Ted (not his real name) saw me as a rival, set me up for failure, then watched from the sidelines as his manipulative plan unfolded. When I confronted him, Ted gave me the verbal equivalent of a cold shoulder, saying, “I’m sorry you feel that way.” Fast forward a couple of years. He was applying…

(1) The soccer ball was kicked by the player.  (2) The player kicked the soccer ball.   Sentence #1 is written in the passive voice. When the subject of the sentence is acted on by the verb, it not only mutes the action, but tends to distance both writer and reader from what is happening in…

“The Old Testament God is punitive and judgmental. The New Testament God is merciful and loving.”   A couple of years, megachurch pastor Andy Stanley delivered a sermon series that reminded a lot of people of an old, old false teaching that has dogged the church for nearly 2,000 years. I wrote about it here, noting…

I admit it. My relatively comfortable life in America gave me a distorted lens through which I used to read the Beatitudes, the opening salvo in Jesus’ longest recorded teaching in the New Testament. Jesus said things like “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3) and I would…

Just because you’re standing in a kitchen doesn’t make you a toaster. Or a Pop-Tart. When I hear people tell me that their lifelong membership in a church means they’re automatically and obviously Christians, I have to do a little quick translating. I understand that some church traditions teach this, and can explain the theological…

Last weekend, New York Times reporter Ruth Graham held up a mirror to the celebrity culture that formed around former pastor Carl Lentz at the New York franchise of Hillsong church. Though Lentz was canned by the church a few weeks ago after his recent affair became public, the privilege bubble that formed around him…