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5 Ways to Improve Your Christian Podcast
I love listening to podcasts. In fact, I’ve listened to them since the mid-2000s, when they were still in their infancy. Normally I stick to my favorites, but every now and then I give a new one a try. And occasionally I find podcasts that are incredibly promising in their title and lackluster in their content and execution. As tempting as it sometimes is to vent my frustrations online, I’m working to push past this and reframe it as an opportunity to create something helpful. So I would like to turn a recent example of a podcast gone bad into an opportunity to build up and encourage. Here are five…
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Respectability
Now when Jesus saw a crowd around him, he gave orders to go over to the other side.And a scribe came up and said to him, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Matthew 8:18-20 (ESV) For most of church history, it was easy to draw connections between Scripture and the best learning of the day. But as the scientific revolution picked up steam, it began to generate more and more conflicts with traditional Christian teaching about the world and the way that…
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Writing on the Way
Today I’m writing on my smartphone. Normally I only use my phone for notes, and especially voice memos, but I haven’t been posting enough and the phone is always with me, so it’s time to learn something new. I’m writing on the way to learning to be a better parent. I saw an interview the other day which really got me thinking about how I parent. The video was about agency, not parenting per se, but it helped me to see a missing piece. Still working out what it means, but the new direction has been a breath of fresh air. I’m writing on the way to theological community. One…
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Lessons Learned on a Sunday Night
I’ve been teaching off and on for nearly 20 years now, which is such an odd thought to me. It makes me sound old. Even though I can look back fondly on a great many of the lessons and series I’ve taught, I still have times where things don’t go as planned. My most recent church series was one of them. And as one of my seminary profs liked to say, it’s not experience that matters, it’s evaluated experience that really counts. So I’d like to share with you what I learned in my most recent experience. The Setup The subject of study was modern identity. I was excited about…
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Reading the Bible in 2021
I have a confession to make: I have never read the Bible in a year. And I know it sounds wrong, but I don’t plan to do it this year, either. The Bible in a year. It’s a popular New Year’s resolution, and I think I may have tried to do it once back in college. The thing of it is, I just don’t want to rush. Is that bad? There are some books worth speed reading, and for me, this is not one of them. Maybe if I read it through more often, I could read it faster without missing something. But as it stands now, this is an…