-
2026 Lenten Film Fest
This Lent, I took up a discipline of watching through a movie each week. That may sound more like leisure than discipline, but in my stage of life, finding time and space to watch through these films meant watching them in snippets on a tablet when I had 20-30 minutes to spare. And to choose…
-
Less “both sides” and more “universal problems”
A lot of dust has been kicked up in the wake of the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk. There’s been the rush to assign blame, examples of how our individual algorithms give us widely different perspectives on the same people and events, and the ever present struggle with how we think and talk about controversial…
-
Biblical Historiography
I was in the eighth grade when I first encountered competing historical narratives. I had just moved to the United States from Canada, and in my US History class we were taught about the War of 1812, or as our history book called it, “The Second Revolutionary War”. I learned that, like the first revolutionary…
-
Earnest Isn’t Enough
I don’t know how it is for everyone else, but there are books that stick with me in a way that I find I am returning back to their ideas over and over again years after I’ve read it. One of those books for me is ‘The Civil War as a Theological Crisis’ by Mark…
-
Violence is bad, actually
Every now and again I’ll come across and article or a book that becomes an apocalypse for me, in the sense that it reveals something, a paradigm or a cultural phenomenon, and the world around me makes a little more sense. Terry Gross’s interview of Quentin Tarantino on Fresh Air was one of those moments…
-
Honest Apologetics
In the introduction to Jesus through the Centuries, Jaroslav Pelikan writes: “For each age, the life and teachings of Jesus represented an answer (or, more often the answer) to the most fundamental questions of human existence and of human destiny, and it was to the figure of Jesus as set forth in the Gospels that…
-
Youth Ministry White Paper
Adolescence is life’s internship. It’s when people learn about who they really are, where they belong, and where they can effect change in the world around them. Inviting adolescents into a life of discipleship takse place when we come alongside them as they go through that liminal space between childhood and adulthood. This happens by…
-
How I changed my mind on women’s ordination
In April of 2005, during my sophomore year at Moody Bible Institute, I wrote a paper entitled: “Female Authority in the Church: a hermeneutical(sic) Look at 1 Timothy 2:11-12.” It was the first time I dug into passages in the New Testament about women in church leadership, and it was the formation of a position…
-
Question 2 of 9
I’m slowly working through my friend Scott’s “Questions to pose to a candidate being asked to serve as an elder in a local church.” Here is his second question: Tell me about five websites that you regularly visit in an average week. Why do you visit these sites? Here are the sites that I follow…
-
10 Questions
A friend of mine, who has spent more than his fair share of time having to wrestle with the expectations we ought to have for church leadership (and what to do when leaders fail), posted ten questions he would ask of anyone who asipres to lead in a church. I found them to be pretty…