current affairs and causes on Church Culture

Tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire.

The church desires to change the surrounding culture. The truth, however, is that the church has been infected by the very culture it seeks to transform.

A passage often referred to in order to describe the sacrificial, countercultural quality of the early church comes to us interestingly enough, from one of its strongest critics, known later to histor...

We have the same biblical texts that earlier generations of Christians thought their way through, of course, but our reflections are shaped by six unique factors. (1) Especially in the Anglo-Saxon wo...

Too Busy for God? American work culture is all-pervasive. For many members of your congregation, it can be a real fight to get actual time off—and cell phones and the internet has made it possible to...

It’s perfectly possible to have an orthodox Christianity that understands itself to be at the center of making human culture, while interacting with non-Christians and their cultural products who are ...

I found out the hard way that if we don’t disciple people, the culture sure will.

A Christianity that reflects its culture, whether that culture is Smith College or NASCAR, only lasts as long as it is useful to its host . That’s because it’s, at root, idolatry, and people turn from...

LORD our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth. You set Your glory above the heavens. We see your power in galaxies that spin in space, and see your care in the sparrows feeding in the snow...

Editors Note: This is perhaps less a review as a jumping off part to articulate some thoughts I developed while reading The Minority Experience. For a full review of the title, a cursory google search...

Cultural diversity was built into the Christian faith…in Acts 15, which declared that the new gentile Christians didn’t have to enter Jewish culture…. The converts had to work out…a Hellenistic way of...

The only person who likes change is a wet baby. –Mark Twain (Attributed) To Change or Not to Change, That is the Question When do we decide to change ? I’m not a Tony Robbins acolyte, but I do l...

I’ve served on staff at a few different churches throughout Silicon Valley for the last decade and a half, including a medium-sized church, a young church plant, and a multisite megachurch. At each, w...

As a five-year-old at Christmas I remember how excited I was to get my first bike. It was a yellow BMX Huffy, a mean machine for a kid in the late 70s. It is one of my fondest memories because I remem...

Recently we found ourselves around a table with a team of faith leaders from an influential Midwestern church. Their restlessness was palpable. “Peace has been one of our core values for years,” they ...

I grew up near Washington D.C. surrounded by politics…I helped with the campaign of a friend’s father as he ran for state office, watched our friendly county supervisor become a US congressman, and le...

When conflict and division are driving both politics and media (including social media), the contrast between the way of the world and the way of Jesus stands out more than ever. How can pastors, task...

God of all nations, Savior of the Church and Lord of our hearts: We come to You, at this time, with our hands empty and our souls crying out: “Lord, help us!” “Do what only You can do!” Change the cou...

Father God–You invite us to come as a child to his/her daddy. You invite us to open our souls to You. You invite us to lay our desires before You. You are fond of us, Your children–so we come to You h...

To reach people we must appreciate and adapt to their culture, but we must also challenge and confront it. This is based on the biblical teaching that all cultures have God's grace and natural rev...

Whenever I lead a training session on cultural identity—particularly when there’s a strong white presence—I begin with this question: “Describe the first encounter you remember having with race.” Most...

Gracious God, we don’t live as Christ did. Although You give us specific instructions for an ordered way of life that stands out from the rest of the world, we settle for lukewarm Christianity. Our li...

Gracious God–Giver of all good gifts: We praise You. You give us the wonder of creation and You give us life. We praise You, Father. You give us forgiveness of our sins with salvation and eternal life...

In this short excerpt, the abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass describes the tension between faith in Christ and faith in a form of Christianity willing to enslave an entire race of peopl...

Any religious movement which adopts a purely critical and negative attitude to culture is therefore a force of destruction and disintegration which mobilizes against it the healthiest and most constru...

The discussion of the sabbath leads to an interesting reflection. Some of our economies and cultures actually are put together in such a way that the poor either struggle to get enough work or have no...

God built into the creation a variety of cultural spheres, such as the family, economics, politics, art, and intellectual inquiry. Each of these spheres has its own proper "business" and nee...

The Church was the one institution whose mission depended on galvanizing attention; and through its daily and weekly offices, as well as its sometimes-central role in education, that is exactly what i...

The cathedral lay at the center of a society. Its structure told the story of the Christian narrative and the human journey. In its shadow people were formed inside a story about how life was best liv...

Many in the church have turned their back on serious study, and have embraced an anti-intellectualism which refuses to learn anything from scholarship at all lest it corrupt their pure faith. It is ti...