Mark Regenerus looks at the number: First, the sheer number of new marriages (i.e., weddings) has generally been decreasing, even while the population of the US continues to increase. For example, in the year 2000 there were 2.32 million new marriages in a population of 281 million persons. In 2010, however, there were 2.1 million new marriages, despite a growing population of 309 million persons. Ergo, marriage is in retreat (and more so among the poor and working class, as... Read more
If you’re a scholarly type, and you’d like to get a project funded that will help Christians understand evolution, check this out: A new funding opportunity for scholars and church/parachurch leaders. The BioLogos Foundation was recently awarded a large grant from The John Templeton Foundation to launch a subgrants program, Evolution and Christian Faith (ECF). This $3.5 millionprogram will fund research and projects that address theological and philosophical concerns many Christians have about evolutionary creation. We also invite proposals which explore how... Read more
Theoblogger Richard Beck has a beautiful post about his worship home, a small service called Freedom: Another thing I like about Freedom: One of the church leaders and I have a running conversation (and he might have this conversation with more than just me). A few months ago he came up to me and asked, “Richard, do you know why we come to church?” “Why?” “So God can kick us in the ass.” Every week it’s a variation on that... Read more
A while ago, I wrote about a bill making its way through the Minnesota legislature. At first, the bill was going to take the presumption of parenting in cases of divorce from 75%-25% to 45%-45%, with the remaining 10% to be worked out by the divorcing parties. Effectively, that means that dads would go from 25% to 45%. In committee, the bill was gutted, merely raising the 25% that goes to dads to 35%, but it finally got out of... Read more
Out of Ur is the staunchly evangelical blog of the staunchly evangelical magazine Leadership, published by the staunchly evangelical Christianity Today International. Nevertheless, minority voices are sometimes heard there, and this is one of those times. Chad Hall prefaces his post by saying that he thinks homosexual practice is unbiblical and that he’s against same sex marriage. Yet, in an argument that resonates with my own ebook on the subject, he doesn’t think that evangelicals should fight the legalization of... Read more
My response to Jason Clark’s review of my book is up at Church and Pomo: If I may put a finer point on it, the question is this: Is there a normative (biblical?) ecclesiology that is timeless, to which every congregation must aspire? Or is ecclesiology necessarily shaped by the culture that inevitably envelops every congregation? I unequivocally say no to the former and yes the latter. I am most interested, as I wrote above, in theologies that are grounded. My... Read more
Richard Flory has the evidence, but he wonders why they don’t transfer: What strikes me most about [Biola Queer Underground] and its counterparts at other evangelical colleges is that its members are not only committed to evangelical Christianity but also to the institutions that systematically marginalize them. From my perspective, it would be much easier (and perhaps much more healthy) to leave and find a more accepting place, perhaps even chuck the evangelical belief system altogether. Yet, as members of... Read more
A couple weeks ago, Steve Knight took notes during a talk I gave at the Funding the Missional Church conference, and he’s posted them on his new Patheos blog, Missional Shift. Here are the first 5; click thru to Steve’s blog to see the rest, plus my theological reflections on “missional.” 10. Missional is trying to put the conventional church out of business — Not so, says Dr. Jones. 9. Missional is anti-denominational — Many of us were surprised to... Read more
In response to my quote bomb, Tripp has bombed me back with a very good post debating the merits of the traditional doctrine of creatio ex nihilo — that is, the belief that God created the cosmos out of no pre-existent material. That God created everything that is out of nothing but Godself. I agree that there are some problems with creatio ex nihilo, and I’ll be exploring them with my DMin cohort next month (as we canoe in the... Read more
So, it seems that this image is making its way around the evangelicalfacebookosphere. Maybe it’s just me, but it really creeps me out. If you have that kind of relationship with the Bible, you may need counseling. It also leads me to ask, What if the person getting the creepy hug were a man? Read more
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