In follow up to my blog of a couple of days ago, I was indirectly reminded by my friend Pam that in the Christian belief system, it seems that God wishes to work through people, using them instead of just performing outright miracles in everyone’s lives. That got me to thinking though, if God lets
Category: Ecclesiology / Church
Church Burnout
During this past year I felt like I sort of got burned out with church. It’s kind of strange, because I’ve gone to church regularly my entire life. At first I was concerned, wondering if this indicated a spiritual problem within me or if I was still a Christian. While I don’t have all of
Addendum to Previous Post
When I wrote the last blog, I forgot to include an important part. I didn’t mean to make it sound like I had the whole thing figured out. A main part of why I wrote it was that there are some friends of mine whom I’m concerned about. No, I’m not saying this from an,
Fighting to Keep Each Other Out of Sin
I’m finally getting around to blogging about something that’s been on my mind for a couple of weeks. There have been a couple of situations relatively recently which have been catalyst for me considering these things. The first question is, what do you do when someone you know commits a significant sin? I’m thinking about
Effective Evangelism? (Part 4)
Part 3 Our Message to the World In my experience, many christians fall into one of two categories: the first is one whose faith, no matter how devout, has little effect on their life as a whole, and so they are pretty much the same as the average unbeliever in their beliefs and values. The
Effective Evangelism? (Part 3)
Part 2 Road Blocks to Evangelism I dare say that unbelievers may well be afraid of joining us today, but for far different reasons. They fear that they may be judged and unaccepted as they are. I have also heard that they are actually afraid they may become worse people! Christians are often seen as
Effective Evangelism? (Part 2)
Part 1 A Better Way to Stand Out While there are few direct commands to evangelize in the new testament, there is plenty of directing to live a christian life. There is plenty of teaching about loving one another and practicing all of the virtues, while at the same time warnings for believers not to
Effective Evangelism? (Part 1)
Introduction Evangelizing is a popular issue among Christians. In fact, it is the word used for the particular tradition from which I come (evangelical). If it is so important, it would follow that we should be interested in understanding and studying it. It’s interesting how often a conversation among christians will turn toward an evangelical
Is Church Really Church?
I don’t have the time to do a full overview of this topic, but I had some good thoughts and wanted to share. As I’ve been growing in my faith and trying to continually understand this whole Christianity thing, the church services I attend (my background is evangelical protestantism) have felt less and less like
The Focus of Christianity
It has been said that the center/focus of the protestant worship service is the preaching, while in the roman (catholic) tradition the center/focus is on the Eucharist (communion). I wonder if this comes from the legacy of Luther and a reaction to problems in the Roman church. Luther himself did not want to split the