Discipleship

For many evangelicals, Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago was the benchmark for successful ministry in the latter decades of the twentieth century. But in 2007, after a survey of over thirty churches in the Willow Creek network, founding pastor Bill Hybels and Willow Creek leadership publicly admitted the failure of their approach to […]

Three decades of data have revealed a near-systemic evangelical ignorance of the Scriptures, theology, church history, Christian art, architecture, and iconography and, correspondingly, of Christian deportment, both social and practical.1 Somehow, despite the information superhighway literally at our fingertips and Kindles glutted with books, ignorance abounds. This ignorance has little to do with intelligence or ability, […]

Cody is confident in his walk with the Lord. He reads his Bible at home, prays every day, and regularly shares his faith with others. He listens to a John Piper sermon on the commute to work and various Reformed podcasts on the way home, and he attends no less than two conferences a year. […]

Has God ordained certain techniques or forms for the church's growth? The one reliable God-given method is the natural and organic one of baptizing infants born to believing parents. In the past, confessional Protestants, such as Presbyterians and Lutherans, planted new churches in a remarkably calm way. Several families would move away from a community […]

We live in an age of unprecedented richness in discipleship materials. Vaults of old treasures of spiritual classics are unlocked daily to enrich this generation, and new treasures are being continually crafted by contemporary Christian leaders. The rise of the Internet, social media, tablets, and the like make these discipleship materials instantly available. The sermons […]

Busyness is booming. People are busy everywhere you look, even on your computer screen. Instead of time-saving devices, we want gadgets that do more and more right alongside us. Busyness has become business as usual, if not business itself. Family is left first thing in the morning, and individuals pursue interests and activities of their […]

The other night, I called my sixth-grade son from work to check up on him. "Um, actually I'm chatting on Skype right now," he confessed, "with one of your Albanian friends, Marko." Knowing fifteen-year-old Marko, I realized he was probably witnessing to my son. Nevertheless, maternal concern won out: "Miro, it's midnight in Albania. Marko […]

Three decades of data have revealed near systemic evangelical ignorance of the Scriptures, ignorance of theology, church history, Christian art, architecture, and iconography and, correspondingly, ignorance of Christian deportment, both social and practical. (1) Ignorance abounds with the information superhighway literally at our fingertips and Kindles glutted with books. This ignorance, however, has little to […]

A four-year-old boy was boisterously arguing with a girl roughly the same age in the corridor of Yullin Church, where I serve as senior minister. In the middle of the fight, the boy quipped, "Do you know why we are fighting?" She answered him back, "You were cruel to me first." "No," the boy replied. […]

One of the more common questions I have heard over the years from my Baptist friends is, "How can an infant benefit from baptism?" The common assumption is that an infant has no capacity for faith, and therefore the child has no concept of what is occurring in his or her baptism; hence, baptism cannot […]

Any conversation about the Matthew 28:18-20 "Great Commission" must begin with the essential acknowledgement that the missional activity of the church (that is, the sending, the going, the making of disciples by baptizing, the forming of Christians through teaching, the enduring presence, and so forth) is the work of God. No, not in the sense […]