Today Kris and I and her family will participate in the funeral of her elderly mother. Betty Norman was a delightful mother-in-law and we love her and will miss her, and consider ourselves blessed to have been in her circle of mothering. She died painlessly and quietly in her sleep Monday night. The picture is a recent one of Kris, Betty and me. In the last few years as Betty aged, Kris and Pat routinely traveled to visit with her... Read more
Our Shepherd’s Nook column is by John Frye, who again takes us to someone many consider America’s pastor to pastors, Eugene Peterson. I agree. When Eugene H. Peterson gave a keynote address that I heard at a writers’ conference at Spring Arbor College, he said, “Writers must be shepherds of words.” That stuck with me. EHP reverences words because he reverences both the sacred Text and the Living Word. In what Henri J. M. Nouwen calls our “wordy, wordy world,”... Read more
Perhaps you do what I do at times. I wonder what assumptions some folks have when they read Genesis 1 or 2 or 3. Most folks don’t get too worked about Genesis 4–11. Since so much matters in Genesis 1–3, it’s a good test case for assumptions. What assumptions are at work in the following: the scientific creationist? the theistic evolutionist (or evolutionary creationist)? the intelligent design reader? The historian of the ancient near east? the evolutionist? Example: once teaching... Read more
From The Atlantic by Alessandra Ram: This is a distinctive American problem, but one that contradicts the point of Paul’s mission: getting two ethnic groups into the same room around (and under) King Jesus. In cities across America, a new population is moving to neighborhoods formerly occupied by working-class African Americans. Property developers, eager to take advantage of the modest rent, are tearing down buildings to make way for trendy eateries and luxury condominiums to fit the needs of millennials: young, educated individuals,... Read more
My experience at Northern Seminary is that our students are discerning God’s will and God’s call — and it is a joy and privilege to teach one student after another who not only is discerning but doing so in the midst of ministry and not in the hope or plan of ministry. Student after student is telling me ministerial stories… of a student who uses his golf career in ministry, of a student who is in seminary the result of a healing... Read more
The last two church fathers considered by Peter Bouteneff in his book Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives are Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa. These two, along with Basil introduced in the posts last week, are known collectively as the Cappodocian Fathers. Basil was bishop of Caesarea Mazaca in Cappadocia. (The image to the right from wikipedia is Mt. Erciyes, a rather substantial volcano about 25 km south of Caesarea Mazaca). Gregory Nazianzus was a... Read more
The questions are these: Is your church missional? How would you know? What are the elements that prove a church is missional? Lots of folks claim the word “missional.” Some claim it with a robust theology — John Franke, Darrell Guder, David Fitch — while others claim the word who are little more than disaffected evangelicals burnt out on the megachurch or evangelical church. I joked the other day with David Fitch that some in the missional movement are more... Read more
Are bears next? Got any stories of adaptable animals? In the 12 years that Stan Gehrt has been tracking a population of coyotes on the Northwest side of Chicago, living not far from O’Hare International Airport, he has watched them adapt to the city in some pretty stunning ways. For one thing, they understand traffic patterns – in fact, better than some people do. As best as Gehrt and other researchers can tell, these coyotes have learned what cars are... Read more
John Tierney says Yes, and here are his reasons: My beef with AP courses isn’t novel. The program has a bountiful supply of critics, many of them in the popular press (see here and here), and many increasingly coming from academia as well (see here). The criticisms comport, in every particular, with my own experience of having taught an AP American Government and Politics course for ten years. AP courses are not, in fact, remotely equivalent to the college-level courses they are said to... Read more
Andy Stanley’s new book is called Deep & Wide and I can’t see the book’s title without breaking into the song we sang (it seems) every week as a kid; it was one song we all knew and could sing. Andy’s the pastor of a monster-big church in Atlanta. I was originally asked to speak at North Point when three young pastors — Norton, Jason, Steven — asked me to do a bit of a conference on Embracing Grace. Maybe it was... Read more
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