christian living on Religious Experience

There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier...

The truth is simpler… and more alarming. [This] is the end of religious experience, the very opposite of mysticism…. We have been going round the paths, and suddenly we see our path goes round a hole,...

The dangers and hardships for the faithful are real indeed. Truth is tested and faith is confirmed not in idle speculation but in the crucible of adversity. Those who wish to find a more vibrant relig...

[Many Christians] below the surface of their lives are guilt-ridden and insecure ... [and] draw the assurance of their acceptance with God from their sincerity, their past experience of conversion, th...

In this beautiful illustration from Tom Long’s well-known preaching guide, The Witness of Preaching , a pastor shares a true story of what valuing human life can look like when God’s Kingdom takes ro...

Religious faith is an embodied journey, not a protected cocoon of beliefs. It’s a pilgrimage.

We structure our churches and maintain them so as to shield us from God and to protect us from genuine religious experience…The adult members of churches today rarely raise serious religious questions...

The Puritans in American Literature “Welcome to Honors American Literature!” You probably haven’t heard that line since high school, right? After his first couple of weeks of school, my boy came home...

The need for affirmation is spiritual, and the behavior it inspires is religious. The longing for acceptance is at the core of human experience and it shadows all of human history.

When the great theologian Jürgen Moltmann was sixteen years old in 1943, he was drafted into the German army and was soon captured by the Allied forces. He wound up in a prisoner of war camp in Scotla...

Many Christians are terrified of doubting their faith. We avoid questions and challenges in favor of keeping things comfortable and familiar. We worry that if we open ourselves up to the possibility o...

The 2023 survey that was conducted by the Wall Street Journal in partnership with NORC at the University of Chicago found that only 39% of the 1000 adults polled deemed religion “very important” to ...

Do We Stay or Do We Go? It was June of 2020 and we had a major decision to make. As we went around our group of elders , each was given the chance to give their opinion: do we go back to worshippi...

Why did it disturb the religious leaders that Jesus ate with “sinners”? To eat with someone is an important symbol of fellowship. And in those days, the Jews had a rule: one is not to have such fellow...

Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage.

[R]eliable quantitative research around this has brought some helpful insights to light. Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Ryan Burge have released the largest study ever done on dechurching in America i...

If the Prof is 10 min late... I was in my freshman year in college, and Statistics was the final class before Thanksgiving break. When the professor was ten minutes late, I and several others got up ...

On Christmas Eve in Tehran, house-church pastor Farshid Fatah and his family were awakened to the frightening sounds of the Iranian security police pounding at their door. After the police searched hi...

Following the biblical pattern, the church has always assumed that God can communicate spiritual truths to people through their imaginations, especially through dreams and visions. Church history is r...

Context The body of the letter continues in chapter 3. If it were not for chapters 4-6, we could even believe that Paul was about to close this letter after we read what appears to be a benediction i...

In the deeply moving novel Silence by Shusaku Endo, the protagonist, a young Jesuit priest named Sebastião Rodrigues describes in horror what it is like to watch two of his disciples, Japanese nationa...

Have you ever met someone and known instantly, or at least guessed, that they were a fellow believer? When I was in college, I lived abroad for a year in Germany. We always had Fridays off so that we ...

Experience shows that it is an easy thing in the midst of worldly business to lose the life and power of religion, that nothing thereof should be left but only the external form, as it were the carcas...

In his excellent book on worship, The Dangerous Act of Worship , pastor and president of Fuller Seminary Mark Labberton shares a story of the transformation of one of his former congregants: Ben ...

Some of us are interested in religious studies because we are interested in people. People do religious things; they symbolize and ritualize their lives and desire to be in a community. What piqued my...

Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in 'religion' mean nothing unless they make our actual behavior better.... When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making ...

My experiences with science led me to God. They challenge science to prove the existence of God. But must we really light a candle to see the sun?

The Christian experience, from start to finish, is a journey of faith.

A student of mine called me late one evening after worship. He was really excited on the other end, and I had to ask him to slow down. So, he says, “Mother Kim, this strange thing happened to me today...

In his enjoyable little book on Christian pilgrimage, British scholar N.T. Wright shares three propositions on the value that pilgrimage can bring to a Christian’s life: First, pilgrimage to holy pla...