Sunday I preached a sermon on the dangers of productivity while also rolling out a new church management platform that will likely make us more…productive. And while increased productivity was not th...  Read More

Back in 2022 I wrote a post reflecting on Malcolm Gladwell’s book Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know Abou the People We Don’t Know. You can read that post here. Gladwell’s basic point is that ...  Read More

Christians are called to forgive. I call it “reactive grace.” It’s “reactive” in the sense that we offer grace in response or reaction to someone doing something to hurt or offend us. But grace also h...  Read More

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what Patrick Deneen calls the “ideology of progress.”[1] Deneen is a political scientist and in his exert opinion, “progress” is the fundamental assumption or goa...  Read More

When it comes to feedback, I mostly hear positive things. That’s not because there isn’t negative feedback out there. I’m sure there is. It’s just that most people don’t share their feedback when it’s...  Read More

I went to Cedar Point last week. Growing up in Northwest, Ohio, I’ve been to Cedar Point hundreds of times. I love the place. I love almost everything about it. I could ride roller coasters all day. ...  Read More

What troubles me most about Bible readers is when they don’t question content they clearly should. People raised in certain types of Christian subcultures often express feeling badly when they questio...  Read More

I acknowledge that my teaching and preaching often has a polemical edge to it. So does my writing. In fact, I chose to publish my first book directly through Amazon because while several conventional ...  Read More

I returned to the office today after a two-week vacation. Beyond just getting to spend quality time with friends and family and some healthy rest from work, this time of year, and specifically the cha...  Read More

Following his resurrection, Jesus asked a couple of his disciples, “Wasn’t it clearly predicted that the Messiah would have to suffer all these things before entering his glory?”[1] The question sound...  Read More

In my pastoral experience, people struggle with the topic of prophecy. Either they struggle to accept that earlier biblical writers were precisely predicting future events (which I think they are righ...  Read More

Today is the first post in a little three-part series on a topic that’s been coming up lately in my life different ways in: prophecy. Traditionally—that is, how people in the Old Testament understood...  Read More