Volume 10, Issue 1
Listening is a difficult business these days. We live in a talk-show culture that makes everybody's opinion as good as anyone else's, where the now arrogant vice of believing in the true, the good, and the beautiful has been replaced with the apparent virtue of following the useful, the preferred, and the stimulating. Seducing distractions […]
With thirty-four years of Christian service under his belt, Peter White, a Scottish pastor, has given us a book on effective pastoring. When I learned of it, I looked forward to reading material written from outside the American context that had the idea of the "key things" for pastoral ministry at its heart. Its content […]
I realize that following the Church calendar is not the practice of some churches. However, it has been effective in many of our churches that have inherited it from ancient practice, and it’s being discovered by others today. While it should never be followed slavishly or with superstition, it helps to have signposts in the […]
Historically, many Christians have thought that the main context of religious and moral instruction takes place in the home, not in church. That is why the Protestant Reformers prepared catechisms-manuals of instruction summarizing the Bible's basic teaching, to be learned by rote in the earliest years (like a new language) and then investigated, elaborated, and […]
When a child utters her first words it is a joyous occasion for her parents. Though her voice is that of a child and her pronunciation may falter, father and mother recognize her words as their own. The words that she uses came from them. For months the child has listened to father and mother. […]
In last issue’s Free Space column, we sat down with the dean of the Duke Chapel, Methodist minister Will Willimon, to discuss preaching. As the complete interview was too long to run but too good to truncate, we saved a portion of that interchange that touched on catechesis and discipleship for this issue. -EDS. MR: […]
TV Guide published a short manifesto-actually, an advertisement by ABC-on the goodness of television, just in case anyone doubted it. For years the pundits, moralists and self-righteous, self-appointed preservers of our culture have told us that television is bad. They’ve stood high on their soapbox and looked condescendingly on our innocuous pleasure….Well, television is not […]
[It is] a scriptural truth that the children of believers are the children of God; as being within his covenant with their parents, he promises to them his Spirit; he has established a connection between faithful parental training and the salvation of children, as he has between seed-time and harvest, diligence and riches, education and […]
The motto that appears on the bulletin cover at my Delaware congregation reads: "Applying God's Word to all of life." It sounds very good, but it needs refinement. We hold that the Word of God is addressed to the whole man and to the whole of life. The problem is that there are a number […]
A little more than three hundred years ago, The New England Primer was introduced in Boston as a textbook for the instruction of the colony’s children, not only in the basics of the English language, but in the basics of Christian doctrine and Bible knowledge. This small volume served America as the primary text for […]
Our “Free Space” column, unlike the feature articles, is the opportunity for those outside of our circles to respond. It doesn’t imply editorial endorsement, but encourages the open exchange of ideas. -EDS MR: You weren’t always a theologian. How did you become interested in this vocation? EC: It is not exactly that I became interested […]
As a seminary professor, I am sometimes asked, "What does it mean to be Reformed?" This is an eminently sensible question in light of the many stereotypes that abound about the Reformed tradition. One way to begin to answer it is to say that, for the Reformed, the boundaries of one's theological convictions are to […]