What’s a nice egalitarian woman like you doing in a complementarian church? When we started attending this church a year and a half ago, a friend said to me, “You know they’re Gospel Coalition people, right?” Yes, I did know. In fact, during our decision/discernment process about whether this church would be a good fit…

Oh so much has been written about the consumerist nature of western Christians. But as I was reading Tim Keel’s excellent book Intuitive Leadership: Embracing a Paradigm of Narrative, Metaphor and Chaos (Baker 2007), I had a wee ah-ha moment. Keel mentions that us sheep aren’t the only ones wandering from pasture to pasture, church…

“Leaving a church because you’re not ‘being fed’ is a sign of spiritual immaturity.” This might be true. Or false. I once had a conversation with a person who headed both children’s and women’s ministry in her mid-sized church. Sunday mornings, she circled through the church like an electron in an atomic accelerator, overseeing children’s…

One reason the question of whether it is possible to “outgrow” a church keeps coming back to me is because of the process described in Ian Michael Cron’s semi-novel Chasing Francis. The book is an interesting hybrid of history lesson, travelogue, church diagnostic, and love story. It tells the story of an evangelical megachurch pastor…

Yesterday at Scot McKnight’s popular Jesus Creed blog, he started a discussion about finding/losing faith. (Click here to read his post and the lively discussion that followed.) It reminded me of something I read as I was up to my frontal lobe in research for The Church For Skeptics: A Conversation For Thinking People. It…