Meanwhile, challenges to gay policies have become increasingly public and vehement in recent months.  Tuesday night, United Methodist clergy said they will officiate at same-sex weddings on Schaefer’s behalf. Schaefer, pastor of Zion United Methodist Church of Iona in Lebanon, Pa., was found guilty on two charges for presiding at his son’s 2007 wedding to another... Continue Reading

“God will always be a part of the U.S. Military even when you are gone to meet him face to face,” the foundation quoted the email as saying in a statement. “I am on staff at USAFA and will talk about Jesus Christ my Lord and savior to everyone that I work with.”   An... Continue Reading

As a therapist who works with children, it makes perfect sense to me that French children don’t need medications to control their behavior because they learn self-control early in their lives. The children grow up in families in which the rules are well-understood, and a clear family hierarchy is firmly in place. In French families,... Continue Reading

The headmistress of Littleton Green Community School, in Huntington, Staffordshire, wrote to parents telling them about the school trip to the Explore Islam workshop at Staffordshire University next week. They were told the Years Four and Six children would be looking at religious artefacts on their visit – and threatened with being labelled as racists... Continue Reading

The law’s challengers had submitted an emergency application to the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the law as litigation continues. Justice Antonin Scalia handles emergency applications from Texas, but likely due to the controversial nature of the law, he had his eight colleagues weigh in.    A divided U.S. Supreme Court allowed Texas’ new abortion... Continue Reading

During the era of racial segregation, it was the black middle class that stabilized many of these communities as blacks migrated from the South to the northern cities after World War II. Many of these neighborhoods have had low-income residents for decades but they did not have the same social pathologies and economic degradation that... Continue Reading

Five women are included, mostly poor, mostly misfits, widows, unimportant, unknown, sinful women who changed the course of history by their simple, obedient lives. One might suppose that the women in Jesus the Messiah’s genealogy should have all been the finest Jewish women, but they weren’t. Most weren’t even Jewish at all. And except for... Continue Reading

Jones’ chapter on antinomian rhetoric (where the opening quote above is found) is very helpful.  I agree that there is much moralistic preaching in churches today.  But we have to be careful not to overreact and overemphasize justification at the expense of sanctification.  We have to be careful not to overemphasize Jesus’ work (what he’s... Continue Reading

Bluntly put, worship isn’t done by lost, dead people, in ways that comfort their “lostness.” Let me add that corporate worship is not, strictly speaking, evangelism. While it includes evangelism, it is not evangelism per se. And if we confuse this point, if we structure and market Sunday worship primarily for non-believers, we walk a... Continue Reading

When you don’t have anything to say that gives grace: Ephesians 4:29: “Let no corrupt talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear it.”   I talk too much. Way, way too much. But God... Continue Reading