My world … and welcome to it. (HT James Thurber) I’m not churchless or secular, but by far the majority of my friends, peers, and coworkers are. Although my university community is not yet the norm for the country as a whole, it may reflect a growing trend. Churchless is an increasing phenomenon in the US. Dave Kinnaman and the Barna Group have published the results of a series of surveys in a new book Churchless: Understanding Today’s Unchurched and... Read more
According to Roger Olson, in his The Journey of Modern Theology, the “ultimate modern theologian” is Rudolf Bultmann. His words: “No one embraced modern naturalism and rationalism more fully, except that he cordoned off Christian faith from rationalism. Everything in the physical world and in history is subject to reason, and it limits religion severely. Bultmann made a virtue out of what he saw as a necessity. He made it impossible for Christianity and science to conflict” (344). Olson knows Bultmann... Read more
Time for our readers to offer a big congrats to Jonathan and Leslie for the arrival of their 4th child! If you aren’t from Churches of Christ, then you probably haven’t heard of the Siburt family, but inside the tribe I belong to, they are like the Graham family of our movement. Specifically Charles Siburt, who spent his entire life serving, recruiting and blessing ministers for local churches all over the world. Despite having severe physical limitations (including being legally... Read more
The burden of my new book, Kingdom Conspiracy, is answering this question: What does “kingdom” mean? I want to begin this session by tapping on a few doors to see who opens the door and asking them what kingdom means. This gives us a sampling of kingdom usage in the church today. It is in no particular order, and we can discuss each but I have tried to give a brief label to how the kingdom is being used at the end... Read more
Roger Olson: First, how do I recognize a Spirit-filled and Spirit-led church? I would not consider any church Spirit-filled or Spirit-led that is not evangelical in the broad sense of that word. It must embrace, live from, worship within, and promote the gospel of Jesus Christ. To put it another way, the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, must be at its center, must be its heartbeat. Assuming that is the case, I look for a healthy balance of... Read more
What is the first word that comes to mind when I say Christian? This question, and the answers given by non-Christians shape the second chapter of Philip Yancey’s new book Vanishing Grace. Yancey is convinced that all people long for meaning, a sense of purpose, that our life actually matters. We also long for genuine community and a sense of being loved and of belonging. Christian faith should draw people in, provide meaning, purpose, and belonging. Yet far too often... Read more
There is a lot of chatter today about the formative dimension of church worship. One can be forgiven for thinking that if we would just get our worship right we’d all be formed into model Christians. My observation is that if gathered worship is formative then the best liturgies should produce the best Christians, and then one could just wander into any one of the major liturgical churches and… well … it’s rather obvious to me that liturgy does not... Read more
From George Sumner: Here is a thesis: that the dynamic “x-factor,” the key to the upsurge of Anglican mission in the modern era, and its common feature still today, may be found in the lineage of Wesleyanism. Wesley’s ministry had a shape that has been repeated and reappropriated over and over again. In mission, we are all Methodists now, at least in our root assumptions and many of our strategies. To understand what I mean, we need to consider the... Read more
Most of the great theologians of the church have addressed the topic of prayer, and it is one of the highlights of Tim Keller’s book on prayer (Prayer) to sketch what Augustine, Luther and Calvin said about prayer — each expressing a pastoral theology of prayer in a letter to someone. Luther, for instance, said each text of the Bible was an aid in prayer in four ways as we meditate on Scripture: “a school text [instruction], a song book... Read more
What happens to church ministry when we turn from the “phraseological” to the “real”? The terms need fleshing out. The phraseological is theology as words, ministry as didactic and indoctrinating, the congregation/members/Christians as empty minds in need mostly of filling or the congregation in need of becoming passive before the fountain of pastoral wisdom. The “real,” on the other hand, recognizes that theology is not genuine gospel unless it is tied into and expressed in reality or life as we... Read more
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