All posts relating to religion, including those on the relationship of religion to other fields, such as science and politics
Imagine being on a ministry committee with the responsibility for examining the plan for Jesus and his congregation (the disciples) going to Jerusalem that final week. What would you consider? What would you recommend? From my observations of the various decision making bodies in churches, I suspect there would have been a few people who…
He posted an excellent article on his web site titled A Lesson from Ethiopia. Further comment at Mt. Tirzah Baptist Church.
The Internet Monk has a list of his most bone-headed ministry mistakes. It’s worth a read. Some of them aren’t really mistakes, in my view. For example, #4: 4. Two of my deacons made a big deal about me taking the a.m. service ten minutes too long two weeks in a row, and they humiliated…
I’ve been meaning to post this for a few days, but it’s been busy, as you can tell from my low level of blogging. Geoffrey Lentz is the associate pastor of First United Methodist Church of Pensacola, and a former student of mine. In fact, I met Geoffrey in the first class I taught for…
This is a continuation of my series on interpreting the Bible. The first post in the series is Interpreting the Bible I: Obvious Exegesis, while the most recent one was Interpreting the Bible VII: Christians Contribute to Confusion. As a reminder, my starting point was a number of comments that suggested that those who take…
I want to discuss inspiration just a bit, partly because it is relevant to my next post on Biblical interpretation (I hope to post it later today), and partly because there is someone on Twitter who is spouting a great deal of nonsense with regard to parallels and borrowing. (For those interested, he is @BibleAlsoSays,…
Sometimes even when I’m way to busy to be blogging, at least on my personal blog, I just see so many things that point the same direction that I just have to write. This post didn’t start with this quote, but it says something I like to read: If our denomination has lost the boldness…
It’s a day for questions! Ben Myers has a guest post by Aaron Ghiloni titled On sermons: a rant. Basically, he doesn’t like sermons. Really doesn’t like them. So as I sometimes do I brought this up with my wife as I was driving her to work. (Since I work at home we live with…
I had this question called to my mind a couple of times this week, and I want to pose it to you. Before I do that, however, let me tell you how it was called to my mind. The first item was a comment on my post on civil liberties. Dave Black comment on that…
First, let me put away another mystery, though I doubt anyone was wondering that much. I’ve been working on a couple of new book releases and the resulting schedule kept me from blogging most of the week. No mystery there! The word “mystery” is rather popular today, but only in the sense of something to…
