God’s Extraordinary Work and Our Ordinary Faithfulness
The balance that healthy churches must embrace: faith in God to do the extraordinary and our resolve to keep doing the ordinary
Are you and your church committed to the basics: to prayer, proclamation, and being a practicing Christian community? If we will make that our aim and keep doing it year after year, who knows how big the flame will be when God decides to light a match and lay it at the kindling of our... Continue Reading
Gresham Machen, Friend to Catholics
“The Church of Rome may represent a perversion of the Christian religion; but naturalistic liberalism is not Christianity at all.”
“Spiritually, he had to make do too — reading his English Bible rather than in Greek, which brought home some things with a freshness; worshipping with Roman Catholics. Of one sermon he says ‘It was far, far better than what we got from the Protestant liberals’. In conversation afterwards, he could not agree with the... Continue Reading
Watching Taboos Topple
“Taboo,” is “a ban or inhibition resulting from social custom or emotional aversion.”
But as I read the above definition of “taboo,” I’m thinking that it can be a good thing that we have taboos. I say this as a person living in 2013 who is watching old taboos topple all around me. It used to be taboo for men to sleep with men. That’s not taboo anymore... Continue Reading
Miracle Baby Plucked Alive From a Toilet Pipe after Being Flushed Away By the Parents Who Didn’t Want Him
It ended with the astonishing sight of a two-day-old, 5lb boy being cut free after apparently being flushed down a lavatory by his mother
In scenes captured on video and posted online, firemen desperately sawed away at the four-inch-wide pipe just below a ceiling in which the boy was trapped. The rescuers then rushed the section of pipe to a hospital, where firemen and doctors alternately used pliers and saws to take it apart. It began when perplexed... Continue Reading
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Paul saw the problem with culture not with the cross; for many in the modern church culture sets the agenda to which the church must conform or die
And that is ultimately the saddest aspect of the Andy Stanleys of this world. It is not their patronizing attitude to others. It is not their arrogant assumption that they represent the culture or that they have the right to tell the rest of us how we should think…Rather, it is the fact that what... Continue Reading
Putting Asunder What God Joined: The Divorce Dilemma
Does a consensus on divorce exist within the PCA? If so, what is it?
What I thought was a consensus when I graduated from seminary, what guided my pastoral practice, and what I thought the PCA intended to affirm as it came into existence seems not view of conservative Presbyterians whom I respect and whose views I am obligated to consider. I have seen the definition of sexual sin... Continue Reading
How My Mother’s Fanatical Views Tore Us Apart
Rebecca Walker’s mother was the feminist author of 'The Color Purple' - who thought motherhood a form of servitude, is now proud to be a mother herself
It reminds me of just how blessed I am. The truth is that I very nearly missed out on becoming a mother – thanks to being brought up by a rabid feminist who thought motherhood was about the worst thing that could happen to a woman. You see, my mum taught me that children enslave... Continue Reading
Union of the UPCNA & PCUSA – May 28, 1958
On May 28, 1958 the United Presbyterians Church of North America united with the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America in Pittsburgh, Penn.
It was almost to the day of this union in 1958 that two Scotch-Irish Presbyterians joined together in 1858 to make up the United Presbyterian Church of North America. Those two bodies which made up that union were the Seceders or Associate Presbyterians and the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church. They had in the old country of Scotland left... Continue Reading
Scouting For Answers Despite the Vote
Putting the Boy Scout’s vote in the larger perspective of God’s Kingdom
The bigger problem with this vote isn’t so much the perceived threat of openly-gay boys participating equally in Scouting, but the apparent lack of context regarding the appropriateness of sexuality of any kind receiving this much attention in Scouting. How involved are the Scouts in their young membership’s sexual development and society’s moral reality of... Continue Reading
Creation and Cosmology in the Early Church
The early church fathers and apologists spent much time debating and debunking the prevalent pagan cosmologies of their day
Generally speaking, Christians in the early church defended a biblical view of creation against pagan views – and this is something Christians are still doing and need to keep doing today. Even though people suppress the truth and hate it, our goal should be to stand on biblical, creational truth with our forefathers. The... Continue Reading