We will be a blessing to the world around us if instead of obsessing about people we fix our hearts on Christ. So take this as my call to you and to me and to all of us: Let’s stop the gossip. Let’s stop the gossip and instead make it our delight to speak about... Continue Reading

How many of our disagreements, misunderstandings, feelings of bitterness, and lack of forgiveness in the body of Christ would disappear if we looked at our conflict in light of eternity?   How do we reconcile with fellow Christians? In my thirteen years of pastoral ministry, I have found that much of my calling deals with... Continue Reading

Morality cannot be simply part of our biology. It doesn’t deal with material reality. Morality has to do with people and relationships and fair treatment of each other. So if moral reality is all about people and their relationships, what should we conclude about where it came from?    Dear J, To take your objections... Continue Reading

A church graveyard often means that the church has lasted for decades and decades as saints have labored there to preach the Gospel and build up the body…how much we lose when our church doesn’t have a graveyard.   Every couple of months, I go for a walk around our church graveyard. I have called... Continue Reading

In the days of Jesus, it was not the Lord who disturbed the peace and purity of the Old Covenant Church, but it was pharisaical practices and deceptive use of language that disturbed her. Likewise in our day, it is not those who insist on the plain meaning of language who disturb the peace and... Continue Reading

What actually happened in the 19th-century American South was a bowing to social pressure to re-interpret the Bible in ways that supported race-based slavery. As a society, the South viewed itself as suffering injustice at the hands of a self-righteous North. This cultural ethos put enormous pressure on all southern Christians to conform to the... Continue Reading

I think that point can be argued in an explicitly Scriptural way. Although, I don’t suppose ‘religion’ establishmentarians necessarily disagree with that point. What I think there is disagreement about is the criterion by which we should discern the respective assignments (to church and to civil government, concerning ethics), and what those assignments are.  ... Continue Reading

Bishop Berlin is infamous for his speech on the floor of the 2019 General Conference where he referred to the Traditional Plan (the legislation adopted upholding accountability for a traditionalist understanding of marriage and ordination) as a “virus” that would infect the denomination. The logical extrapolation was that people who supported the traditional plan (i.e.,... Continue Reading

A higher view of Public Worship will make us far less concerned with who can do what in a worship service. Instead, it will drive our congregation to see that their greatest joy is to join their voices in song, hear God speak through the reading and preaching of the Scriptures, and be in their... Continue Reading

Wouldn’t it make sense that when we have fought the good fight and finished the race and kept the faith, that we cross a kind of finish line and celebrate like an athlete? For in that moment we will know—we will know beyond all speculation, beyond all doubting, beyond all need for faith, that every... Continue Reading