After I spoke at a church this past weekend, I was asked, “How is it that so many celebrity preachers, celebrity Christian authors, and celebrity pastors take the stage with known (and popular) false teachers?” There are, of course, many possible reasons. It could be they seek to maintain or add to their own personal popularity. It may boost their ego to speak to large crowds of 25-50,000, or it may boost their personal wealth … Continue reading
Category Archives: Evangelical Left
Could it be that many who like to claim Christianity as their faith can only do so by minimizing God? In Christianity& Liberalism by J. Gresham Machen, Machen spends a fair amount of time addressing how liberal theologians in his day, who were “in search of the historical Jesus,” claimed to believe that Jesus is God – but only after they had refashioned Jesus to look more or less like themselves. He makes an intriguing … Continue reading
The old saying is “It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.” That is true when kids are rough housing and things go dangerously awry. But life can be that way too. Quite often, it seems, human beings go through life with little thought to what happens when we breathe our last. Life is all fun and games for lots of people, until the music stops and there is no chair to grab onto. … Continue reading
(Originally printed in the Spring 2005 Issue of the MCOI Journal beginning in page 10) By Peter Simpson What should the relationship be between the church and culture? How should the constancy of the church adapt to the fluidity of culture? The church must find some way to communicate God’s message within the cultural contexts in which it finds itself. These concerns provide impetus for thought-provoking conversation in today’s church. The emergent church claims many … Continue reading
Needless to say, I was away from home on a Sunday. We decided to go to a friend’s church we had attended before. I won’t name the church and details have been altered to stave off embarrassment. But I bet you can guess the denomination. The first thing I noticed how the congregation had dwindled. Where once there were a hundred seats, now the chairs had disappeared from the back. I walked across a sea … Continue reading
[Trigger warning: statements that might qualify in some minds as offensive hate-speech will be quoted in this post. Heck, I might even throw in a few of my own!] You know Joe. He’s the VP whose favorability ratings go up every time he puts on Ray-Bans. And you know Nancy: the 76-year-old former (first female) Speaker of the House to whose face the years, and allegedly plastic surgeons, have been kind. Okay, then. You certainly … Continue reading