Aug 11
It’s late afternoon, and I’m looking and listening out my new office window at a thunderstorm. Thunderstorms are common on the prairies, of course, and can be truly breathtaking. They are wild and unpredictable—they can last for hours, or be gone only minutes after they arrive. The rains come fast and hard, the sky booms, crackles, and sparks—lit up with the pyrotechnics of heaven. Read more
The church of Christ is in the business of proclaiming good news, in word and deed. This is our reason for being. Somehow, we believe that the good news concerning Jesus of Nazareth has changed, continues to change, and will one day finally change things in our lives and in our world. Good news changes things.
This is what we say.
And yet there are moments when it all seems so unbelievable. Read more
My first “official” responsibility in my new position took place a week or so earlier than schedule, as I officiated at a memorial service on a sunny, breezy, southern Alberta Saturday. It was a somewhat strange thing to be leading a service like this before even attending a Sunday morning service! Read more
Well, the lazy days of summer just roll on... After a great few days camping in BC with my brother and his family, yesterday afternoon was spent participating in a local golf tournament/fundraiser for the Canadian Foodgrains Bank. My father is one of the coordinators for the local growing project here, and when he asked my brother and I if we wanted to go golfing to support a good cause, we could hardly say no (despite the fact that we are both truly abysmal golfers!).
Before Rob Bell went and wrote a book about heaven and hell, thereby ensuring his status as “lightning rod for criticism and heresy charges for the foreseeable future,” Brian McLaren was often the most frequent target of abuse for angry Christians. Ever since A New Kind of Christian was published in 2001, McLaren has been a polarizing figure in parts of the Christian world. Read more
It is an odd thing, I have discovered during my nearly three years as a pastor, to be entrusted with people’s pain.
It’s not an everyday occurrence, but today pain came calling. Two conversations with two people, both carrying crippling burdens of hurt and despair, sorrow and longing, both dealing with the complex cocktails of physical, spiritual, mental, and relational pain that characterize so many lives, both searching desperately for a word of hope, comfort, or encouragement. Read more
Each year, one of the most significant parts of the Regent Pastors Conference for me is when we take the Lord’s Supper together as our last act before going our separate ways. Given some of the themes that I reflected upon in my previous post, this year was no exception. Read more
May 2
The conversation taking place on my previous post—specifically the comment referring to open theism—has got me thinking about some of my writing and reflection I did on the topic during my university days. I spent an entire undergraduate thesis under the supervision of a self-described “atheistic Jew who is angry with God” advocating open theism as a response to the problem of evil. Read more
Apr 22
An interesting quote for Good Friday, from William Willimon’s Why Jesus?:
[T]he cross is not what God demands of Jesus for our sin but rather what Jesus got for bringing the love of God so close to sinners like us. This is all validated by God raising this crucified victim from the dead, not by dramatically rescuing Jesus’ failed messianic project, nor certifying that Jesus had, at last, paid the divine price for our sin. Rather, it showed the world who God really is and how God gets what God wants.
Apr 12
I finished Eugene Peterson’s The Pastor last night while waiting for the kids to finish up at piano lessons. It was a good book (if a little more hortatory than one might expect from a memoir) and I am grateful for the window that it provided into the life and career of a man I admire greatly. Perhaps unsurprisingly, over the course of reading Peterson’s memoir I have found myself reflecting often upon this peculiar vocation called “pastor” that I have found myself in, how I ended up here, and what I understand it to be. Read more
One of the benefits of having a blog is that, aside from feeding your ego through the ordinary rhythm of writing about whatever you want whenever you want and plastering it all over the internet, you can use it to draw attention to yourself at any and every other convenient opportunity as well :). Like, say, when an article of yours is published. Read more
Well, I finished Rob Bell’s Love Wins on an airplane this weekend. First reaction? It’s not bad. My suspicions that the storm this book has generated has a lot more to do with how it was marketed and the frantic and reactionary nature of the world of social media than with the content of the book itself were certainly justified. I may write more about Love Wins in the next little while. Or I may not. We’ll see. My sense is that the internet is getting tired of this whole thing. Read more
Mar 16
In light of what’s going on in Japan, the theological controversies dominating the headlines these days can seem fairly trivial (to put it mildly), but I did want to post an intriguing quote from William Willimon’s Why Jesus? I’m not terribly interested in the question of whether or not Rob Bell believes in a hot (or long) enough hell to satisfy the demands of this or that understanding of orthodoxy, but I am, and have always been, very interested in (and dependent upon) the “relentless divine reach” of Jesus: Read more
I spent a bit of time this morning listening to an interesting little interview with Eugene Peterson over at NPR’s “Books” page. The interview accompanies a short excerpt from Peterson’s new book, The Pastor: A Memoir—a book that is in the mail, and that I am very much looking forward to. Unfortunately, Eugene Peterson wasn’t on campus much during the three years I spent at Regent College so I did not have the privilege of taking a course with him, but his books have been a lifeline to me over the course of my first three years in pastoral ministry (I’m thinking specifically of Under the Unpredictable Plant, Working the Angles, and Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work). Peterson’s consistent refusal to allow the pastoral vocation to be accommodated to the logic and demands of the marketplace (I believe “religious shopkeepers” is the term he uses) is an inspiration and a challenge. Read more
While I am increasingly growing bored, annoyed, alarmed, and bemused by the furor around Rob Bell’s new book and the universalism it may or may not betray, I did want to pass along an excellent post that a friend sent me this morning. I think that Jason Boyett is identifying a very important point about the nature of Scripture and how it relates to the theological positions we hold, whatever they might be: Read more
Today was an odd day in the blogosphere. It seemed like every third post that came through the reader had something to say, or linked to someone else who had something to say, about Rob Bell’s forthcoming book Love Wins, and whether or not Bell has placed himself beyond the pale by declaring himself to be a universalist (you can start here, if you like, and follow the link trails). Like nearly everyone else offering commentary on this book, I have not read it. The main reason for this is because the book hasn’t been released yet, which makes the hysteria around what it might say even more grimly amusing. It’s interesting to observe how threatening some people find even the possibility that Bell might not believe in a very specific conception of hell. Read more
Feb 25
Two of my projects this week have been working on an article on suffering and the sovereignty of God, and preparing a class for this Sunday on the varieties of approaches to the problem of evil. Consequently, I’ve been raiding the bookshelf over the last few weeks in order to reacquaint myself with some of the authors and ideas that I leaned on more heavily during my university and grad school days. Read more
Feb 13
This morning, I began teaching a kind of “Apologetics 101” mini-course at church. On the agenda today was the question of how it is possible to believe that Jesus is the way, truth, and life when there are so many other religious options out there. In other words, how do we affirm one perspective as true in a pluralistic context? Perhaps more importantly, how do we do so in an intelligent, curious, and sensitive manner that does not alienate and annoy people unnecessarily? It was a thoroughly enjoyable and thought-provoking class. Read more
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Rumblings 