One of my favorite podcasts is Phil Vischer’s rollicking foray into pop culture and the state of affairs in the Evangelical church. Regular cohosts actress Christian Taylor and pastor/author Skye Jethani are joined (and sometimes replaced) by a variety of interesting guests. This week’s guest, Dr. Gary Burge, tackled the Israel-Palestinian conflict, which can be summed up…

This quarter at Northern Seminary, I took a class for which I had low enthusiasm before I walked in the door back in September. In fact, the words “low enthusiasm” might be overstating it a bit. If it hadn’t been required to complete my degree, I would have probably found a way to avoid taking this…

The conversation around the relationship between those at midlife and the local church clicked into a higher gear last week with these two blog posts: At Thom Schultz’s Holy Soup: The Rise Of The Dones. “After sitting through countless sermons and Bible studies, they feel they’ve heard it all…The Dones are fatigued with the Sunday…

“How are you doing?” There’s a lot of different ways in which those words can be voiced ranging from a casual aside with no desire for an answer to the way the pastor of the church we’d attended for a year and a half asked it of me. It sounded as though he really wanted…

In military terms, a retreat is the decision for an army to withdraw because they’re losing a battle. In Evangelical church circles, a retreat is a weekend packed to the rafters with activity, teaching and relationship-building. Jesus often retreated from the go-go-go of his ministry to seek his Father in solitude. Solitude was the life-giving…

If you attended a church service this weekend, you may have been sitting in a roomful of suitcases. There’s no way to tell what percentage of people in a given congregation are schlepping baggage from a previous negative church experience, but I suspect the numbers would startle even veteran church leaders. Bad baggage is often…