There are two common dangers in pastoral ministry and Paul is alert to both of them. They are what we might call over-pastoring and under-pastoring. Over-pastoring is what happens when a leader or leaders exercise too much control in the…
Let’s just face the facts. Today, many Christians do not think attending church is that important. In the past, Christians believed that actively being a part of a church body was absolutely necessary to one’s faith. There used to be…
In his book, We Learn Nothing: Essays and Cartoons, political cartoonist and New York Times Op-ed writer Tim Kreider describes the modern epidemic that he calls “outrage porn”: So many letters to the editor and comments on the Internet have…
Embodied Desires A common “churchy” response to this cultural situation runs along basically Platonic lines: to quell the raging passion of sexuality that courses its way through culture, our bodies and passions need to be disciplined by our “higher” parts—we…
Enjoying the Growing Pains I can’t sleep. My wife and I are expecting our third child. These two things aren’t related. Better said, they are not causally related. Our oldest is two and a half and our newly minted “middle…
This is how we know that we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence: If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. Dear friends,…