Unless seminaries leave the ivory tower for local leaders in the public square. Like these ones have. I recently received a handwritten letter from a pastor in India. His name is Roy, but I didn’t know this gentleman, and we had never corresponded. Somehow he contacted me and told me about the two congregations he…
Not everything that’s a sin is a crime—let alone one punishable by death. This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here. In this day of social media mobs and troll-fueled extremism, it’s not unusual for a politician to be digitally attacked for being too weak and “not really one of us”—on a seemingly…
How did a name the Puritans made popular take off in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese immigrant circles? As a freshman at Biola University, Grace Brannon (née Kim), 28, encountered many Korean and Korean American women with the same first name. When several of them became part of the same friend group, they started to call…
Harrison Scott Key’s latest book gives a tragi-comic take on the Christian humility required to stay married. “What happened was, my wife for a billion years—the mother of our three daughters, a woman who’s spent just about every Sunday of her life in church—snuck off and found herself a boyfriend. … He has a decorative…
Manifesting isn’t the answer. Consenting to holiness is. Recently, a psychologist at New York University wondered if young adults were not saving money for the future because they felt like they were putting it away for a stranger. So Hal Ersner-Hershfield conducted an experiment, giving some college students a real mirror and others virtual reality…
One formed me. The other entertained me. On a sunny March afternoon in 2014, I found myself jumping on the L train from Manhattan to Williamsburg to interview a young, urban pastor named Carl Lentz in his luxury waterfront apartment. A trendy evangelical magazine wanted me to profile him. With its nightclub venues and award-winning…
The Spirit is at work, but so are the mechanisms around high-production sets. “Bigger!” said the voice in my in-ear monitor. I was on stage in a dark room, nearly blinded by spotlights. It was my first time leading worship at a big regional conference for college students, and one of the production managers in…
The Spirit’s descent at Pentecost is a model for diverse and distributed leadership. The modern church in the West has a suspicious relationship with power. When it serves our interests or protects our privilege, we justify evil in many forms—from denying racism to protecting sexual predators. The problem is not new, nor is it distinctly…
Two Chinese Christian women ministered to their cellmates and prison guards with stories, prayers, and hymns. “About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were all listening to them” (Acts 16:25). This happened in a jail cell in Macedonia about 2,000 years ago. Many years later in a…
Despite what Chinese religions and pop culture might suggest, they stay human—and that’s a good thing. On May 14, 2023, Taiwanese media reported on the first TV appearance of the famous singer couple Yu Tian and Li Yaping since their daughter died of cancer. In the TV program, the couple talked about their mourning and…
