The first family ministry book I ever read was Family-Based Youth Ministry by Mark DeVries. My first response was to reject family ministry as a preposterous idea in my particular context. It took two years for the struggles of ministry and the work of the Holy Spirit to change my mind.
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Family Ministry: A New Definition for Family Ministry (Part 3)
I delivered this paper on an expanded definition for family ministry in May 2017 at the HOUSE Conference in Australia, a conference sponsored by YouthWorks and themed around the intersection between family ministry and ecclesiology. This post is the third part of a three-part series. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 _____ A RENEWAL OF […]
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Family Ministry: A New Definition for Family Ministry (Part 2)
I delivered this paper proposing a revised definition for family ministry in May 2017 at the HOUSE Conference in Australia, a gathering sponsored by YouthWorks and themed around the intersection between family ministry and ecclesiology. This post is the second part of a three-part series articulating the need for a revised definition for family ministry. Part […]
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Family Ministry: A New Definition for Family Ministry (Part 1)
I delivered this paper proposing a revised definition for family ministry in May 2017 at the HOUSE Conference in Australia, a gathering sponsored by YouthWorks College and themed around the intersection between family ministry and ecclesiology. This post on a revised definition for family ministry is the first part of a three-part series. Part 1 Part […]
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Apologetics: Can We Trust the New Testament Gospels?
The witch’s knife plunged deep into the lion’s heart, and the majestic creature quivered and died. For a few seconds, complete silence descended on the movie theater. A slight sniffling beside me broke the stillness, and that’s when I heard my 9-year-old daughter whisper a rather profound word of wisdom to her friend—wisdom that reminds […]
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Sermon: The Difficult Journey Toward Deep Diversity
“It is appalling,” Martin Luther King, Jr., once pointed out, “that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on Sunday morning.” One of the primary reasons that churches remain segregated today is because white Christians failed to acknowledge the full humanity of their African-American sisters and brothers many years ago. For many African […]
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Leadership: When Your Church Has Issues
It happens in dating, and it happens in friendships and marriage. You meet someone, and—for a while—this individual seems flawless. Sometimes it takes a few months, other times it only takes a few minutes—but, eventually, it happens. It becomes apparent that this person has issues. Chances are, they recognize the same truth about you. It […]
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Church History: William Wilberforce and the End of the British Slave Trade
In late March, 1807, the British slave trade came to an end. One of the key figures in the battle against the British slave trade was an evangelical Christian named William Wilberforce. Wilberforce was short—about five feet, three inches in stature—and suffered from poor health, but he was eloquent and witty. He became a member […]
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Sermon: That Awkward Text About Noah that No One Wants to Preach
In every Sunday School lesson and Bible storybook about Noah that I recall from my childhood, the ark-builder’s story ended in triumph. In sermons, if they mentioned this text at all, it ended with a “curse of Ham.” Noah saves the animals and sees the sign of God’s covenant—and, with that, the account of Noah […]
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Family Ministry: Remembering Who Your Children Really Are
Childhood identity theft. It’s a real thing. Thieves steal children’s Social Security numbers and then appropriate their financial identities for personal profit. “Children represent an emerging market for identity thieves who steal their Social Security numbers because they offer clean slates that can be used to commit fraud for years without detection,” one CPA has […]
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Church History: Forget About St. Valentine! Today Is St. Cyril’s Day
The Magnificent Moravian Failures Who Weren’t Failures at All In the ninth century A.D.—four hundred years or so after the fall of the Western Empire—a prince in the land of Moravia asked the emperor of the Eastern Empire to send missionaries to his people. The prince’s motives were primarily political. He needed the support of […]
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Culture: The Failure of White Evangelicals in the Civil Rights Movement
A few months ago, Justin Taylor interviewed four evangelical historians about the role of Southern white evangelicals in the American Civil Rights Movement. It is a lengthy and painful read, but it provides a much-needed perspective on white evangelicals’ persistent failure to challenge systemic racism. Here are a few excerpts: Matt Hall: The unfortunate reality […]
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Family Ministry: Museum of the Bible, the One Trip to Plan for Your Family This Year
On November 17, 2017, the much-anticipated Museum of the Bible will be opening in Washington, D.C. with more than 40,000 objects on display in a 430,000-square-foot structure, three blocks from the Capitol Building. The collection includes artifacts from the time of Abraham, fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as biblical papyri and manuscripts, […]
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Blog: Most-Read Posts of 2016 and Plans for 2017
Around twenty-seven thousand people racked up nearly one hundred thousand views of this blog in 2016. If you were one of them, thank you! Since there are no advertisements on my site, I don’t profit from any of the content. And so, if you’ve profited from what I’ve written, please consider purchasing a book (or two […]
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Advent: Finding Joy When God Seems Silent
Advent is the season when we meditate on experiences of waiting and silence in the Scriptures. By coming to terms with the waiting that we see in Scripture, we prepare our souls for those moments when God seems silent in our own lives. One of the ways we prepare ourselves for this silence is by […]
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Family Ministry: How Adoption Taught Me to Trust My Heavenly Father More
Thirteen years ago this week, we finalized the adoption of our first child. In the spring of 2003, a seven-year-old girl had struggled up the front steps of our home in Oklahoma, tattered vinyl suitcase clutched to her chest. In the room where we had wept so often for the baby that never came, I […]
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Writing: Choosing the Right Tools for Writing
Nearly everything I’ve taught or written in the past several years has been handwritten with a fountain pen before it was reduced to pixels for the purposes of editing and publication. As a result, I’ve owned more than a dozen different pens, scores of notebooks, and many ounces of ink. Many of my students have […]
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Culture: C.S. Lewis and the False Promise of Pornography
“We are fast becoming a pornographic society. Over the course of the last decade, explicitly sexual images have crept into…virtually every niche of American life,” R. Albert Mohler writes. “By some estimations, the production and sale of explicit pornography now represents the seventh-largest industry in America.” Pornography has become—as William Struthers has pointed out in his […]
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Family Ministry: Discipleship and Family in African-American History
A few months ago, I sat down with my colleagues Kevin Smith and Kevin Jones to discuss the dynamics of discipleship and family ministry in African-American communities. Rev. Smith is the executive director of the Baptist Convention of Maryland and Delaware. Dr. Jones is a scholar of the history of education and coauthor of the […]
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Culture: Is Christianity Headed South?
Is Christianity headed south? Year after year, Western culture continues to grow increasingly secularized. Secularization is—in the words of Baptist theologian R. Albert Mohler— the process by which a society becomes more and more distant from its Christian roots. Though the formal sociological theory is more complicated than that, the essence of secularization is the […]
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