Many Christians have been taught to believe that there is a tension at the heart of God between mercy and justice. They’re told that God is loving, slow to anger, willing and able to forgive. But the...  Read More

I’m leading a formation group right now called “Reading the Bible Like Jesus,” a workshop adaptation of my book, All the Way Down: Rebuilding Christianity from the Rubble of Evangelicalism, while also...  Read More

We’re all prone to idolatry, whether what I call Idolatry #1—the worship as God of something that is clearly not God—or what I call Idolatry#2—the worship of the right God in the wrong ways. But why?...  Read More

I’d never heard the word quindecinnial before I just looked it up. It’s the word for a 15-year anniversary. Today marks 15 years since I began at the church. When I started, my oldest daughter was 2....  Read More

The thesis of my Sunday sermon this week was “conscious contemplation of God’s love leads to conscious participation in God’s life.” Many people make the mistake (often because they were mistaught, j...  Read More

Leviticus is one of those books where I think the average Bible reader with his uncritically held assumption that everything the Bible says is equally true and authoritative will make some mistakes th...  Read More

While reading in the book of Exodus the other day I was struck by this particular law: 10 “If a man who has married a slave wife takes another wife for himself, he must not neglect the rights of the ...  Read More

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