Roots and Renewal: Why History Matters
Over the greater part of a decade, I served as a missionary in Central Europe, where the currents of history run deep. If you have ever traveled through that part of the world, you will have noticed something remarkable: though secularism has asserted its dominance, Christianity’s imprint remains unmistakable. It lingers not only in the […]
A Lesson from the Church in Croatia
“Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.” (John 13:35, NLT) In the years since Croatia’s break from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, evangelical Christians in the country have both enjoyed and endured a burgeoning of religious expression. And with this newfound freedom, the question has now […]
Learning from Lausanne: Reflections on an Evangelical Movement of World Missions
As many of us in America turned our eyes to the recent political election, you might’ve missed what happened a couple months ago when 5,000 believers from 200 countries gathered together in Seoul, South Korea for the Lausanne Movement’s Fourth Congress on World Evangelization. Prior gatherings had been held in Cape Town (2010), Manila (1989), […]
Is It Possible to Vent without Gossiping?
We all need someone to talk to. And if we don’t talk about the things that bother us, we often internalize our angst in ways that can become debilitating and dangerous. But how do we talk about the things that bother us without being slanderous or gossipy? Many of us go to safe spaces. A […]
What If This Election Is About Discipleship?
“The basic problem of the Christians in this country in the last eighty years or so, in regard to society and in regard to government, is that they have seen things in bits and pieces instead of totals.” —Francis A. Schaeffer, “A Christian Manifesto” “I’ll be honest with you,” my friend confided, “When I heard […]
What Is Unity in the Bible? (It’s Far More Important Than I Thought.)
And the first prize for most unifying religion goes to… Easy answer, right? Obviously, the answer is supposed to be Christianity, isn’t it? And yet the church isn’t always very unified—at all. At last count, there are over 45,000 Christian denominations globally. Narrow it down to just one denomination, and chances are that even that […]
