We Must Do Better at Our Religious Meetings “Why do you so hate the church?” Shocked, I furrow my eyes and scowl at my friend. “I don’t hate church.” “But you’re always criticizing it in your blog.” This gives me pause. True, much of my writing about church doesn’t celebrate what she does well but […]
God Intended for Us to Take a Day of Rest Each Week The Old Testament talks a lot about the Sabbath. God wants his children to work six days and then rest on the seventh. In fact, he commands that they observe the Sabbath. But lest we think this is an Old Testament thing, God […]
How Engagement and Marriage Worked in the New Testament In Bible times, when a couple became engaged, the groom-to-be with go home and prepare a place for them to live by adding a room to his parents’ house. As soon as he finished the construction, he would go to his fiancée, the marriage ceremony would […]
Make Sure Your Faith Community Focuses on the Right Thing We need to examine the purpose of church. Why do we meet each week? What are our goals when we come together? What should our focus be? Though people will give various answers, the responses fall into two broad categories: ourselves and others. Church Is […]
If Our Beliefs Are Important to Us, We’ll Make Them Part of Every Aspect of Our Life Have you ever met someone out of your normal context and were surprised at what you saw or heard? This is a person who compartmentalizes their faith. They have a work persona, a leisure-time persona, and a family […]
The Emergent Church Seeks to be Biblically Relevant for Postmodern People Ten to fifteen years ago, it seemed that every time I turned around I heard something about the emergent church. I wrote about this in my dissertation, with one long chapter devoted to the topic. My thoughts on the emergent church were greatly influenced […]
Bigger Isn’t Always Better and the Micro Church Proves This In another post we discussed the emergent church. Today we shift the discussion to micro church. Emergent church and micro church, are these alternate labels for the same thing or different? The answer is maybe. The concept of a micro church can go by different […]
Fundamentalist preachers twist what the Bible says and misapply it for their own benefit I was taught to give 10 percent of my money to church. I’ve heard many evangelical preachers assert that their followers had to give 10 percent to the local church. It was a tithe, an obligation. You could, of course, give […]
An Academic Pursuit of Religious Knowledge Can Cause Much Harm When I wrote about the dangers of pursuing a right theology, I noted that God doesn’t want us to know about him. He wants us to know him on a personal level. In our pursuit of knowledge, we seek to categorize our understanding of God. […]
A Church and Its Congregation Shouldn’t Let a Corporate Mentality Infiltrate It’s Thinking In “Why Business Practices Hurt the Church” we discussed how business thinking has improperly affected the big-picture perspectives of church. Yet the business mindset goes deeper than that, negatively influencing church practices and attendee attitudes. Spiritual Outcomes Are Not Quantifiable The business […]