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Bad Teaching and Abuse
ByhenryAl Johnson has posted a story about an abused wife on Recovery Poetry blog. Before I comment on this particular story, I want to note that a site like Johnson’s blog can be an important tool for people who are suffering abuse, no matter what the cause or the background. In working in ministry in…
Of Evangelism, Missions and Other Bad Words
ByhenryThe tragedy of the American church is that we have the greatest resources ever in the history of Christianity and for the most part we’re sitting on them, doing nothing. When we are doing something, most of what we do is for ourselves. The question, I’m told, is what we should be doing and how…
Helping One Another Change
ByhenryI just extracted a note from Dave Black’s blog to The Jesus Paradigm. (That site supports his book by the same name as well as a few others that don’t have their own domain name.) In it Dave talks about admonishing, encouraging, and upholding. You’ll have to go read the post to find out what…
The Fanatic Illustrated
ByhenryIn a previous post I used the relationship between essentials and non-essentials to group ways in which Christians (and Christian groups) operate. One of these approaches to doctrine was labeled “the fanatic” (see image). With some help from Joel Watts, I’ve found a good illustration of this, and it’s The Berean Library, which lists as…
Hidden Hate – Open Rebuke
ByhenryYesterday I had planned to write a response to the Ted Haggard situation, but other issues got in the way, and then the story developed. I was going to talk some about the meaning of forgiveness combined with accountability and openness. I would have said that we didn’t know yet precisely what had happened, but…
Abuse of Authority or Church Discipline?
ByhenrySomeone on the Compuserve Religion Forum has posted a reference to an article about churches starting to try to discipline their congregations. I’m not going to try to summarize the article. Suffice it to say that the most extreme example involves a pastor calling the police to arrest a woman for trespassing. Her crime? She…
I really hate singing some of these songs in church, because I know I’m not being sincere. Sometimes I just stand there and keep quiet because I don’t like being dishonest. I’m referring mainly to the ones written in the first person, where the singer claims that he is worshipping God with his whole heart, or anything along those lines. The people who write these insincere or overly emotional songs should be shot.