"For example, 'John the Baptist' was really like 'John the Dunker,'" Hoffman said. John was doing something new by submerging people in water to cleanse them of their sins, but that is lost on people 2,000 years later, Hoffman said. Today, people hearing John's title might think it refers to a Baptist denomination rather than his then-strange behavior.

In a new prayer letter Billy Graham writes: "My heart aches for America and its deceived people. The wonderful news is that our Lord is a God of mercy, and He responds to repentance."

The words “freedom of belief” do not appear in the First Amendment. Nor do the words “freedom of worship.” Instead, the Bill of Rights guarantees Americans something that its authors called “the free exercise” of religion.

Despite our long-standing ties to the Southern Baptist Convention, Calvary has for some time been at odds with many of the policies and public positions of the SBC. There have been many specific issues, like a rejection of the ordination of women, for example, over which we disagreed. But increasingly these differences became more foundational.

Twenty-five years ago, a rally in Washington, D.C., for Soviet Jews drew a quarter of a million participants from all sections of the Jewish community. Given that a significant proportion of this country's 250 million Christians are politically engaged, it isn't far-fetched to believe that a similar initiative on behalf of persecuted Christians could attract a crowd of more than one million.

As I read Thabiti’s book there was something that I was feeling that I couldn’t immediately put words to, and then it hit me. Thabiti, a black man himself, writes of the black church and culture as if he was a visitor to a land he’d never been to before. Granted his work is historical by nature, but it comes across as if it’s written by an outsider.

Pride is the single most destructive force on Earth. It blinds us, isolates us, and calcifies us. Jesus died for messed up, broken, selfish, incomplete people. Me, you, everybody. No exceptions.

Atheism, he suggests, fails in providing real community, education, and perspective. It does not foster kindness or tenderness. It produces pessimism and fails to create a true appreciation of art, architecture, and important institutions

And while in the pietist perspective the meaning of the material aspects of creation is variously interpreted—ranging from a useful backdrop to redemption to an obstacle to it—it remains universally the case that these material aspects have no fundamental role in God’s larger redemptive purposes. That this is so may be seen in several widespread expressions of pietism. First, we see it in pietistic preaching, which fails to positively address larger social or material concerns.

But for the message to be compelling, it must also be clear. Their challenge is in communicating an identity rooted not in some watered-down Christianity that mimics social progressivism, but rather a holistic, historic, and even uncomfortable Gospel that keeps the redemptive work of Jesus radically at the center.