Habitually Going to Church?
Interesting! It used to be said that if the habit is established while they’re young, they won’t lose it later. I don’t know how true that might have been, but it doesn’t appear to work in this chart.
Why? My pastor, Geoffrey Lentz, says it’s because following Jesus in social justice is hard and demanding and might mess up our lifestyes: What would happen if we “let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an everlasting stream” (Amos)? It wouldn’t work out very well for me. This one hits us right where…
I’ve used the term phrase “divine-human combination” or something quite close to it several times over the last few days. It’s easy to make it appear that this concept of inspiration, sometimes called “incarnational” is largely a tool to deal with the difficult parts of scripture. When I read “love your neighbor as yourself” I…
It’s the day after Christmas and what a mess! I bet that’s what many are saying, anyhow. Our Christmas has been very quiet this year. That’s because my wife ended up taking all the traditional holidays working, and our grandchildren don’t arrive until the end of the week. We’ve done a little bit, but the…
I was struck by Dave Black’s note on Hebrews 4:14-16 from Wednesday on his blog. I extracted it to jesusparadigm.com, as Dave’s blog is a journal that doesn’t offer links to individual posts. (I have his permission.) I highly recommend his post. It struck me because Hebrews is such a central part of my reading…
Ex-UMC, now megachurch pastor Craig Groeschel offers six suggestions for the United Methodist Church, packaged in six brief blog posts. I think that there is much worth considering in his suggestions, though I don’t think they are generally all that new. There’s something that bothers me in the whole discussion, however. In practically every debate…
Steve Kindle and Bruce Epperly got together on the Faith on the Edge podcast (episode 33) to discuss Nick May’s book Ditch the Building. I’m publisher to all three authors, though as pointed out in the podcast, Bruce has books with a number of publishers. It should be noted that Bruce’s written output is too…