Two Biblical commands no Christian will ever obey

Last updated on: July 17, 2014 at 1:58 pm By Morgan Guyton

I’ve been at the Ecclesia National Gathering in DC. It’s a network of moderate evangelicals who use the word “missional” a lot and plant churches and stuff like that. We just had a presentation from Bill Webb about the nature of the Bible’s authority. One of his points was that the Bible’s authority is always “accommodated” to its particular cultural context. He shared two very awkward Biblical commands, Proverbs 31:6-7 and Deuteronomy 25:11-12, that I’m pretty confident no Christian would... Read more

Wrestling with heaven and hell (last weekend’s #sermon #podcast)

Last updated on: July 17, 2014 at 1:58 pm By Morgan Guyton

I keep on getting busy and forgetting to post my sermon podcasts. Last weekend, for our Wrestling sermon series, we wrestled with heaven and hell. To provide a different framework than the usual one in which the question is concerned, I looked at two passages from Isaiah. Isaiah 2 starts off by talking about God’s vision for a beautiful peaceful world (vv. 1-4) and then talks about the entrenched idolatry and injustice that will need to be destroyed for God’s... Read more

Three highly ignored teachings of the New Testament: Sabbath healings, circumcision, and unclean food

Last updated on: July 17, 2014 at 1:58 pm By Morgan Guyton

One of the main reasons that many Christians fall short who are earnestly seeking to live Biblical lives is their refusal to see legitimate analogies between issues of controversy in the time of the Bible’s stories and our lives today. Most Christians completely miss the significance of three important social teachings in the New Testament because they deal with issues that were a huge deal in their day but are completely uncontroversial now: Sabbath healing, circumcision, and unclean food. No... Read more

Why my heart is torn between Russian Orthodoxy and Pussy Riot

Last updated on: July 17, 2014 at 1:58 pm By Morgan Guyton

A few months ago, First Things ran a post critiquing emergenty evangelicals like me for dabbling in the theology and sacred ambiance of high church traditions like Orthodoxy and Catholicism without being willing to submit to the hierarchy. Whether it’s inconsistent and incoherent and irrational, there’s something that causes Christians like me to have one foot in the Occupy camp with the irreverent hooligans and one foot in the cathedrals that enchant us. Two images have grabbed my heart over... Read more

If I made a coloring book for my church vision…

Last updated on: July 17, 2014 at 1:58 pm By Morgan Guyton

My friend Matthew Paul Turner shared a page from the coloring book Steven Furtick has used at his Elevation Church to share the church vision. I wanted to offer my own version, but I’m not very talented artistically, so I cheated and Photoshopped an actual photo from our worship service using the “Charcoal and Chalk” filter. It’s a photo of a kid serving communion because that’s what he wanted to do more than anything else so I let him. Some... Read more

Our Journey as a Celibate LGBT Christian Couple (a guest post by Sarah and Lindsey from A Queer Calling)

Last updated on: July 17, 2014 at 1:58 pm By Morgan Guyton

[The following is a guest post from Lindsey and Sarah who describe themselves as a celibate LGBT Christian couple. They reached out to me on twitter after my post about the Wheaton dialogue between LGBT-affirming students and Rosaria Butterfield. Lindsey and Sarah are emphatic about saying that they don’t want their story to be used to invalidate any other LGBT story. I asked them to write a guest-post because I was fascinated by their lifestyle, and it was something I... Read more

No, David Brooks, the poor are not the prodigal son

Last updated on: July 17, 2014 at 1:58 pm By Morgan Guyton

David Brooks has done it again. This time he wrote a column about how America’s class divisions are illustrated by the parable of the prodigal son: “We live in a divided society in which many of us in the middle- and upper-middle classes are like the older brother and many of the people who drop out of school, commit crimes and abandon their children are like the younger brother.” The point of his column was to exhort the “older brothers”... Read more

The awkward truth about snake-handling: it’s totally Biblical

Last updated on: July 17, 2014 at 1:58 pm By Morgan Guyton

Jamie Coots, the snake-handling Kentucky pastor who starred in the National Geographic reality show “Snake Salvation,” died this past weekend after refusing treatment for a snakebite. Snake-handlers tend to be an embarrassment to most other Christians. But here’s the problem: they’re following exactly what the Bible says in Mark 16:16-18: “The one who believes and is baptized will be saved; but the one who does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: by using... Read more

Have you ever been thrown into hell or did you pluck your eyeball out in time? (Matthew 5:29)

Last updated on: July 17, 2014 at 1:58 pm By Morgan Guyton

Jesus says some pretty wild things, but this week’s lectionary reading includes one of his most extreme statements in Matthew 5:29: “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.” I’ve only known of one instance in which somebody actually obeyed this teaching, and it was fictional. My favorite novelist Joyce Carol Oates... Read more

The Bible has room for more than one gay Christian story

Last updated on: July 17, 2014 at 1:58 pm By Morgan Guyton

A couple of weeks ago, at Wheaton College, a very interesting dialogue happened. The campus had organized a speaking event for ex-gay activist Rosaria Butterfield whose story of converting from a leftist lesbian university professor to the homeschooling housewife of a conservative evangelical pastor has made her very popular in the conservative evangelical speaking circuit. LGBT-supporting Wheaton students held a “demonstration” outside the talk that they said wasn’t a “protest.” They held signs saying things like “We’re all loved by... Read more