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Writing

Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Motherhood

Home is the Place They Leave

Your first born is a novelty. Everything seems special and unique. No one’s child is like yours. Then, over time, you begin to make mistakes. Some strategies don’t work on the additional personalities born into your family, or they simply don’t scale from a practical perspective. With maturity, you realize…

by Mandi GerthMay 17, 2022
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John

Unionized Perfection

Could Jesus have sinned? Before answering the question, it's best to run through a couple of qualifiers. First, scripture clearly teaches He did not sin. Second, I realize the seeming futility when discussing hypothetical situations. The question of the peccability of Jesus, or Jesus's capacity to sin, is in reality,…

by Matthew CoreyMay 12, 2022
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Grace

The Farm

The first time I saw the inside of a prison was in 1999; I was 16. I hadn’t knocked over a fruit stand or been caught stealing hubcaps, I was just an unsuspecting teenager playing piano for a Louisiana gospel group. One Wednesday evening in October, my pastor and leader…

by Brandon MeeksMay 10, 2022
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Biblical Studies

Its Lamp is the Lamb: The Diminishing Rule of the Celestial Bodies

The act of naming carries a lot of weight in the Bible. Naming denotes authority and possession; the namer signifying that he understands the thing named, and therefore possesses the requisite wisdom to rule over it. God set the stage for naming when he named the domains during the first…

by Daniel StanleyMay 3, 2022
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Pastoral Ministry

The Algebra of Church Growth

This short essay makes an obvious point: Church growth is a matter of the rate of entry into a church relative to the rate of exit from that church. Perhaps church growth literature has long recognized that fact. Yet given the greater focus in church – at least in my…

by James R. RogersApril 26, 2022
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Boniface Option

An Arrow Has a Telos: Strategy in the Negative World

If you’ve not yet heard of Aaron Renn’s three worlds framework , here’s the quick version: once upon a time, being a Christian was a net social good in American society. Whatever was going on behind the scenes in elite institutions, the general rank-and-file perception of Christianity was positive. That…

by Tim NicholsApril 19, 2022

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Eucharistic meditation, Fifth Sunday of Easter

2 Kings 20:7: The Isaiah said, Take a cake of figs. And they took and laid it on the boil, and he recovered. Hezekiah is on his deathbed, and it’s something of a surprise that he is suffering from nothing more serious than a boil. And then we’re surprised again…

May 14, 2006

Exhortation, Commissioning

John 12:24: Jesus said, Truly, truly I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains by itself alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. We are not ordaining you today. We are not laying hands on you. But we are…

May 14, 2006

Exhortation, Fifth Sunday of Easter

Easter is about hope, not only hope for the future, but hope realized in the present. The Lord promised that Abraham’s seed would be like the stars of heaven. The point was not simply that Abraham’s seed would be numerous, though they are and will be. The point was that…

May 14, 2006
Theology

Mix and Match

A candidate for ministry who holds to a Lutheran view of the real presence and a Calvinist view of double predestination would be welcome in neither Lutheran nor Reformed churches. What does that say about Protestantism? Are the different doctrinal and confessional systems so airtight that this kind of mix-and-match…

May 13, 2006

Road to Wittenberg

Why are liturgical/sacramental Calvinists always accused of heading toward “Rome”? Why is it never said, “He’s on the road to Wittenberg”? To ask the question is to answer it: “Road to Wittenberg” sounds so, well, so Protestant , and hardly serves the rhetorical needs of those who want to scare…

May 13, 2006

Death, Deeper Death, Resurrection

The story of the Bible is the death and resurrection of the Christ, but often there is an important nuance to this story-line. The house of Ahab is not destroyed during the reign of Ahab, but during the reign of his son Jehoram, the best of the Omrides (2 Kings…

May 12, 2006

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