Family

I will officiate at a wedding ceremony today. My wedding sermons aren’t really sermons but meditations. They are short but calculated. I view the wedding meditation as the last effort on the heels of pre-marital counseling to sink the arrow into the target. The target, of course, is the couple. The...

Editor's Note: This article was originally published on reformation21 in December 2008. From Adam onward, each generation of believers has faced the challenges of bad and erroreous theology. When we look at our children—and the one I'm looking at now happens to be a fourth grader—we must wonder if...

John Knox considered Anne Locke one of his dearest friends and valued her advice and support. He confided in her at some the most difficult times of his life, even in the midst of military battles. In spite the scarcity of information about her life, Anne’s influence was obvious not only in Knox’s...

Editor's Note: This article was originally published on reformation21 in June 2007. It was twenty years ago that Lisa Maxwell and I walked down the aisle at the First Presbyterian Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado. As a minister, I go to more weddings than most people, but Lisa is still the...

Over the last year, I have interviewed a number of believers who are trying to love their neighbors and change the way work is done in their field. Listening to them, I have come to a clearer understanding of the way social reform works. Generally speaking, people who bring positive reform normally...

Do you ever get overwhelmed by all the things you need to get done, and discouraged by all the things you probably won't? Almost every day, right? I felt overloaded when we made a few small domestic renovations, leaving our home in something more than its usual disarray. I felt the same way when I...

As the news challenge us to think biblically about the place of women in today’s world, it might be useful to remember there was a time when women were discouraged from reading, studying, and thinking independently. In fact, the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to the translation of Scriptures in...

Many see Jonathan Edwards as a terrifying preacher. Some consider him one of the greatest American theologians. A few know a couple of endearing details of his life, such as his loving relationship with his wife Sarah. Very few know him as a father. A Large Family Born on October 5, 1703, in East...

If it’s true, as the ancient Tertullian said, that “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church,” much seed has been sown on Turkish soil, from the 2 nd -century martyrdom of Polycarp to the massacre of Christian Armenians in 1915 (where 1.5 million Armenians lost their lives). And these are...

My father's family escaped the Soviet Union in 1934, a few months after the United States established diplomatic relations there, in 1933. They had Russian roots and naively returned to visit an ailing relative in 1922. The Russians said "Welcome back, comrades," seized their passports, and kept...