Flawed People Drive Author Back to the Church, Not Away

Where human frailty once served as a reason for me to withdraw from the church, with its unruly and divergent congregants, this is now what compels me ...

Football Player Can't Forget the Ball He Dropped

Noble Doss dropped the ball. One ball. One pass. One mistake. In 1941, he let one fall. And it's haunted him ever since. "I cost us a national ...

Woman Chooses Painful Route to Gain Respect

Hajnal Ban decided she was tired of being what she considered short. The five-foot-one Australian woman had been made fun of most of her life, and she ...

Pastor Discovers Meaningful Way to Help Others in Pain

In an interview about his book The Folly of Prayer (IVP, 2009), author and pastor Matt Woodley shared a story about his friend Theresa. Theresa was experiencing ...

The Limits of the Human Will

Many of us act as if repentance is a matter of the will. [But] we can't "will" ourselves into change. We can't "will" ourselves ...

Wanting the Cure Without the Care

What we see, and like to see, is cure and change. But what we do not see and do not want to see is care: the participation in the pain, the solidarity ...

Praying Against the Consequences of Sin

Most of us spend the first six days of each week sowing wild oats, then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.

—Fred Allen, U.S. ...

Broken Globe Symbolic of Broken World

In a sermon Pastor Matt Woodley shared the following story:

When I was about ten years old, my dad, a medical doctor, received a special gift from one ...

Organization Doesn't Help the Wounded

A soldier was wounded in a battle and ordered to the nearest military hospital. Arriving at the entrance, he saw two doors: one marked "For Minor ...

Fred Smith: Church Is for Broken People

Fred Smith loves to ask people this question: "If you were caught for drunken driving, and the headlines in your local newspaper that Sunday morning said, ...