galatians on Secularism

A strong church once inscribed these words on an archway leading to the churchyard. Over time, two things happened: the church lost its passion for Jesus and His gospel, and ivy began to grow on the a...

[For Christians] the entire religion shop has been closed, boarded up, and forgotten. The church is not in the religion business. It never has been and it never will be, in spite of all the ecclesiast...

One of the gravest dangers to the Christian faith is its wholesale appropriation of the larger culture. When this happens, the citizens of those places cannot recognize the difference between their cu...

Far too many people, especially within evangelicalism, think that the individual is all that matters, and that the corporate dimension is a distraction or diversion. Of course Christianity is deeply p...

In Silence, Shusaku Endo writes of the journey of Portuguese Jesuits journeying to Japan. It is a conversation about those who intend to take the path of Jesus, only to find they are on the path of Ju...

For some, faith begins with a hard shell, a rigid set of answers and platitudes that keep them safe but eventually prevent them from growing into who they could be. The system that was initially prote...

To remain neutral in a situation where the laws of the land virtually criticized God for having created men of color was the sort of thing I could not, as a Christian, tolerate.

The only clear line I draw these days is this: when my religion tries to come between me and my neighbor, I will choose my neighbor…Jesus never commanded me to love my religion.

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to makes us love one another.

In his now famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail , Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. offers a scathing rebuke of his white clergy colleagues, whose inaction caused him much frustration: I have heard numero...

Christianity has suffered more casualties from faux faith than from honest doubt.

The first step in backsliding is to put one's service for Christ ahead of one's love for Christ.

The fourth-century emperor Julian (AD 331-336) feared [Christians] might take over the empire. Referring to Christians as “Galileans” and Christianity as “atheism” (because of their denial of the exis...

The Christian faith can never be separated from the soil of sacred events, from the choice made by God, who wanted to speak to us, to become man, to die and rise again, in a particular place and at a ...

God of the Nations We stand apart from you We stand apart from each other We stand with our tribe Hiding behind walls Throwing our stones Our divisions dishonor you We harm instead of heal You weep Of...

Much that we have interpreted as a defect of sanctification in church people is really an outgrowth of their loss of bearing with respect to justification. Christians who are no longer sure that God l...

Religion is like a knife: you can either use it to cut bread, or stick in someone’s back.

Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.

The Danish philosopher and contrarian Soren Kierkegaard once compared Christians of his time to a flock of geese in a barnyard. Every week, they listened to an eloquent speaker who recounted the stori...

Challenges to holiness without mention of grace force a human-centered religion. After all, people cannot do what they are told to do apart from Christ’s grace. That’s John 15:5, right? “Apart from me...

The scholastics used to say: Homo non proprie humanus sed superhumanus est —which means that to be properly human, you must go beyond the merely human.

I grew up as a Christmas and Easter Methodist. Our family called ourselves Christians, but it was not an important part of our lives. I found church boring. When I turned eighteen, something happened ...

[Speaking of the early church] A cosmopolitan spirit grew, particularly in the cities, that transcended national barriers. Old tribal distinctions and identities were breaking down, leaving people rip...

In the Christian subculture, there is an unspoken standard, a notorious goal to “win the contest.” It’s there, the contest. We don’t say it out loud, because it sounds ludicrous spoken into the open a...

True Christianity is a fight. . . .There is a vast quantity of religion current in the world which is not true, genuine Christianity. It passes muster; it satisfies sleepy consciences; but it is not g...

The Christian religion begins in a New Birth in the power of the Spirit. It is developed under His guidance, and sustained by His presence; but ignoring the Spirit, it becomes a matter of education an...

If a CEO or an accountant is caught in an adulterous affair, it is not likely to make the news at all. But when a pastor is caught in an affair or embezzling money, it is a big deal. Which leads us to...

When I was considering the possibility of embracing Christian faith as a young college student, what I feared most was that it would make my life smaller rather than larger—less love, less joy, less c...

The Christian religion as a religion is not of God. It is on the contrary another example of a mortal road to God like the Buddhist or any other, although of course different in form. Christ is not th...

The success of every culture hinges not on big points of morality—there will always be issues like abortion or school prayer over which people differ—but on smaller values, like being considerate of o...