By Anthony Smith This is a fictional letter written to a Christian in the distant future. It was inspired by the book project Letters to a Future Church that is hosted by IVP-Likewise books and Patheos. Please check out some of the great letters composed by thoughtful voices in North American Christianity. Here’s my contribution: Dear Rosa Watkins, I hope all is well with you. I’ve been wanting to write to you for a while. I’ve been waiting for all the media flurry to... Read more

Discipleship isn’t a Program, It’s a Relationship… This month at the Patheos Book Club, we’re talking about the new book Dallas and the Spitfire: An Old Car, an Ex-Con, and an Unlikely Friendship, by Ted Kluck and Dallas Jahncke. Here, Kluck talks about the book, the friendship and the challenges of discipleship. In Dallas and the Spitfire, you say that discipleship felt weird to you in the past. How so? Because typically it either involved guys at our church who... Read more

Two women can meet as complete strangers over coffee and be discussing the most personal details of their lives within fifteen minutes. With men, if this happens, it takes much longer and goes on while they’re making sawdust or draped over two fenders looking at a motor. That’s how it was with Ted Kluck and Dallas Jahncke in Dallas and the Spitfire, a new book about an unlikely frienship from Bethany House Publishers (now featured at the Patheos Book Club).... Read more

[This is the fifth and final in a series of posts on the American Evangelical relationship with God by T.M. Luhrmann, author of When God Talks Back. For more conversation on this book, visit the Patheos Book Club.] Imagination changes people, not just because of the content of what they imagine, but because the sheer attention to what is imagined makes what is imagined more vivid. The medieval mystics sought to fill their minds only with God, so that the very structure... Read more

[This is the fourth in a series of posts on the American Evangelical relationship with God by T.M. Luhrmann, author of When God Talks Back. For more conversation on this book, visit the Patheos Book Club.] One of the questions skeptics ask about Christian faith is how Christians respond when their prayers fail. It is an old, old question. I cry out to you, God, but you do not answer (Job 30:20). The evangelical Christians I knew prayed in a way that seemed... Read more

[This post is part of our Blogger Roundtable on the new book Letters to a Future Church, edited by Chris Lewis, and now featured at the Patheos Book Club.] I want to tell a story I once heard about my current church, St. David’s Episcopal in downtown Austin, Texas. It’s the story, actually, that made me want to serve there when I graduated from seminary. It all has to do with that downtown location, one block from Austin’s bustling Sixth... Read more

[This is the third in a series of posts on the American Evangelical relationship with God by T.M. Luhrmann, author of When God Talks Back. For more conversation on this book, visit the Patheos Book Club.] The hardest thing for a congregant to grasp is that they are loved unconditionally by God. Unconditional love is not part of the human experience after infancy, after the crawling, reaching baby learns that love comes with expectations of right behavior. At some point in my... Read more

[This is the second in a series of posts on the American Evangelical relationship with God by T.M. Luhrmann, author of When God Talks Back. For more conversation on this book, visit the Patheos Book Club.] How do you recognize God’s voice? At a church like the one I studied, people speak about hearing God’s “voice.” They talk about things God has “said” to them about very specific topics—where they should go to school and whether they should volunteer in a daycare—and... Read more

About ten years ago now I set out to study how God became real to people by looking at a kind of faith that might seem to make the contradictions and difficulties in a faith commitment even more difficult: experiential evangelical Christianity. Read more