I’ve been traveling the last several weeks – spending some time in Europe working (with a little vacationing thrown into the mix). Last weekend I visited Lutherstadt Wittenberg, A small town in eastern Germany where Martin Luther spent most of his adult life, preached, raised his family, and … oh yeah … composed the 95 theses. The wooden door is long gone, but Luther’s theses are engraved on bronze doors to All Saints Church also known as the Castle Church... Read more
Jackson Wu (PhD, SEBTS) teaches theology and missiology in a seminary for Chinese church leaders. Previously, he also worked as a church planter. In the next month, he has just released his second book One Gospel for All Nations: A Practical Approach to Biblical Contextualization. In addition to his blog, jacksonwu.org, follow him on Twitter @jacksonwu4china. The Bible not only gives us our message; it should shape our methods. In One Gospel for All Nations, I suggest that the biblical writers have a distinct pattern... Read more
The author of this blog post is a missionary in North Africa with Pioneer Bible Translators. She, along with her husband and two little girls, lives on the outskirts of a refugee camp working to facilitate disciple-making, Bible translation and mother tongue literacy among two least-reached Muslim groups. Her favorite things about North Africa include drinking scalding hot mint tea, wearing colorful tobes, watching her daughters play on ant hills, and hearing people’s stories. Her least favorite things include rats... Read more
I don’t care how good it is, for many (if not most) pastors I know, N.T. Wright’s mammoth Paul and the Faithfulness of God is still too long. The same is true for many of my professor friends who don’t teach Paul. With the final volume in the set coming out this fall, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, we have four volumes: two for PFG, one collection of essays (Pauline Perspectives), and now one on the recent history of interpretation. Pastors say to... Read more
Christopher Ingraham: You’ve heard the news about honeybees. “Beepocalypse,” they’ve called it.Beemageddon. America’s honeybees are dying, putting honey production and$15 billion worth of pollinated food crops in jeopardy. The situation has become so dire that earlier this year the White House put forth the first National Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and Other Pollinators, a 64-page policy framework for saving the nation’s bees, butterflies and other pollinating animals. The trouble all began in 2006 or so, when beekeepers first... Read more
Chapter 4 of Walter Moberly’s book Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture is, for many of us, a challenging read. This chapter addresses the title question of this post – does God change? More specifically, does God change his mind? God doesn’t change in the essence of his being, he doesn’t grow and mature like humans. But does he even react to human actions? This question, and Moberly’s wrestling with it, is worth a short series... Read more
From Steve Cuss, a well-timed word, and my questions: What has your church done to examine it’s expenditures or what has it done to increase giving at the expense of local expenditures? I think our marketing budgets and production budgets have too many zeros on the end of them. Here is what I mean: A couple of times per year I receive a large box in the mail from a national church leader conference. The box contains several posters to... Read more
Lindsey Bever: It’s the primal fear of the cellphone age. You’re having what you believe is a private conversation at a restaurant or perhaps a hotel suite. Maybe you’re talking about someone back at the office you’d like to get rid of. You go on for hours, maybe longer, confident that since you’re miles away, they’ll never know what you’re plotting. But they’re hearing every word you say. Why? You pocket-dialed them…. The problem is that “oral communications” aren’t necessarily... Read more
Used by permission: By Mark Stevens, a pastor friend in Australia The NIV and Me 2015 marks the 50th anniversary of the New International Translation of the Bible. Below are my own thoughts and reflections on this translation that has changed the way many Christians read the Bible. 60 years ago a major shift began to take place in English Bible translation. The 17th century crafting of the King James Bible had become irrelevant to the modern person, to the... Read more
This post, by Jeff Cook, comes to me the day after preaching a sermon at Church of the Redeemer! I believe in sermons, but I do know that some churches create a Sunday service that functions as “Come hear me preach” event. When the whole of the Sunday “event” is wrapped up in that sermon then church becomes less than what church ought to be. Some criticize the sermon out of “sermon” envy — they are not as good as... Read more
Jesus Creed
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In