Do you think these human beings matter to God? They certainly don’t matter much to us. About a hundred prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are now engaged in a hunger strike. But don’t worry; the prison guards won’t let them die. They force-feed them through tubes in their noses. Apparently one detainee has been force-fed daily since 2005. (more…) Read more
It’s a strange and beautiful thing to hear someone preaching your own thoughts in a sermon. That’s what happened for me last summer when I heard Pentecostal preacher Jonathan Martin‘s sermon series “The Songs of Ascent” about King David and the Psalms. My whole life, I have been on a journey of trying to understand the nature of worship. Growing up Baptist, I was instilled with a zeal for sincerity in worship. What is the difference between truly worshiping God... Read more
The 2nd century Gnostic heretics were very good at constructing airtight, scripture-based arguments for their beliefs. In response to this, church father Ireneaus wrote that the verses in the Bible are like a mosaic of painted tiles that can be arranged in any order. He said that the same set of tiles that ordered correctly create the mosaic of a beautiful lamb had been reordered by the Gnostics to make a fox. This is a very important point about the... Read more
Vincent Alexander was like any other kindergartener at Orange Grove Elementary School a month ago. Then something funny started to happen with his eye so he went to the doctor. They did a CT Scan just to rule out the really rare possibilities like AT/RT ((atypical teratoid rhabdoid tumor), which is what it was. (more…) Read more
I had an outbreak of worldviewism today on my Facebook page today after I shared my post on privilege and Biblical interpretation. Worldviewism is a school of thought within the evangelical world, particularly among the homeschoolers and tribulation preppers, that divides the world into thought-systems (there are often said to be four) which are completely self-enclosed, disconnected, and incompatible with one another. Your task as a Christian is to make sure that your Christian worldview hasn’t been infiltrated by traces... Read more
This is a post where I’m raising a question that I flat-out don’t know the answer to. I watched a conversation yesterday between Derek Rishmawy who represents what I call the “Calvinist you can talk to” perspective and Stephanie Drury who is a “post-evangelical feminist.” Derek had written a post about the importance of not dissing King Solomon and the sacredness of scripture just because Mark Driscoll has misused Solomon’s words in Proverbs and the Song of Songs. Stephanie’s response... Read more
So I got an idea of a way to turn the “smoking hot wife” meme against its patriarchal self. Let’s share some smoking hot sermon podcasts from some on-fire preacherwomen like Nadia Bolz-Weber, Amanda Garber, Lillian Daniel, etc. I heard one from Charith Fee-Nordling at the Missio Alliance conference; my word, it about burned a hole straight through me. So if you’ve heard a smoking hot sermon from a preacherwomen, put a link to it in the comment section or... Read more
This weekend we continued Burke UMC’s Rewrite series on how God rewrites the lives of people in the Bible and today. Our character for the weekend was Peter. I talked about how Jesus picked Peter to be His right-hand man because he was a bold fisherman. But Peter had to learn like every alpha male that the boldest thing we can do is to own our weakness. He couldn’t follow Jesus to the cross, but because he was humbled, God... Read more
Complementarian megachurch pastors are like pitchers who only throw 40 mile an hour change-ups. It feels cheap and dirty to swing at their pitches, but I’m genuinely bothered by what I’ve been hearing lately from that strange foreign land where Christians believe that wives are supposed to submit to their husbands. First I learned that it’s trendy for pastors in that world to tweet out photos and commentary to their congregations about their “smoking hot wives.” And then Mark Driscoll... Read more
A number of people in my church have been impacted by the game of chicken known as sequestration that Obama and the Republicans are playing with one another. Almost everyone either works for the civilian sector of the government, a government contractor, or the military. Several people have lost their jobs; many have been furloughed. And that’s why I’m more than a little bit hot about the way that Congress has suddenly bolted in action to exempt the FAA from... Read more
Mercy Not Sacrifice
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