“Paul, in the Bible, tells my wife to be silent in church. Screw St. Paul, screw him!” shouted a visibly angry Frank Schaeffer during one session of the festival. Schaeffer, son of deceased author and evangelical leader Francis Schaeffer, lamented his family’s role in building the “Religious Right,” and the gathered audience of disaffected former... Continue Reading

But, as J.I. Packer points out…the truth actually lies in the opposite direction. Rather than being a hindrance to evangelism, God’s sovereignty is the grounds for believing that our evangelism has any chance of success at all.

“I must affirm definition of marriage as between one man and one woman,” said Jodi Craiglow, of the Miami Valley Presbytery in Ohio. She directly addressed gay PCUSA members, saying, “As much as my heart breaks for your pain and frustration, I must simply hold to the standard of the God I love.”

General Convention is also notable for its sheer ostentation and carnival atmosphere. For seven straight nights, lavish cocktail parties spilled into pricey steakhouses, where bishops could use their diocesan funds to order bottles of the finest wines.

Evangelicals were entrepreneurial and started new churches, while Mainline Protestantism “doesn’t value entrepreneurship.” The “negative side” is that the evangelical world is “almost all male” dominated with “loud white guys like me,”

The country’s most visible Christian entrepreneur is Stephen Tong, founder of the Indonesian Reformed Evangelical Church, which despite its name has much in common with the Pentecostal worship style. In 2008, the church opened its Messiah Cathedral in Jakarta, a classic megachurch seating 6,000, a grandiose structure that would not look out of place in Seoul or Singapore.

Following Whiteson’s lead, Cham’s comic is replete with oversizd magicians’ hats. Instead of producing bunny rabbits out of thin air though, they emit particles—different particles than those first inserted… And, of course, the most obvious resort to supernatural language is the notorious label with which physicist Leon Lederman baptized the Higgs boson particle: “the God... Continue Reading

“I know some officers who’ve been ordered by their commanders not to speak to the press, whereas those who have been supportive of the policy are brought out before the press. We have a double standard.” -- R. Crews

Let me try this illustration. You are trying to impress someone, maybe a girl you want to date. However, your mother insists you take your ugly and socially inept cousin along with you…You know that if you don't cut the cords from this cousin you ain't going to get the girl. Of course, if and when you do get the girl your cousin is still your cousin. You can't hide him forever.

The portion where Dr. Butterfield is the most critical (and appropriately so) is where she helps us see where our spiritual formation is too often superficial and how the church frequently allows us to frolic in our biblical immaturity.