Words have meanings. I point out this painfully obvious fact because, even though we are aware from our first year that words have meanings, we don’t always put much effort into figuring out the meanings of the words we use. This is egregiously obvious when you listen to our political discussions these days. People seem to throw around -isms and […]
You want to know the questions many youth pastors hope they don’t get asked? You might think it’s possibly questions about homosexuality or abortion, or maybe transgenderism, or possibly about hell, why God lets people get cancer, or why God ordered the Israelites to violently drive out the Canaanites in Joshua’s day. You’d probably be right about all those. Those […]
The United States is one of the most individualistic cultures in the world, perhaps in the history of the world. As a culture, we value independence, individual freedom, being self-made and self-sufficient, and having a distinct, individual identity perhaps more than any other. So what do we do when a highly individual-centered culture meets the highly community-centered one outlined in […]
In my last post, I shared 9 things that Barna’s newest comprehensive worldview survey revealed about Generation Z (those born 1999 and later). In many ways, they continue the trends that began with my generation (the millennials), but in a few others they are very different. For those of us with close connections to people of this next generation, it’s […]
Recently, the Barna group undertook a comprehensive survey — the first of its kind — of the lifestyles, habits, and worldviews of what it calls “Generation Z,” that is, the post-millennial generation. Based on Barna’s definition, millennials are those born between 1984 and 1998, and so Generation Z is those born in 1999 or later — those who are 18 […]
There’s a very popular and common narrative in our culture about the relationship between science and religion. At its core, the idea is pretty simple: Religion, particularly Christianity, has suppressed and kept humanity in darkness about the scientific world, and science has enlightened us to the realities of it. Religion is blamed for things like suppressing Galileo, a belief in […]
Of all the people Jesus encountered during his life on earth, the people he always reserved his harshest criticism for was the hypocrites. Pretty much everyone who’s ever opened a New Testament knows how Jesus felt about hypocrites. Even most people who don’t know the Bible know how Jesus felt about hypocrites. And the biggest hypocrites of all were the […]
Theology is an amazing thing. Even though we Christians study a book that hasn’t changed in 2,000 years, and a God who has never changed, the big questions we ask about him often do. Questions that seemed like silly fantasies in 1818 — like that of life on other planets — are now real questions that we have to consider theologically. […]
Recently, one of my favorite pastors, John Piper, ignited a small storm of controversy when he took the position that not only can women not biblically be pastors, but women can’t be seminary professors either. His reasoning was that it doesn’t make sense for women to be mentoring and training up men for an office that they themselves cannot hold; it […]
Everything we have is from God. If you believe in a Creator God at all, that’s a perfectly logical statement, and in fact is necessarily true. If God created us, he is to thank for every good thing we have. And if God is not only the Creator of the world but is actively intervening in our lives today, as […]
Recent Comments