Church

One of my favorite things is getting together with other pastors and asking them how their ministry is going. Most of the time a pastor will say that things are going great, and then he will share some of the joys of his ministry. However, occasionally a pastor will sigh deeply and tell me that...

Only a few days after Josh Harris told Instagram that he is no longer a Christian, Marty Sampson similarly announced that he is "genuinely losing [his] faith." To briefly summarize, the former Hillsong United lead singer is apparently the first person to notice that miracles aren't commonplace...

In 1869, the German physiologist, Friedrich Goltz, published a series of conclusions from tests he performed on frogs. In his book, Beitrage zur Lehre von den Functionen der Nervencentren des Frosches ( Contributions to the Theory of the Functions of the Nerve Centers of the Frog ) , Golz revealed...

The church is an environment of extremes. The trouble with extremes is that they always contain a seed of truth, making them look and sound plausible to the careless bystander. By virtue of this fact, the church is also often full of susceptible bystanders ready to lap-up the latest and greatest...

Names have always been important. There's a reason why "Judas" never tops the list of most popular baby names in any given year. When my wife and I were trying to pick out names for our children, we always had the same conversation: How will it sound with our last name, what does it mean, and how...

God's people need to be prayed for. They need to led in prayer. They need to be taught how to pray. We all believe that prayer is important. Nevertheless, working our convictions about prayer into our practice of ministry is challenging. The Apostles declared "But we will devote ourselves to prayer...

Last week I posted a piece suggesting three principles by which the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) may respond to the call to confess racist tendencies in the years leading up to its founding. One of these principles was to carefully observe the doctrine of the spirituality of the church. I...

In his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation of 1520, Luther takes aim at the Roman Church's "flimsy and worthless" claim to possess the exclusive authority and ability (by virtue of some unique spiritual gift) to interpret Scripture. "It is a wickedly invented fable," the Reformer...

During a recent evening worship service at our church, the Rev. Scott Cook was ordained to the gospel ministry. Scott is a recent graduation of RTS (Charlotte) and had previously been an outstanding intern at our church. I had the enormous privilege of preaching from John 3:22-30, on the theme, "...