In the last twenty-five years, about 40 million people have stopped attending church. We can’t blame this on COVID. This trend was well underway before COVID ever appeared. If this fact doesn’t wake us up to the reality Christians are facing in the Global West, I don’t know what will. To learn more about this…
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…
A few items of interest from recent weeks: Jeffrey Rickman was kind enough to invite me to join him on the “Plain Spoken” podcast to talk about Wesleyan doctrine, particularly as it applies to the Global Methodist Church. And I really enjoyed this audio-only podcast with Carolyn Moore and Pierce Drake on “The Art of…
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:
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…
The following originally appeared on Facebook and is reproduced here in several different languages with the author’s permission. 1. PEACE- Pray against spirits of division, suspicion, anxiety, panic, and fear that grip our communities. 2. LEADERSHIP- Pray for wisdom, truth, direction, compassion, and strength for all leaders (political, medical, economic, ecclesial, etc) in authority. 3. PROTECTION-…
At Christmas, Christians celebrate something utterly preposterous, yet utterly true: The God of all creation, who brought forth all things from nothing, and by whom all things exist, was born as a human baby. He was born to a poor young woman who lived in a backwater province on the eastern frontier of the Roman…
Last semester I taught a class called Wesleyan Biblical Interpretation. We read a considerable number of Wesley’s writings along with a couple of secondary texts. Rereading these primary and secondary sources led me to ponder anew the vast differences between the way in which Wesley read the Bible and the critical stances that emerged during…
I recently read through Scott J. Jones’s excellent book, John Wesley’s Conception and Use of Scripture (Kingswood, 1995). I’d read parts of it before, but I’d never made my way through it cover to cover. It’s a very informative work. I’d recommend it to anyone interested in Wesley and Scripture. Especially since the emergence of…
This is a sermon I delivered at Sugar Land First UMC on Trinity Sunday, June 16, 2019. Many thanks to Rev. Martin Nicholas for the invitation. A long time ago I taught in a community college. One of the courses I taught was Major World Religions. One day I was giving a final exam–back in days…