Acts 17:6, Revelation 5:9-10, Galatians 3:28, Romans 8:17, Matthew 5:3
The kingdom of God turns the Darwinist narrative of the survival of the fittest upside down (Acts 17:6–7). When the church honors and cares for the vulnerable among us, we are not showing charity. We ...
John 17:6-19, Matthew 20:20-21, Matthew 6:22-23, Exodus 3:2-5
Jesus Prepares for Departure John 17 is part of a larger section of John’s gospel known as the farewell discourses (13:31-17:26), in which Jesus prepares for his imminent departure from earth after h...
John 17:6-19, Matthew 20:20-21, Matthew 16:22-23, Exodus 3:2-5
Jesus Prepares for Departure John 17 is part of a larger section of John’s gospel known as the farewell discourses (13:31-17:26), in which Jesus prepares for his imminent departure from earth after h...
Romans 12:1-2, Colossians 2:8, 1 John 2:15-17, 1 Corinthians 10:23-33, Mark 7:8-9
When my grandparents were in their eighties, their television developed a fault that made the screen permanently bright green. It was good for viewing garden shows or nature programs, but it was prett...
An Irish church once had a humorous yet insightful motto that gets at the heart of the pain that often accompanies our relationships: “To dwell above with those we love will certainly be glory. But to...
The challenge each of these faced in their deconstruction—and what we may face—is walking the tightrope between becoming our own person and honoring our past. In The Homeless Mind , sociologist P...
The Book of Acts, like the Gospels before it, shows us that Christianity thrives when it is, as Kierkegaard put it, a sign of contradiction . Only a strange gospel can differentiate itself from the wo...
We are taught, often by the tone of voice of the media and the politicians rather than by explicit argument, to bow down before…progress. It is unstoppable. Who wants to be left behind, to be behind t...
Edward T. Hall likened the effects of culture to an iceberg. Some aspects of a culture are overt, in clear view above the waterline, so to speak. But most are hidden deep below the surface, forming th...
There Are No Ordinary Things J. R. R. Tolkien tells a short story about an ordinary fellow who just wants to finish a painting. Over time, he is constantly distracted by the requests of his neighbors...
For most of us, Jesus’s world is a strange, foreign country. I don’t mean just the Middle East, a major international trouble spot then as now. I mean that people in his day and in his country thought...
All crises are judgments of history that call into question an existing state of affairs. They sift and sort the character and condition of a nation and its capacity to respond. The deeper the crisis,...
When the movie The Da Vinci Code hit the theaters and the swirl of related controversy began to pick up speed, I decided finally to read the book so that I wouldn’t be found ignorant dinner parties. I...
Regarding the average human’s awareness of their own culture, career anthropologist Darrell Whiteman has said that “it is scarcely a fish who would discover water.” This is a reliable statement. Human...
We individualists generally belong to what anthropologists term low-context cultures. That means that when we communicate, we assume a low level of shared information. We therefore assume it is good c...
Different Attitudes on Prayer This past Sunday was the first time I've been in worship at our local church in some time, and it was a wonderful service. The liturgy was inspiring, the praise musi...
Every five hundred years, give or take a decade or two, Western culture, along with those parts of the world that have been colonized or colonialized by it, goes through a time of enormous upheaval, a...
Galatians 1:10, Jeremiah 29:7, Matthew 5:13-14, Colossians 2:8, John 17:15-16, Acts 17:22-23, Romans 12:2
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...
Our culture invites us to experience everything! If we fail to take advantage of it all, we think we are missing out. But honestly, the web of invitations we are called to navigate is massive and c...
Adjusting for population growth, ten times as many people in the Western nations today suffer from “unipolar” depression, or unremitting bad feelings without a specific cause, than did half a century ...
No truth which human beings may articulate can ever be articulated in a culture-transcending way-but that does not mean that the truth thus articulated does not transcend culture.
Colossians 1:15-17, Hebrews 1:3, 2 Corinthians 4:4, John 1:18, John 10:30, John 14:9
Christmas in May I’m pretty sure it was Stephen Covey, back in the day ( The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People ) who originally said, “The main thing is to let the main thing be the main thing...
We are a society that despises lack. We despise weakness and need and insufficiency. We turn the other way and pretend to be watching oncoming traffic when the red light halts us and the beggar reache...
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...
1 Samuel 16:7, Amos 5:21-24 , Isaiah 1:11-17, John 4:21-24, Matthew 18:20, Psalm 95:6-7
A missionary family who has started organic churches in some of the most dangerous fields in the world once returned to the states for furlough. On the first Sunday back, they visited a large Baptist ...
Culture is like gravity. We never talk about it, except in physics classes. We don’t include gravity in our weekly planning processes. No one gets up thinking about how gravity will affect their day. ...