Ministry in a Fallen World

In 1983 the First Presbyterian Church of Concord, California was in the headlines. Pastor Leon Thompson had convinced his 500 member congregation to purchase ...

Faking Out God?

Research psychologists have found there are at least three situations when we are not ourselves. First, the average person puts on airs when he visits ...

Oxymoron: Childlike Journalist

In Something Beautiful for God, longtime British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge tells how he met Mother Teresa while filming a BBC documentary about her ...

A Kind Interruption

One Sunday at my church, the choir had finished singing the anthem and the pastor was rising to deliver the message. It was a moment of holy expectation. ...

Transforming a Hostile Culture

"Never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race," wrote English scholar Alcuin. He was referring ...

Bruce Willis on Morality

Actor Bruce Willis offers his opinion on church teachings about morality:

[Organized religion] used to hang the whole thing on one hook. If you don’t ...

Limits of Theology

Respect for differing views...provides some defense against the natural desire to probe incessantly the mystery of the gospel. (There are those who would ...

Harm of Radical Individualism

Many Christians have been infected with the most virulent virus of modern American life, what sociologist Robert Bellah calls “radical individualism.” ...

Learning to Live with Others

It is not easy living in a church community—it's full of sinful people who do all sorts of things that disturb us. But an old story from the lives ...

God's Method

We are constantly on a stretch, if not on a strain, to devise new methods, new plans, new organizations to advance the church and secure enlargement and ...