God has seen fit to bring significant diversity to Grace Fellowship Church. Every Sunday we worship as a community of Christians that spans the world, its continents, and its cultures. Yet for all this diversity, we remain a young church that has consistently had trouble drawing and keeping older believers. While we do have some…
A recent article from the New York Times says, rightly I’m sure, that We’re More Honest With Our Phones Than With Our Doctors. Writing from the confluence of medicine and technology, Jenna Wortham explains that “in recent years, mobile technology has granted me and countless others the ability to collect an unprecedented amount of information…
Have you ever said something dumb—something really, really dumb? Have you ever said something so dumb that you cringe to even allow the memory to crawl back into your mind? We all have at one time or another, haven’t we? Few things are more painful than realizing we’ve displayed ignorance or arrogance through dumb statements…
Yesterday Kenneth Keathley, a professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, described on his blog how Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis has changed his position on one key element of evolution (see “Ken Ham Embraces Evolution“). He pointed to an article in the latest issue of Answers magazine, a publication of Answers in Genesis, and…
My youngest child is about to turn 10 years old and will soon be joining her two siblings in the double digits. This means that Aileen and I have graduated—we have graduated from parenting little ones to parenting big ones. Lots of parenting remains, of course, but the little years are now in the past.…
Though I didn’t know it when I began, this article would come to hang on a single moment, a single moment of temptation. On Saturday I found myself musing on personal holiness and the joyful reality that you can be far holier than you ever would have thought possible. On Sunday I began scribbling thoughts…
We are now in our twelfth year of public schooling, and between our three children we have totaled twenty-two school years of public education. This has taken place in a limited context, of course: one primary school and one high school in one school district in one town in one province in one country. I…
As Christians, we look with ultimate hope to our ultimate future—the sure hope that we will be with God forever in a world free of sin and all its ugly effects. Christ will return, and what He has prepared for us will be more glorious than all we can ask or even imagine. It’s the…
Yesterday we heard the unsurprising news that Pope Francis has approved Mother Teresa for sainthood. She will be officially declared a saint this September, 19 years after her death. For Protestants like myself, this raises a couple of important questions: According to the Roman Catholic Church, what is a saint? And how can a person…
If you have been a Christian any length of time, you are familiar with that miraculous moment when the great curtain of the temple was torn in two. At the death of Jesus, at the very moment he drew his last breath, that curtain was ripped apart stitch-by-stitch. And not only was it ripped apart,…
Christians have had their share of social media successes in over the past few years, many of them related to identifying theological error and defending theological truth. This work has been carried on through blogs, of course, but also through Facebook and YouTube and other forms of digital communication. But for all of the success,…
A few months ago I was given an interesting and intimidating opportunity. My son is in tenth grade at a nearby public school and one of his classes last semester was Civics and Careers. For the second half of the semester the focus was on careers and his teacher put out the call to parents…
Coloring books for adults are a recent, unexpected phenomenon. This genre came out of nowhere to dominate the bestseller lists so that in March three of the top-ten Christian books were coloring books, closely shadowing their success in the mainstream market. Coloring apps are appearing now as well, offering a digital variant of this paper-based…
Upon hearing of the death of Jerry Bridges yesterday, I sat down at my computer and began to write. I began to write of the ways in which he impacted me through his writing. Very few authors have shaped me more than he did; very few books have played so important a role in my…
I maintain an occasional series of articles called “It’s a Fact, Eh?” which offers little glimpses at some of the joys, complexities, and eccentricities of being Canadian and living here in the Great White North. Today I want to talk about the Canadian dollar and its relationship to its American counterpart. Really, I want to…
There is a question that comes up time and again in those question and answer sessions that happen at every Christian conference—those sessions that are so often a highlight of a good event. It is the question of justice and usually asks something like this: Can it really be just for God to punish people…
I love tools. I especially love good tools. I love to explore different tools, to try them, and to choose the ones that do the job the best. In my case, the tools I use tend to be related to writing and publishing and they come in both hardware and software varieties. I outlined my…
Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these,” Jesus said as He recalled the beauty of a common lily (Luke 12:27). And I suspect that even Solomon in all his splendor could not have imagined the sheer affluence that you and I enjoy today. The lily is here today and…
Have you noticed how everyone today seems to tell us what and how they feel? “I feel like we should pray about that before we do it.” “I feel like Hillary Clinton would make a terrible (or wonderful) president.” “I feel like that’s an unfair statement.” I could be wrong here, but aren’t these “I…
You never know where your Bible study will take you. You never understand how perfectly God has woven his Word until you follow a single thread from author to author, culture to culture, millennium to millennium, and see how God’s revelation of himself and his purposes is so perfectly consistent. Recently I followed a thread…