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Jonah Goldberg writes an interesting piece on Avatar, noting that James Cameron’s adventure is a story in which the good guys end up accepting Jesus Christ as Savior…not.  Of course, that would have made the movie truly counter-cultural, but in reality it is insanely boring and predictable in its derision of Western culture and admiration [...]

This past two weekends in Sunday School, we have studied the Passion Week—the final week of our Savior’s earthly ministry. We noted how roundly Jesus condemned Israel and its leaders for being Israel for the sake of Israel. They longed for God to set them free from pagan oppression and bring in the kingdom He [...]

I cannot resist the temptation to comment on a singing sensation sweeping the internet this week.  On the show “Britain’s Got Talent” (a Simon Cowell produced UK version of American Idol), Susan Boyle–a frumpy, middle-aged, unemployed resident of a small village in Scotland–made her singing debut before a hostile audience and three judges, including the [...]

The thesis of Greg Beale’s work, We Become What We Worship: A Biblical Theology of Idolatry, is “we resemble what we revere, either for ruin or restoration.”  Following Beale’s text, yesterday at church we took a hard look at how Jesus builds on the theme of idolatry in the Gospels through his use of Isaiah [...]

In the August/September issue of First Things, editor Joseph Bottum pens an insightful article entitled, “The Death of Protestant America: A Political Theory of the Protestant Mainline“. Besides reading it for Bottum’s excellent prose (of which one of my favorite examples is here), it is interesting to get his take on the spiraling plummet [...]

As we’ve been going through Stott’s book on mission(s) and have learned that it’s best not to bait our evangelistic hook with the lure of social help, the following scenario has come up in conversation.
If you were running a homeless shelter in your town, which provided temporary room, board, and work skills training to men [...]

Last week, we began a series of posts based on John R. W. Stott’s book, “Christian Mission in the Modern World.” Stott’s book has five chapters, each one addressing a key word related to mission(s)—mission, evangelism, dialogue, salvation, conversion. Last week, Jon reviewed the first chapter (mission—part 1, part 2, and part 3), and this [...]

In the wider discussion of the relationship between Gospel proclamation and social action, there are two general schools of thought. In his book, Paradigms in Conflict, missiologist David Hesselgrave calls these two approaches (1) “holism” and (2) “prioritism.”
In an article on the Lausanne Pulse.com website, Evvy Campbell describes holism this way:
Holistic mission can be defined [...]

In Jon’s excellent post yesterday on “mission(s)”, he described how John Stott outlines three ways to relate evangelistic proclamation and social action. (1) Social action as a means to evangelization. (2) Social action as a manifestation of evangelism. And (3) social action as an equal, yet independent partner with evangelism.
And as Jon mentioned yesterday, Stott [...]

This post is a continuation of the review begun yesterday here. On the way to wrestling with a biblical view of “mission” in Christian Mission in the Modern World, John Stott points out two views he believes are mistaken.
The first is to define mission exclusively in terms and actions related to evangelistic proclamation. [...]

For the next few weeks we’ll be periodically reviewing portions of John Stott’s work, Christian Mission in the Modern World (IVP, 1975), which you can download electronically here (cost is $13). We are compelled to wrestle a bit with this text for a few reasons: 1) Champ read the book as a supplement to [...]

This weekend’s reading group will meet tomorrow at Tim Hortons on Fodor Road at 8:30 a.m. We’ll be discussing Tim Keller’s article, “The Centrality of the Gospel.” How would you relate the Gospel to various life issues?
Here’s an excerpt which (by first giving two wrong-headed options) discusses a better way to relate the Gospel to [...]

When my father was a young man, he and his brother-in-law were walking through some trails in the mountains of North Carolina. They weren’t dressed for hiking. My dad was just giving my uncle a tour of the area near where we lived.
When they came to a large creek, my dad simply started to wade [...]

Just a couple of thoughts regarding Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a movie about academia’s censorship of alternative hypotheses to Darwinian evolution in the classroom and elsewhere.
First, what the movie is not: it is not meant to be a thorough explanation of the theory of Intelligent Design (ID), so don’t expect to walk [...]