How The MegaChurch Stole Christmas (Day Worship)

Some of America’s largest megachurches won’t be open on Sunday, December 25. After multiple services on Christmas Eve, they are giving their congregations, volunteers, staffs- and thousands of twice a year attenders- the day off to spend with their families.

I first saw the story of Kentucky’s two largest mega-churches cancelling services on December 25 in this Kentucky.com story. Similar stories have appeared all over America, such as the Chicago Tribune.

Get Religion has good coverage and a developing discussion.

Ben Witherington III – prominent New Testament scholar at Asbury Theological Seminary and a resident of the Lexington area- blogs in response. You won’t hear many seminary professors be this blunt with the megachurch.Continue reading “How The MegaChurch Stole Christmas (Day Worship)”

A Conversation In God's Kitchen

I am reprinting this essay by request and in order to get it into the search engine. If I were writing this today, a few things would be changed, but it is still by best contribution in regard to my own belief about the nature of Christian scripture.

Another helpful essay is “Magic Books, Grocery Lists and Silent Messiahs: How rightly approaching the Bible shapes the entire Christian Life.”

And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself…They said to each other, “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?”…Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures…Luke 24:27, 32, 44-45Continue reading “A Conversation In God's Kitchen”

The Light Of A Most Obvious Question: Why Hanging Out With Jesus Is Changing My Christianity

If you enjoyed this piece, you would probably also like this earlier exploration of the significance of the Gospels in the Christian Life.

Dedication: A few weeks ago, I listened to an extraordinary sermon, but not extraordinary in the way you might think. The absence of Jesus in the sermon shook me.

Jesus was never mentioned. Not once. Not anywhere. Not ever. Not in any way. Not in the introduction. Not in the illustrations. Not in the conclusion. Not in some trailing reference to “accepting Christ” stuck on to the last paragraph a la Joel Osteen.

Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero. Change the word “Bible” to “Koran” and the sermon could have been a hit in any mosque in the world.

Frankly, this kind of thing has caused me to start rethinking a lot of things. How can we be approaching Christianity as if it is the Oxford English Dictionary, where Jesus is an entry, but you can read thousands of entries without any reference to Jesus? That’s not right.

In the hopes of deterring some from the road that ends in giving talks about reformers and doctrine and the Bible and why we’re so right, but never even speaking about Jesus, here’s a (hopefully) provocative post.Continue reading “The Light Of A Most Obvious Question: Why Hanging Out With Jesus Is Changing My Christianity”

The Christian and Mental Illness VI: What Does The Gospel Say?

I come to my last post in this series: What does the Gospel say to the mentally ill? What does it say to all human beings about the mentally ill? What does their presence among us tell us about ourselves? How is mental illness related to “true humanity?”Continue reading “The Christian and Mental Illness VI: What Does The Gospel Say?”

The Christian and the Mental Illness V: The Church and the Mentally Ill

What is the church’s responsibility to the mentally ill? I have concluded that mental illness, despite the potential baggage of the worldview of psychology, is inherently a truthful enough category to be useful in describing a phenomenon in the real world. While there are very controversial and ongoing conversations regarding the Biblical analysis of mental illness and the interpretation of Biblical passages about mental illness, we cannot reasonably deny that mental illness, as a human experience understood today in the language of medical diagnosis, did exist in the Bible and is all around us today.Continue reading “The Christian and the Mental Illness V: The Church and the Mentally Ill”

By Request: "Confessional Essays" From the iMonk

An Incomplete list of “Confessional Essays” published at Internetmonk.com.

“The things I thought were so important – because of the effort I put into them – have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered.” -Thomas Merton

Continue reading “By Request: "Confessional Essays" From the iMonk”