Sinclair Ferguson’s Reflections on the Gospel in Scotland and in American Evangelicalism: Substituting the Idea of Grace for The Person of Jesus Christ
Preaching about grace detached from the person of Christ
…reviewing what took place in Scotland would be to understand how easily the church slips into turning on its head what theologians would call the indicative of the Gospel and the imperative of the Gospel: focusing on the administration of rites rather than the ministry of the Holy Spirit as the means by which salvation... Continue Reading
Another Big Mistake that Young Preachers Make
Prayer can transform both pastoring and preaching
The conversation goes like this, “I pray for you and every family in our church regularly and I wanted to know if there was anything that you would like for me to specifically pray about.” Write it down, pray for it, and ask them about it after a period of time. This will change the... Continue Reading
Change Wisely, Dude
A young writer has some advice for church leaders trying desperately to attract and retain young people: change carefully and wisely. What young people say they want in their 20s is not necessarily what they want 10 years later.
When I slipped back in, I wanted what my own parents had wanted in their hippie youth back in the 1970s: an anti-institutional church that looked less like a church and more like a coffee house. But after two years at Praxis, the coffee tasted thin. I felt homeless in heart. I missed intergenerational community.... Continue Reading
The Slippery Slope to Polygamy and Incest
Opponents of same-sex marriage have long argued that allowing such unions will lead to marriages among more than two people and between adults who are related. They're right.
In private conversations with leaders in the marriage movement, I often hear two responses. The first is that there is no political energy behind a fight for incestuous or polygamous marriages. The second is that they would be fine if those restrictions fell as well but, in effect, “don’t quote me on that.” The first... Continue Reading
Who Ruined the Humanities?
Of course it's important to read the great poets and novelists. But not in a university classroom, where literature has been turned into a bland, soulless competition for grades and status.
So you see, I am not making a brief against reading the classics of Western literature. Far from it. I am against taking these startling epiphanies of the irrational, unspoken, unthought-of side of human life into the college classroom and turning them into the bland exercises in competition, hierarchy and information-accumulation that are these works’... Continue Reading
A Woman and Her Bible: Part Deux or Part Trois?
There She Goes Again: Andree and Me
This approach does not rule out a cautious and conservative exemplary use of Old Testament biography. … But it does keep us from getting distracted away from God’s purpose in history and most importantly from Christ who is the focus of it all. It helps to guard us from speculative use of the Old Testament... Continue Reading
What If Our Grandmothers Were Actually Right? Justice and Children
The abandonment of older assumptions about the family, it turns out, has a tremendous social cost after all
When, we might ask, will we stop obsessing about what marriage means for us adults – about what we can get out of it or why we should be allowed to get out of it – and start coming to grips with what marriage as an institution – and our marriages in particular – mean... Continue Reading
Young Evangelicals Are Getting High
Young Christians are going over to Catholicism and high Anglicanism/Lutheranism in droves, despite growing up in low Protestant churches that told them about Jesus.
It’s a trend that is growing, and it looks like it might go that way for a while: people who grew up in stereotypical, casual evangelicalism are running back past their parents’ church to something that looks like it was dug out of Europe a couple hundred years ago at least. It’s encouraged by certain... Continue Reading
A “Supremely” Assured Devolution and Destruction of Marriage and Culture
Consequences of the Supreme Court's ruling on DOMA
Christ warned us that men and women, unrestrained by God’s grace, will call good, evil and evil, good. But in reality, while we may call what is immoral, legal, we cannot make moral what God has declared immoral. Finally remember that, in a sense, the SCOTUS decision has not changed a thing. The issues are... Continue Reading
Some Different Advice to Those Raising African-American Boys in the Wake of the Martin Shooting and Zimmerman Trial
A response to Toure's article "How to Talk to Young Black Boys about Trayvon Martin"
In one sense, all Toure advocates here is wisdom, the kind of savvy with people and in situations that could de-escalate very volatile circumstances. We want our boys to be peace-loving and to survive to fight on their own terms. I commend all of this. But at other places Toure reveals a view of life... Continue Reading
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