Last Sunday our church gathered and remembered the Lord’s death by observing Communion. Over the past few years I have seen a trend towards making Communion as efficient and quick as possible. We have songs to sing, and sermons to preach and Communion eats up valuable time. Communion is rigid and inflexible; completely the opposite of our modern and mobile church goer. Communion is solemn, and sitting quietly makes the people in our busy culture …
Churches should be contextualized, I agree. But the gospel always challenges context. There must be a healthy balance between embracing and exploding context. A church should never be a church for only one kind of person. The gospel isn’t anti-culture, but neither does it enthrone any single culture. The gospel transforms culture.
It is one thing to begin a church with members from a single culture, but if that church never preaches a gospel that …
Last night I taught at my church’s monthly Equip event. It’s an event that we use to study the Bible and train ourselves for ministry. This means that any topic we teach on has result in training for the ministry. When I was tasked with teaching about the doctrine of the trinity I realized that I had placed that doctrine in the “Good to know, but I can’t do much with it” category.
Shame on …
We have made a bad habit of rushing through the introductions to the epistles. If all of the scriptures are profitable to us, then even the introductions can teach us about God, how he is working, and how we should respond. Take Colossians 1.3 for example:
We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you,
Paul always thanked God when he prayed for the Colossians. Don’t rush past …
In the introduction to his book, Church in the Making, Ben Arment asks a bold question,
How did church planting become such a spiritual crapshoot?
He points out that when asked why their plant is growing most planters respond by saying, “God is just blessing.” Conversely, when asked why their church is dying most planters say, “God is teaching me a lot right now.” His point is that most planters don’t have a good …
Over the last 2 years I have experienced something of a transformation of the heart. The transformation didn’t begin with the following scripture passage, but it is summarized by it:
…O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. 2 Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? 3 Are you