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.

Maturity is not becoming stronger and stronger, more and more competent. Christian growth is marked by a growing realization of just how weak and incompetent we are, and how strong and competent Jesus is on our behalf. Spiritual maturity is not our growing independence. Rather, it's our growing dependence on Christ. Remember, the apostle Paul referred to himself as the "least of all the saints" (Eph. 3:8) and the "chief of sinners" (1 Tim. 1:15), and this was at the end of his life!

Many social conservatives warned during the GOP primary that Romney would struggle to spark evangelical enthusiasm. Fewer conservative Christians would volunteer to canvass neighborhoods, donate money or plan rallies, they said.

So YECA is essentially lobbying young evangelicals to support President Obama, though even he, having mostly remained silent about the climate over the last 4 years, is unlikely to resurrect it as a major theme in the future. The YECA website celebrates that Obama has “finally” mentioned global warming, in a recent Rolling Stone interview.

The BOP claims that allowing ministers to opt out on theological grounds would represent a “dramatic change in the fundamental polity of the denomination” and claims it would “compromise and jeopardize the theological foundation of the community nature of the benefits plan.”

It takes an intentional commitment to abandon fads and gimmicks, to hold fast to the Bible in both content and methodology.  And it takes a willingness to do the painstaking work of patient contextualization, continually discerning the fine line between inspired innovations and unbiblical shortcuts. In the previous three posts (here, here and here) I have been... Continue Reading