Category: Church
Church Life and Social Collapse
Anne Helen Petersen recently featured a piece on her Substack written by a Peloton customer sharing her experience with the company. What’s most striking about the piece is the title, though it is helpful to read the whole thing to...
Church Does Not Equal Content
(I’m indebted to Mark Sayers and Myles Werntz for much of what follows.) If church can just permanently be online for anyone who wishes it to be, then church is effectively little more than content: it’s music and speech beamed...
The Bavinck Turn
In his (excellent) biography of Bavinck, James Eglinton notes a shift that happened in the great Dutch theologian around the turn of the century. Earlier in his career, Bavinck was deeply concerned with the project of reinvigorating Calvinism in the...
Moving On
If you’ve followed the discourse around sexuality and the PCA, then you’ve likely seen Tim Keller’s recent piece, which has provoked some strong reactions within the PCA. It’s a helpful write-up of what has happened so far. This is my...
Every New Day, Love Song for a Savior, and Dechurching
I was at the last show Five Iron Frenzy played outside Colorado. In 2004 they passed through Lincoln on their way back home for their final two shows, both played in their hometown of Denver. But before that they played...
(One Reason) Why Abuse Goes Unchecked in Churches
You’re in one of these churches. You’re there on Sunday morning. You get there around 8:15 every week for coffee and donuts. Your kids go to Sunday school with friends they’ve known their whole lives. You eat your donut and...
Getting Practical About Doctors of the Church
Continuing on my reflections on ecclesial renewal as it relates to Keller’s proposal, let’s keep talking about the problem of how to revitalize the lost ecclesial office, “doctor of the church.” What we know is two-fold: First, there are problems...
Dawson on the Other-Worldliness of Christianity
Dawson: But though the religion of that age was intensely other-worldly, its other-worldliness had a very different character from much that we have come to associate with the word in its modern pietist form. It was collective rather than individualist,...
Dawson on How the West Got Saved
Dawson: Unlike Christian Byzantium, Christian Rome represents only a brief interlude between paganism and barbarism. There were only eighteen years between Theodosius’s closing of the temples and the first sack of the Eternal City by the barbarians. The great age...
The Five Phases of Movement and Cultural Renewal
Start by listening to this Mark Sayers lecture from a conference in Melbourne a few years ago. Sayers argues that one of the ways the discussion about Christianity and the west has gotten off track is that it’s not really...