Series: Columns

Discipleship & Spiritual Formation

Missing God

By Mark A. Taylor Being a soldier can be boring. Especially when you”re far from home, in a dry, dirty, dusty place. When the assignment is to keep order among a stubborn people who resent you and all you stand for, the duty is all the more distasteful. And so, when a strange peasant called a king is assigned to your watch, who could blame you for having a little fun? Nothing about him looks like royalty, that”s for sure. So you find some thorns and make him a crown. Your buddy has a robe he took from some unlucky

March 9, 2016

Discipleship & Spiritual Formation

Soul Work Is Slow Work

By Jim Tune Paul Sparks, a cofounder of the Parish Collective, likes to refer to the reverse Prayer of Jabez. I find his twist on things refreshing: God, Shrink our territory, And narrow our boundaries That we might truly be a blessing to all. Yeah. Like that would be a best seller or catalyze a 40-day program for the typical Evangelical church. Most preachers and church planters struggle with impatience. We have goals to achieve, targets to hit. Wherever we are, it seems, we are itching to leave. Here and now is never enough. We want to get to some

March 8, 2016

Care & Counseling Grief & Suffering

Surgery and Other Sickness

By Mark A. Taylor “I have visited and prayed with many sick people,” Professor Sherwood Smith told my class at The Cincinnati Bible Seminary more than 40 years ago. “But never did I pray like I did when the patient was my wife.” For some reason that insight has stuck with me all these years, and now it comes into sharper focus as I anticipate my own surgery Thursday this week. “Lord, heal him,” the elders prayed in December, not long after my diagnosis of prostate cancer. “Lord, keep him in the palm of your hand,” the men in my

March 5, 2016

Restoration Movement History

Lexington Celebrating Restoration 200 on May 15

Restoration 200“”billed as a revival of unity, liberty, and love””happens May 15, 3:00 p.m., at the Courthouse Square Plaza in Lexington, KY. The gathering will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the first Restoration Movement church in Lexington. After the Cane Ridge Revival near Paris, KY, in 1801, Christians across the commonwealth shed their denominations to imitate the church of the New Testament. They said, “We are not the only Christians, but are Christians only.” This revival of the church, often referred to as the Second Great Awakening, brought to light the detriments of separation in the church, and emphasized the

March 4, 2016

Devotionals

What Are You Waiting For?

By Jennifer Johnson As you read this it”s March, but I”m writing it in December. The lead times for print mean I”m usually penning reflections for an issue months before it goes to press, so although you are currently preoccupied with final preparations for Easter, I am in the middle of Advent. I have a love/hate relationship with this part of the church calendar. Christmas is my favorite time of year, but that”s because most of us jump right to the celebrating. Music, lights, special events, too much special food””we go right from Thanksgiving to Emmanuel. But Advent reminds us

March 4, 2016

Mission & Evangelism

“˜A Dream in My Heart”

By Jennifer Johnson It all began with a sermon. Several years ago, Josh Howard, director of leadership training at Central India Christian Mission, was listening to a message called “Born to Reproduce” by Dawson Trotman, founder of The Navigators. “He made a comment that it was possible for us to reach the entire world in 10 years,” Howard says. “I thought, There”s no way that”s true. So I got out my calculator and did the math. I realized that if every person reached one person every six months, in 15 years we could reach all of India”s 1.1 billion people.

March 2, 2016

What Are the Odds?

By Jim Tune As I write this, the Zika virus is just beginning to make headlines. Claudia and I are only 10 days away from embarking on our first-ever cruise. Our seven-day, Western-Caribbean cruise was a surprise I arranged for my wife to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. One of our ports of call is in a country for which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has already issued this midlevel travel alert: “Practice enhanced precautions.” Who knows what another 10 days will bring? This virus is spreading aggressively. The virus, which is spread mainly by mosquitoes, appears to

March 1, 2016

Living in the Spotlight

By Mark A. Taylor They were experienced reporters with the Boston Globe, accustomed to encountering shocking facts. And yet they had trouble believing the breadth of the priest pedophile problem in their city. As Spotlight (which Sunday won the Oscar for best picture) tells the story, they came to the truth slowly. From a single incident they found connections to more, from one priest to 13. And by the time they broke the priest child-sex-abuse scandal, almost 90 clerics had been implicated. Since then many hundreds of victims have come forward in Boston alone. And abusing priests have been punished

February 28, 2016

Book Reviews Reviews

Wrestling with Faith and Disagreeing on the Bible

By LeRoy Lawson My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer Christian Wiman New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013 The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (The Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era) Mark A. Noll Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, reprint edition, 2015 When a speaker is teetering on the brink of death, ravaged by bone marrow cancer, you pay attention. When he is poet Christian Wiman, sharing his personal insight into the Bright Abyss, readers””religious and nonreligious alike””ponder his every thought. Wiman is struggling””against death, against the danger of being

