Zach Hoag Is Uncategorized
Yesterday, a writer I really like wrote a piece at Christianity Today that I really didn't like. Read more
Yesterday, a writer I really like wrote a piece at Christianity Today that I really didn't like. Read more
Rachel Held Evans’s new book Searching For Sunday (see my interview with the author here) has sparked a good deal of speculation over what constitutes an evangelical, and whether or not Rachel is one. Without getting into all the details of this particular situation (because just, no), I’d like to propose 3 kinds of evangelicals that I am observing in the U.S. Christian conversation – whether the folks I’m describing would self-identify with that label or not, and whether the folks I’m describing would recognize each... Read more
Rachel Held Evans's new book Searching For Sunday (which I reviewed here and which you can win by entering here) has sparked a good deal of speculation over what constitutes an evangelical, and whether or not Rachel is one.Without getting into all the details of this particular situation (because just, no), I'd like to propose 3 kinds of evangelicals that I am observing in the U.S. Christian conversation... Read more
Right after Mel Gibson’s blood-drenched The Passion of the Christ hit theaters and toppled the box office, John Piper released a book called The Passion of Jesus Christ that was intended to seize this cultural moment for the sake of the gospel. Churches, like my Reformed Baptist church in Vermont, ordered this inexpensive book by the truckload in the hopes of educating their congregants and evangelizing their communities alike. I took home a few, and gave a way a couple. At the time, I was all... Read more
Right after Mel Gibson’s blood-drenched The Passion of the Christ hit theaters and toppled the box office, John Piper released a book called The Passion of Jesus Christ that was intended to seize this cultural moment for the sake of the gospel. Churches, like my Reformed Baptist church in Vermont, ordered this inexpensive book by the truckload in the hopes of educating their congregants and evangelizing their communities alike. I took home a few, and gave a way a couple. At the time, I was all in. There were... Read more
Sometimes it’s time to go. I have a hard time being decisive in moments of change and often take some time to transition from one season to another. Maybe we all do. But usually, it’s an exercise in prolonging the inevitable. The change has already happened – I am just a little slow to acknowledge and accept it fully. But that time has come with my blog here on the Patheos Progressive Christian Channel. Indeed, I recently attempted a rebrand... Read more
Ruth Graham is over at Slate today talking about the aftermath of the Mars Hill multisite dissolution – and the continued momentum of both the individual churches and Mark Driscoll’s ministry. She’s basically saying: multi-site megachurches are hard to kill. In her words: [T]he bottom line is that while the central organization may be dead, many of its fruits—the smaller congregations that once shared the name Mars Hill—have survived. Now, all of those individual churches have been set loose to... Read more
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is one of my greatest influences. Yesterday our nation celebrated him! In sharing my (lightly-edited) sermon from Sunday’s worship service which honored Dr. King, I hope to inspire and challenge us. Most of all, I hope to reclaim King from the ways that he has regularly been sanitized and domesticated in our society since his death. Read, reflect, comment and share! (I posted this originally at The Blackburn House blog.) The Voice of Vocation The... Read more
The graphic above is a screenshot from the timeline now posted on Mars Hill’s post-mortem website. While much ink has been spilled on the demise of the church due to abuses and general unhealth, it’s kind of striking to see the multi-site mission that Mark Driscoll manhandled into an impressive video-driven empire now dead, only to have 11 independent churches live on in its wake. And, while I’m sure there are many out there who are skeptical of these new churches and... Read more
Jeffrey Kranz is a writer, designer, and consultant at OverviewBible.com, and he’s created a pretty amazing infographic of the genealogy of Jesus, with an emphasis on bringing together the Messiah’s human and divine origins. Most of us are aware that the book of Matthew opens with a complicated list of names in Jesus’s family tree, and we usually skip over that part to get to the “good” stuff. But there’s some good stuff right there! The infographic represents both Matthew and... Read more
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