Holiness Reeducation

I am not sure if there is a theological term for it, but most pastors I know experience what I call an Easter hangover. Yesterday I could hardly function. I took two naps. But that is a beautiful feeling, having left everything you are on in a moment of celebration and worship. Every week should [...]

Betraying our Faith to find Faithfulness Peter Rollins has written a thought provoking book called The Fidelity of Betrayal. In the book Rollins looks at the nature of the word of God and the story of God’s people contained in it and asks us to reconsider some ideas we may have about both. This is [...]

I had said on Monday that I was going to delve into Peter Rollins’ book today, but I wanted to come back for one more look at the Great Emergence first. In the last couple of chapters Phyllis Tickle looks at the different roles that we see Christians in North America adapting during this time [...]

In the next two chapters of The Great Emergence, Phyllis Tickle endeavors to offer an analogy for understanding the construct of religion (as a cable tethering boat to land) and the events and changes that take place prior to a time of great change within the church. I will leave the cable metaphor for another [...]

A couple of posts ago I posted some videos of conversations between Phyllis Tickle and Peter Rollins. To further augment those conversations, I am reading Tickle’s book the Great Emergence and Rollins’ book The Fidelity of Betrayal at the same time. Both are wonderful books, very different, but beautifully conversant. For the next couple of [...]

Let me just begin today’s ramblings with the weather update. I shot this live and on location. Shepherds and God Yesterday I preached on the unlikeliest of messengers of the Good News, the shepherds. The reality that God used smelly, grungy, uneducated, disrespected and disregarded shepherds to be the heralds of the birth of the [...]

Some of the distinctive themes that emerge from this book surround the effects on the church in this shift from modernity to postmodernity. Be it a shift away from partisan politics, a theological shift that affects foundationalism, or a transformation in the way we train pastors, these shifts all effect the future of the church [...]

I have been so busy responding to other posts, that I hadn’t written a second reflection on The New Christians yet. So here you go. Ton’s book is full of creative metaphors, stories, and allegories that help illustrate the concepts he is explaining. One of the ones I have been chewing on for a couple [...]

Tony Jones, the national director for Emergent recently came out with a new book called The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier. For the next week or so I am going to post some thoughts on the book and offer questions to interact on from the book. But, before I do, I am offering [...]

According to a recent Pew Foundation poll, Americans are abandoning their religious heritage to explore other faiths or other expressions of their faith in record numbers. The poll found that only 51% of Americans now claim to be Protestant Christians. 24% claim to be Catholic, and where it not for the largely Catholic immigration influx [...]