How to Get Closer to God

Friends of mine will tell you that I have a tendency to turn conversations towards theology.  I can’t help it – it’s a topic I’m passionate about. In a recent conversation, a friend was telling me about the journey that he is on in an effort to grow closer to God.  He’s engaging in the [...]

Can An Evangelical be a Universalist?

Prominent (and hilarious) Christian blogger, Matther Paul Turner, the man behind the mask of Jesus Needs New PR started a brief conversation on his Facebook today, asking whether an evangelical can be a universalist and linking to an article. The article is worth the read, but I think the conversation that ensued was more interesting. [...]

Love Wins by Rob Bell Book Review Part 5: Typical Emergent Hypocrisy

And then there are those whose lessons about heaven consist primarily of who will be there and who won’t be there. (p. 25) … It’s very common to hear talk about heaven framed in terms of who “gets in” or how to “get in.” (p. 50) The Emergent church peeps all play a familiar tune [...]

Love Wins by Rob Bell Book Review Part 4: An Adventure in Missing the Point (of Jesus and the Rich Man)

Here’s where I’m at with Bell’s book: the whole thing is a house of cards.  Actually, perhaps a more fitting analogy would be that it is a brick wall.  Each brick represents an argument that Bell makes in favor of a limited hell.  With this bricks, he’s constructed a wall, and it should be clear [...]

Love Wins by Rob Bell Book Review Part 3: Everything Comes to an End?

If you’re going to talk about hell, it’s pretty much a given to talk about heaven.  And in Love Wins, Rob Bell does.  After asking a lot of questions in the first chapter, questions that any serious Christian needs to wrestle with, he jumps right in to a chapter about heaven. In the vein of [...]

Love Wins by Rob Bell Book Review Part 2: The Value of Questions

There’s something Rob Bell should be praised for: his innate ability to discern legitimate questions that can and should be asked of the Christian faith. So far as that goes, Bell is a genius.  He has taken the time to really think through and identify potential holes in orthodox Christianity, specifically, as it pertains to [...]

Love Wins by Rob Bell Book Review Part 1: Introductory Thoughts

When the Christian world blew up a few weeks ago about Rob Bell, I didn’t know whether I was going to end up buying and reading the book or not.  Despite, at one point, being a very big fan of Rob Bell (if you’d like to read other posts I’ve written where I mention him [...]

What Would You Preach In Japan?

First, watch this:     C.S. Lewis once observed that, in a world where we’re likely to be so self-focused that we ignore God completely, pain has the ability to soften our hearts and open our eyes to the reality we often ignore. For many, no doubt, this reality hit closer to home than they [...]

Relevance

My new friend and fellow blogger Jason Huffman recently blogged about the Christian buzzword “Relevant” and we had a brief conversation there that I think is worth rehashing and expanding here. The question is this: is it important for the church to be relevant? At first glance, it seems like this might be a trick [...]

Do Christians Need to Hear the Gospel?

There’s an underlying assumption that goes mostly unnoticed which dramatically affects the nature of so-called Christian preaching: That Christians don’t need to hear the Gospel.  At least not with any degree of regularity. They already know the Gospel, many say.  Why continue to preach something that they already know?!?! A few rhetorical questions in response: [...]

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