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BHT fellow Alex Arnold asks what a post-evangelical youth ministry looks like.
Post-evangelicalism is asking what the church itself looks like when it draws its identity, substance and focus from the larger, deeper, wider communion of the church catholic.
Nothing is more typical of evangelicalism in both its strengths and its weaknesses than youth ministry. Many of […]

Only Scriptural Baptist churches can make a legitimate claim to an unbroken succession back to the time of Christ and the apostles. Christ only built one kind of church and that church is described in detail in the New Testament. The only churches meeting the requirements of that description today are true Baptist churches. Baptist […]

Tony Jones sent me his new book The New Christians, and I’ve been looking at some of the resource material on Emergent Village. I’ve been very encouraged the the Values and Practices Statement from Emergent Village. In my own journey to create a Jesus-shaped spirituality, I was particularly challenged by the first section: Commitment to […]

Read the original (written back when I was a Calvinist): On Christless Preaching.
Recently I was traveling to a conference with a friend, and I listened to a sermon. Preached by a Christian, a Baptist, a minister at a church, a graduate of a Christian school training ministers to serve and communicate Jesus.
This preacher gave a […]

(Yes, Virginia, there’s a review of N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope coming very soon.)
I grew up and was formed in a version of the Christian tradition that practiced a remarkably simple form of Christianity.
It was about going to heaven.
This life was preparation for heaven. God was preparing a place called heaven with lots of mansions. […]

“I am on a post-evangelical journey, discovering what it means to be vitally connected to Jesus.”
A truly prominent, not-post anything blogger has put forward the following theory:
Those who use the prefix “post” to describe themselves are claiming to be smarter than those who don’t.
Example: A “post-modernist” is saying “I used to be mired in the […]

Sometime in the past, I read an interview with Michael Card and he was asked a question about contemporary praise and worship music. Somewhere in his answer, there emerged the comparison of the current contemporary music scene to an industry, and the music emerging from it was the product.
Art. Creation. Industry. Product. Useful categories for […]

In the book Rising from the Ashes, Becky Garrison interviews emerging church leader Peter Rollins, author of How (Not) to Speak of God and the soon to be released The Fidelity of Betrayal: The Ir/Religious Heart of Christianity.
Rollins has always intrigued me. Some of his ideas are difficult to grasp, but in this interview he […]

This is the last post on the subject of the Church: Flawed and Finished. The others are directly below. I will be doing an F.A.Q. post on the topic.
1, 2, 3, 4.
What is the connection between the flawed church in history and the completed, finished perfect body of Christ?
Is it the fact that God […]

Before moving on into more posts on the relationship of the historical church and the ideal church, I want to ask and briefly answer some questions.
1. To what extent is the historical church flawed?
Like the human beings that make up the church, the historical church is fallen, sinful and affected by sin in every way […]

This series looks at how imperfect and flawed congregations can possibly be the church of Jesus. The first two posts in the series are here and here.
When scripture speaks of the church in ideal terms, it is always from the viewpoint of God’s finished work of love and new creation that begins and ends with […]

The introduction to this series is here. I was somewhat “motivated” recently when a Protestant convert on EWTN said “Protestants have Christ, but they don’t have his bride.” I found the statement quite…..interesting, especially in view of how I believe the scriptures describe the church in history and in God’s plans.
This second post deals with […]

Some recent comments on EWTN drove me back to my Bible and some time thinking through my concept of how the church is both fallible and perfect; flawed and finished; historical and eternal. I’ll share several brief posts walking through the relationship between a very human and flawed historical reality and its relationship with the […]

Ash Wednesday (and the beginning of Lent) is one week from today, so it’s an appropriate time to point you in the direction of some good Lenten Links. If you’ve made the big step into observing Advent, Lent should be next in your appreciation of the Christian year..
Since most of you have already done 40 […]

***Music by The Doors: “The End.”***
There was an elf that met the children at the door. Also in this room was a store that had Barbies, action figures, Brats Dolls, and all of the most popular items that you would find in a Toy-R-Us catalog the day after Thanksgiving. In order for kids to get […]