Be Part of History: Support the Gosnell Movie (and Hurry!)

Last updated on: April 25, 2014 at 7:18 am By Owen Strachan

You can be a part of movie history. A group of courageous and award-winning filmmakers are committed to doing a documentary film on Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia abortionist who killed dozens, hundreds, and perhaps thousands of babies by delivering them at his clinic and then severing their spinal cord with scissors. The film is being crowdfunded and needs $2.1 million dollars by May 12, 2014. It has currently raised $1.36 million through Indiegogo. That’s under 20 days. If you’re pro-life,... Read more

Should Christians Use the Term “Gay Christian”?

Last updated on: April 23, 2014 at 6:38 pm By Owen Strachan

In his new book God and the Gay Christian, Matthew Vines seeks to legitimate homosexual practice among evangelicals. I responded to this heretical teaching yesterday in my post about the new Southern Seminary eBook, God and the Gay Christian? I quoted a section from my chapter on the church’s historical teaching, a chapter that has now been posted in full over at the Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood. Today I’d like to think a little more with you about Vines’s use of... Read more

God and the Gay Christian–An Evangelical Response to Matthew Vines

Last updated on: April 22, 2014 at 12:16 pm By Owen Strachan

Led by President R. Albert Mohler, Jr., faculty from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary just published an eBook titled God and the Gay Christian? in response to a new book by Matthew Vines entitled God and the Gay Christian (published by an offshoot of Multnomah/WaterBrook, a historically evangelical publisher). I was blessed by the work of faculty colleagues Jim Hamilton (on the OT), Denny Burk (on the NT), and Heath Lambert (on counseling) in this project. Scholarship has immense value when done... Read more

The Missing Link in the Poverty Debates: Fathers and Mothers

Last updated on: April 21, 2014 at 10:59 am By Owen Strachan

I remember being out in the back room in my home in Machias, Maine. I was a librarian’s son, and so there were books in great quantities in said house. I loved it. One day, having finished my latest basketball book (I nurtured something of an obsession with fine sportswriting as a boy), I wandered into the back room and came across Jonathan Kozol’s Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation (Broadway, 1995). Kozol’s elegant profiles of... Read more

Easter Is About Satan Losing in Spectacular Fashion

Last updated on: April 20, 2014 at 12:38 pm By Owen Strachan

I was reminded by this excellent piece from Tim Brister about Easter that Easter is the least sentimental of all our holidays. Easter, Tim says, is for the dead. This beloved cultural holiday is not fundamentally about pleasant feelings, or warm days, or communal togetherness, or pastel-colored shirts, or ingeniously devised egg hunts, or being together with loved ones. These aren’t bad things. Many are good (particularly depending on what color the pastel shirt is). It’s just that they aren’t... Read more

Public Engagement Does Not Mean Sneering at Jerry Falwell

Last updated on: April 19, 2014 at 9:01 am By Owen Strachan

I just wrote an essay for Canon & Culture, the new project of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. It’s entitled “The Moral Majority Is No More,” and it attempts to begin charting a new course for evangelical public engagement among the group known as the “Millennials.” Here’s a little bit to whet your ethical appetite: Unlike the Moral Majority, many Millennials are quiet as a church mouse on public square issues, save for a... Read more

A Banner Week for CBMW at T4G, and Scattered T4G Thoughts

Last updated on: April 17, 2014 at 12:20 pm By Owen Strachan

I am so thankful for last week (April 7-11), the week of the 2014 CBMW National Conference and the Together for the Gospel conference. I have effectively come of age over the life-span of T4G, which began in 2006 in the Galt House Ballroom, the very place that we at CBMW held our NatCon. The final day of the first 2006 conference, I proposed to my now-wife. In 2010, I interviewed for the job I currently hold at T4G, meeting... Read more

On a World in Which Little Boys Do Not Die at Marathons

Last updated on: April 15, 2014 at 1:09 pm By Owen Strachan

I grew up watching the Boston Marathon. It always hit at a lovely spot in the year: mid-April. In New England, this is an enchanting time, mostly because the months immediately preceding it have not lacked for cold. The flowers start to bloom, the temperature skyrockets to a blistering 50 degrees, and kids burst out of doors to play. My family always traveled around this time to Lincoln, Massachusetts to visit my grandparents. I loved this trip. School was out... Read more

The Child Who Couldn’t Walk (and Then Did)

Last updated on: April 7, 2014 at 8:28 am By Owen Strachan

I just wrote a piece for the Gospel Coalition entitled “We’re All Over-Protected Now.” I tackled our need for risk and a bigger vision of God, themes I spell out in my book Risky Gospel. In the TGC essay, I got to share this powerful story: I recently heard a Southern Baptist Theological Seminary administrator tell me of a child he knew who was adopted by a godly family. The child had been told for years that he couldn’t walk.... Read more

Should John 7:53-8:11 Be Moved to a Footnote?

Last updated on: March 31, 2014 at 8:17 am By Owen Strachan

Yesterday at Kenwood Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, Jim Hamilton preached a sermon on John 8:12-30. It was typical of Jim’s sermons: loaded to the brim with exegetical and biblical-theological insight, passionately delivered, and punctuated by a summons to faith in Jesus, the light of the world. I love serving with Jim, Denny Burk, and a band of brothers as an elder at KBC. Here, though, is what was not typical about this sermon: Jim spent about ten minutes detailing... Read more