February 26, 2016

Church Leadership

Our Target? Everyone

By Eddie Lowen For a long time, I believed every church needed a target group: the irreligious, the unchurched, men, young families, singles, young adults . . . some group that is underrepresented in most established churches. But my thinking has shifted. I am now cautious about identifying target groups. Let me walk you through the New Testament passage that altered my philosophy and shaped our church”s mission language. Acts 10 introduces Cornelius, captain of the Italian Regiment. It”s safe to assume Cornelius looked and sounded much like the soldiers who brutalized and killed Jesus. That unsavory association made Cornelius

February 24, 2016

Church & Ministry Leadership Development

Safety

By Jim Tune A word has been on my mind lately. I”ve been thinking about what it means for me personally, and as a preacher. The word: safety. I encountered the word in an excellent book, Crucial Conversations. “In order to speak honestly when honesty could easily offend others, we have to find a way to maintain safety,” the book says. “When it”s safe, you can say anything.” We often focus on the content of our conversations, but content isn”t usually what makes or breaks relationships. Safety is. Feeling safe allows us to talk about difficult things and to speak

February 23, 2016

Church & Ministry Leadership Development

Does Your Ministry Have a Right to Exist?

By Mark A. Taylor Tech expert Shelly Palmer, although sought-after about all things digital, would likely be lost at a church leadership conference. But he wrote something a couple of weeks ago to get any church leader thinking. He titled his blog post, “Does Yahoo Have a Right to Exist in 2016?” And then he proceeded, with two pages of well-researched facts and well-thought opinions, to support his hard answer: “No.” Whether you use the web portal Yahoo or not, his line of reasoning might get your attention. Should you ask his question about your own ministry, congregation, or parachurch?

February 17, 2016

Church & Ministry Church Growth

The Limits of Relevance

By Jim Tune Relevance is a good thing. Relevance is about trying to communicate the gospel in an understandable way to a particular culture. It”s absolutely essential if we are going to reach people who don”t know Jesus. But relevance has its limits. In his new book Disappearing Church, Mark Sayers describes three cultures. The first is pre-Christian. The second is a culture that”s shaped by Judeo-Christian values. The third is post-Christian. To communicate the gospel to the first culture (pre-Christian), we need to find relevant ways to speak the gospel. The same also applies when we speak into the

February 16, 2016

Church Life

Creating the Integrity of the Church

By Mark A. Taylor Peggy Noonan wrote in Saturday”s Wall Street JournalÂ about “the general decline of America”s faith in its institutions,” and you can guess the institutions she listed: “the professions, the presidency, the Supreme Court,” and the one she mentioned first, the church. I”m assuming Noonan, a Catholic, thinks first of the church she knows best, and statistics suggest the Catholic Church in America is in trouble. According to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), a national nonprofit research center affiliated with Georgetown University, attendance at Mass in the U.S. declined from 55 percent of the

February 10, 2016

Culture & Public Square Justice

Welcome Home, Syrians

By Jim Tune I”m not overly patriotic. Most Canadians aren”t. We have no equivalent to country singer Lee Greenwood”s song “God Bless the U.S.A.” with its nationalistic and stirring refrain, “I”m proud to be an American where at least I know I”m free.” All that said, a news flash popped up in my Twitter feed a few months ago that made me extraordinarily proud of my country. Originally tweeted by Neville Park, this message quickened this Canadian”s pulse: “MEANWHILE IN CANADA: Syrian refugees arriving. Airport is worried they will be overwhelmed by well-wishers.” Syrian refugees? Overwhelmed by well-wishers? Yes!

February 9, 2016

Passing the Tests

By Mark A. Taylor Years ago, when the wife of a popular minister suffered a stroke, a mutual friend said, “If the devil can”t get him any other way, he”ll go after his family.” This minister was widely known, a sought-after speaker, and the author of several books. Never has there been a hint of scandal or impropriety in his life or ministry. Thankfully, his wife recovered and, by all appearances, her illness never swayed him from service. I thought of that time this week when I sat across the table from an aging saint whose wife died in December.

February 6, 2016

Church & Ministry Church Leadership Preaching

The Best Sermon I”ve Ever Heard (8)

By Arron Chambers Christian leaders, some of them preachers themselves, tell us about a sermon they can”t forget””and maybe you won”t either. TRACEY D. LAWRENCE Tracey D. Lawrence is an author and professor. She has written for Chuck Colson”s BreakPoint, the Wilberforce Forum, Promise Keepers, Sheila Walsh, Rebecca St. James, and others. She holds a BS in Christian education and an MA in church history and theology. Her book written with Eric Irivuzumugabe, My Father, Maker of the Trees, a memoir of the Rwandan genocide, was featured on The New York Times best-seller list. Tracey serves as a professor

February 5, 2016

Happy New Year?

By Joe Boyd So, a few weeks into 2016, how”s it going? Will it be a happy year or not?Â Sometimes happiness is counterintuitive. At 42 years old, I have come to realize I can drift toward unhappiness. There”s a lot that plays into this for me. My personality type (INTP) tends toward melancholy with a chemical propensity to depression. But I”ve also found I can make choices that increase my capacity for happiness. Here are some practical steps I have taken over the last decade that have helped me. Maybe they will help you too. 1. Exercise. I know,

February 5, 2016