other jets as well. (It’s hard to get by with just one, after all.) In response, my…

Christians as Peculiar People

You’ve probably seen the much-ballyhooed PRRI survey, a segment of which indicates that white evangelical Christians feel that Christians are more discriminated against than Muslims in the United States. (If you haven’t, you have to scroll down for a while to get to this table.) Other groups interviewed for the survey disagree. I was intrigued by…

The Return of the Local Option

A plan has recently emerged to preserve the unity of the UMC. I encourage you to read it carefully and prayerfully. The proposal begins by diagnosing a very serious problem in our denomination: we have reached an impasse on matters related to “self-avowed, practicing homosexual” people. The proposal then offers a potential solution which I…

Baseball and the Body of Christ

Leo Durocher once wrote, “Baseball is like church. Many attend, few understand.” I would add that baseball, like church, involves a community that you have to be a part of in order to gain understanding. To appreciate the beauty of the game of baseball, you have to learn to sit with it. You have to…