Jun 6
As hard as it is to believe, my two lovely children are on the verge of completing their first decade on planet earth. It’s been an incredible ride so far. We have been blessed beyond measure both with the members of our family and how we have been put together.
Our own adoptive journey came to mind when I was directed to this post by Megan Hyatt Miller (h/t: Jesus Creed) on whether or not adoption is becoming “trendy.” Read more
Well this story is bound to induce a combination of chuckles and mild derision towards “born again” Christians and Roman Catholics. Apparently, Duke researchers have discovered that Protestants who claimed not to have had a “born again” experience had larger hippocampuses than Protestants who had. Roman Catholics and the religiously unaffiliated were also discovered to fall into the “smaller” category. Read more
On April 28, 1996, the city of Winnipeg, MB lost its beloved NHL Jets. The Jets became the Phoenix Coyotes due to a combination of the financial realities faced by a small Canadian city, a weak Canadian dollar, rising player salaries and NHL commissioner Gary Bettman’s idiotic insistence that the National Hockey League needed to grow in places like Phoenix and Miami and Nashville and Atlanta. You know, places where it snows approximately never. Read more
During my sermon yesterday, I made some remark about how such and such a way of looking at the Christian life was “in our theological DNA” as Anabaptists. I suppose the comment was meant to communicate that the stream of the Christian tradition from which we emerged has had a specific take on what discipleship looks like and that those of us who trace our lineage to the Anabaptist tradition are theologically hard-wired to embrace certain things. It’s almost as if we can’t help ourselves. Or can we? Read more
If you’ve ever snooped around on my About page, you’ll know that I am not a native west-coaster. I have called this place home since 2005, but prior to that virtually my entire life was spent on the Canadian prairies. The past six years have been a delightful time of discovering a place completely unlike the one I grew up in. Read more
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
My wife received a lovely bouquet of flowers from a co-worker today, and they were sitting on our living room coffee table when the kids arrived home from school. I sat down on the chair nearby and set to work returning a few emails when my daughter caught sight of the flowers and came racing excitedly across the room.
“Wow,” she exclaimed, after inspecting them for a few seconds. “Isn’t it amazing how God made these?” 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
May 10
One of the highlights of any trip back to Regent College is the opportunity to snoop around their excellent bookstore. It’s always difficult to avoid spending much more money than I have, but I often emerge with a handful of good books to keep me going for a while. This year, one of titles I came away with was Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World. 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
Not a lot of time for blogging this week as I’m in Vancouver attending the annual Regent College Pastors Conference. As always, it’s been great to get away and enjoy a time of worship and intellectual stimulation in the beauty of springtime in Vancouver. A few loosely connected reflections, coming out of what I have seen and heard so far this week… 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
Last night, we had a drama group performing at our church (unenviably, on the same night as game seven of the Canucks/Blackhawks series!). Through a series of sketches, the group skillfully and humorously walked us through the basic contours of the biblical narrative—creation, fall, redemption—climaxing, of course, with the resurrection and the hope of new creation. One of the ideas that stood out to me during the dialogue in an early scene which depicted God deliberating with one of his angels about what and how to create, was that in creating human beings, God took a risk. Read more
Over the last couple of years, my kids have periodically asked some variation of this question: “Who made God?” Usually, in response to their queries, I have stumbled and bumbled my way to an unnecessarily complex and probably not entirely satisfactory explanation of divine aseity (well, I don’t use the word, necessarily). Come to think of it, my explanations almost certainly aren’t satisfactory because the question seems to keep popping up. Read more
[T]he proclamation of Easter Day is that all is well. And as a Christian, I say this not with the easy optimism of one who has never known a time when all is not well but as one who has faced the Cross in all its obscenity as well as in all its glory, who has known one way or another what it is like to live separated from God. In the end, his will, not ours, is done. Love is the victor. Death is not the end. The end is life. His life and our lives through him, in him. Existence has greater depths of beauty, mystery, and benediction than the wildest visionary has ever dared to dream.
Christ our Lord has risen.
Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat
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 19
This morning I came across an interesting lecture over at TED Talks by journalist, author, and “wrongologist” (apparently there is such a thing!) Kathryn Schulz called “On Being Wrong.” If you’ve got 18 minutes to spare, it’s well worth checking out. Read more
This morning, I noticed with interest that Holy Post, the National Post‘s religion blog, has decided to disable comments on their posts for a while due to the bad behaviour of commenters (curiously, comments are allowed on the post announcing that comments will no longer be allowed!). Read more
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