Last year the church where I serve as teaching pastor, Keller Park Church (South Bend, Indiana), celebrated its 50th anniversary—or our very own year of Jubilee. To celebrate this occasion, I preached a series on the Jubilee theme as found in the Gospel of Luke (with allusions to Isaiah and Leviticus). Below is the third sermon of the series. (While you’re here, check out the first and second sermons, Revolution and Release.) When I was a kid, we observed the Sunday Sabbath quite... Read more
Today for my “Dispatches” post I want to share a bit about Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS), Elkhart, Indiana, where I work (for one of my jobs) and some of the things going on here. (I’ll share about my other job as a teaching pastor some other time.) My first time on campus at AMBS was nearly a decade ago when I audited the course Christian Attitudes toward War, Peace, and Revolution, taught by Ted Koontz. Koontz took over the... Read more
Last year the church where I serve as teaching pastor, Keller Park Church (South Bend, Indiana), celebrated its 50th anniversary—or our very own year of Jubilee. To celebrate this occasion, I preached a series on the Jubilee theme as found in the Gospel of Luke (with allusions to Isaiah and Leviticus). Below is the first sermon of the series. (While you’re here, check out the first sermon, Revolution.) Does anyone else remember learning this story as a kid—perhaps in Sunday school with... Read more
Last April, Fuller Seminary president Mark Labberton spoke at a private meeting of evangelical leaders at Wheaton College in Chicago, Illinois, on the crisis within evangelicalism. In his address, Labberton observed, “The central crisis facing us is that the gospel of Jesus Christ has been betrayed and shamed by an evangelicalism that has violated its own moral and spiritual integrity.” Labberton identified issues of power, race, nationalism, and economics as having a deforming influence on the contemporary evangelical movement. While I... Read more
Last year the church where I serve as teaching pastor, Keller Park Church (South Bend, Indiana), celebrated its 50th anniversary—or our very own year of Jubilee. To celebrate this occasion, I preached a series on the Jubilee theme as found in the Gospel of Luke (with allusions to Isaiah and Leviticus). Below is the first sermon of the series. When I was a kid, my brother and I used to spend our summers watching movies on VHS. I think we owned... Read more
Last week I posted some dispatches from the Anabaptist ecosystem, which are basically stories from the Anabaptist-Mennonite world that caught my eye. I intend this to be a regular feature here at Anabaptist Revisions as I continue to offer gentle revisions to the Anabaptist vision in light of Mennonite reality. Here are five stories that caught my eye over the past week. 1. Introducing Menno Simons Mennonites take their name from sixteenth-century Reformer Menno Simons. Don’t know who Menno is?... Read more
This weekend I plan to continue a Martin Luther King Jr. Day tradition I started last year. Here’s what I wrote last year for MLK Day in my local paper, the South Bend Tribune: This weekend the country is going through the annual ritual of whitewashing King’s legacy in order to make him palatable to white moderates. We will listen to sanctimonious sermons and speeches that will claim King as a national hero and thereby imply that we are worthy as a... Read more
Lately there’s been debate among old white male pastors like me about whether diversity is a gospel matter. One white male pastor worries that “pastors in our day [will] let cultural concerns”—like diversity—“crowd out the preaching of new birth, repentance, and justification by faith alone.” He writes that, if this happens, it “wouldn’t be the first time in the church’s history that the ‘gospel’ became more social than gospel.” Another group of white male pastors are even more direct: “We... Read more
Back in the day, I attended Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) in Deerfield, Illinois, for seminary. There I learned the history of American evangelicalism from John Woodbridge. What I didn’t realize at the time was that how one tells the history of American evangelicalism has a lot do with how one thinks about contemporary evangelicalism: what it is, who gets to define it, who counts as one, and so on. Embed from Getty Images It wasn’t until after seminary that... Read more
As I mentioned in a previous post about Mennonite historian Harold Bender’s seminal essay, “The Anabaptist Vision,” one of its limitations is that it reduces Anabaptism to an abstract vision. By so doing, it misses what historian John Roth calls “the joyful messiness of lived experience.” To provide revisions to the vision, then, I’d like to periodically draw attention to some of the goings-on in the Anabaptist ecosystem. Here are a few things that caught my attention last week: 1.... Read more
Anabaptist Revisions
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